Is teaching always political?

Andrea Braidt, Elke Krasny, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

Boris Buden, Bauhaus-University Weimar

Hedvig Turai, International Business School, Budapest

Christiane Erharter, ERSTE Foundation, Vienna

Lecturers from Hungary and Poland report that by now 30% of their students have a right-wing Weltanschauung. In June 2016 members of the European “Identitarian movement” disturbed a lecture on the topic of “Flight and Asylum” at the University in Klagenfurt in Austria and attacked its rector. This panel discussion was concentrated around the questions, "Is teaching always political? What are students/lecturers/professors allowed to say at the university? What is the responsibility of the lecturer? How do you react if your course is disturbed?”

The panel was organised within the context of PATTERNS Lectures, a programme to develop new university courses in the fields of artistic research, art history, cultural theory and cultural studies in Central and South Eastern Europe.

PATTERNS Lectures was initiated by ERSTE Foundation and is being implemented by World University Service (WUS) Austria. For more information please see the website.

Two's Company

Anne Eggebert, Sarah Cole

Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, United Kingdom

This performance paper is from the XD Pathway of the BA Fine Art course at Central Saint Martins. Since their involvement with Ezio Manzini’s UAL-wide research on Cultures of Resilience Eggebert and Cole have tested a number of alternative pedagogic practices with current students and alumni.

During 2016 Eggebert and Cole worked with Anna Hart, (AIR Studios), to pilot a project Superannuates and Tenderfeet that paired second-year students with members of an Age UK art group, deploying AIR’s methodology of pairing people who might not normally meet and asking them to explore place and practice together. The pairings were asked to test possibilities of exchange and mutual production, allowing their curiosity to inform a new dialogue that crossed boundaries of age, gender and culture (the students were from China, Singapore, Korea, Switzerland, and the UK regions). All the participants were invited to bring their on-going artistic concerns to these dialogic processes, using practice as the place where exchange could happen. The pairs went for walks, visited exhibitions, shared techniques, wrote each other letters, drank tea and commented on the 'unlikeliness' of their budding relationships. Destinations included Tate Modern, South Bank Centre, Camley Street Nature Reserve, Leicester Square casinos and Archway cafes. All the pairs ended up making collaborative work, the outcomes including performance, film, prints, drawings, sculpture and text-based works shown as Exchanging Time at Conway Hall Library in May 2016 and later presented for further reflection at the Cultures of Resilience Symposium.

In 2017 Eggebert and Cole extended this research by working with two new artist facilitators who have been asked to identify groups with whom students can work in the immediate locale of Kings Cross, focussing on the processes of linking communities through pre-existing networks, using the methodology of pairing and art making. The presenters used these projects as a test-bed to further explore the ideas and issues that surface from active pairing of people, to determine how our students engage effectively with, learn from and share expertise with their neighbours – how they exchange and deploy the richness of difference, and how these encounters and artworks may stay in the memory despite their transience.

Let's Plaii, Interdisciplinary Improvisation tool for Higher Arts Education

Annemarie Geerling

ArtEZ University of the Arts and University of the Arts Utrecht, Netherlands

Artists from different artistic disciplines cooperate and mingle more and more nowadays. They look at each other’s work and increasingly incorporate elements from other art disciplines in their own creative process. Looking at higher arts education, collaboration is an important competence. A growing number of courses includes ‘interdisciplinary collaboration’ in the study programme.

In her teaching practice, at ArtEZ University of the Arts, Annemarie Geerling noticed that the hybrid art world is still little represented in higher arts education. Students and staff of different departments of art universities have difficulties finding each other naturally.

That is the reason that Annemarie, when doing her Master research at the interdisciplinary Master of Education in Arts at HKU, chose to focus on the question how to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration in higher arts education.In her final design research project she designed the tool Plaii.

Plaii is a tool to encourage artists from different disciplines to meet each other in an interdisciplinary improvisation. Plaii is designed to let the participants know each other’s views behind and principles of the making processes in their discipline. Plaii contributes to the education of students, preparing them for the current hybrid professional arts practice.

Plaii is a new way to improvise with participants from different art disciplines. Each participant picked a card with an instruction in the form of multi-interpretable shape; this shape invites one to a playful improvisation. After this improvisation, several questioning cards raised and supported a deepening conversation. After this conversation, two more improvisations and conversations followed. Plaii also contributes to generating ideas and gaining inspiration. The name Plaii refers to a definition of play in wich pleasure, spontaneity and the feeling of freedom are important. The two ii’s stand for Interdisciplinary Improvisation.

Plaii can be used in the studio or classroom right away. It also invites participants to further research into interdisciplinary improvisation. Annemarie has started to investigate in what way Plaii can be applied in an adjusted form in other circles for other target groups. For example with a team of secondary school art teachers and with art professionals at the ICON (Innovative Conservatories Network) seminar in Helsinki in October 2016.

In her workshop at the ELIA Academy Annemarie invited the participants to experience Plaii and discuss approaches and possibilities to apply the tool in different contexts.

Who Comes? Who Stays? Who Leaves?

Annette Hermann

State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart, Germany

An empirical study on motivation, interest, aims and beliefs of trainee art teachers at an Academy of Fine Arts.

Based on John Hollands’ (1997) congruency theory of persons and environments, Annette Hermann’s work draws on the belief that students want to integrate their own self into the study environment, i.e. the Art Academy and, more specifically, the art teacher training programme. This applies to artistic, pedagogical and in-school training modules, and “process factors” with regard to students’ experiences: Do they feel they are a good fit for this environment? If not, how do they cope and attempt to fit in within it?

Three complete student cohorts were interviewed before and after their in-school semesters (3rd year). Before the study, questionnaires and structured interviews were carried out. Based on Cramer’s (2012) longitudinal model of professional development, the self-reported student data was analysed with regard to input conditions, process characteristics and training experiences.

In view of the conference theme of elasticity, two selected findings were discussed:

First of all, it can be said that there is no homogenous picture of art-educational self-concepts to be found in the sample. Rather, a number of forms exist, which can be largely differentiated into five types on the basis of the students` artistic and pedagogical interests and orientation:

The stable artistically oriented students think: “I’m mostly interested in artwork,” combined with uncertainty about career choice and how they fit in during in-school training.

The stable socially oriented students believe that, “the challenge is the educational work“. The pedagogical interest is wide, the career choice is clear, the artistic studies can be connected with big crisis.

Artistically socially oriented students say, “I found out that the balance between teaching, contact with young people and my own artwork makes me feel good.” During their studies, artistic and pedagogical interests grow, connected with a positive feeling of fitting in. They are also certain about their choice of career.

The outside school oriented specify that, “school is not the right place for what I want in life“. To this group their experience during in-school training is particularly responsible for serious doubts and thoughts about dropping out. The fluctuating students think, “I miss my own artwork during in-school training.“ After in-school training their interests are not fully compatible and they are not sure of their career choice.

Secondly, the self-concept of students is dependent on their individual experience of fit in the study environment. After two years of artistic training within the academic environment, the in-school semester presents a considerable opportunity, sometimes combined with a feeling of wanting to change plans.

There are two strategies to establish a fit: either the person or the environment requires adjustment. Most students are sufficiently flexible to adapt to their new surroundings by opening up to the processes of learning and modifying their self-concept. However, others respond by leaving the art teacher training programme and searching for a more suitable environment (most often the fine art programme).

Overall, evidence suggests that those students with self-concepts including both artistic and pedagogical interests are associated with the highest levels of good fit during the different study phases.

Design in Context

Barbara Asselbergs and Michel van Dartel

Avans University, Expertise Centre for Art and Design EKV, Netherlands

Humans are inseparable from the world around them. Yet time and again, the domains of art and design considers them in isolation from their surroundings, as convention has it that work is produced in studios and experienced in the sterile environs of art and design venues. How can we expect art and design to forge meaningful connections to the world when they consistently treat artists, designers, audiences and users as if they were separate from it?

In this presentation, Asselbergs and van Dartel explained that the stakes involved in this isolation are higher than they may appear at first glance. As we live in cities developed around data and act within the inscrutable structure of the present-day economy, there exists an unprecedentedly great need for artists and designers to help us understand how we relate to our surroundings. Connecting ideas from fields ranging from cognitive science to avant-garde art and design history, art and design pedagogies need to consider aesthetics “in the wild” if we are to respond to this exigency.

Secondly, the presenters delved into the consequences of considering aesthetics “in the wild” for art and design practices and pedagogies by zooming in on a research project titled ‘Design in Context’ (working title) that is currently undertaken in a collaboration between the Institute for Art, Design and Technology at AKV|St.Joost and the City of Breda. In this project, an interdisciplinary group of teachers and students collaboratively investigate the potential of a post-industrial area of Breda city.

Contrasting the master-planned strategies that urban planners and real-estate developers propose for the area, based on the area’s more infrastructural value and financial potential, ‘Design in Context’ adopts embedded positions in the area to reveal and explore more obscured natural and humanistic values and probe their potential for the development of the area. The strategies taken and methods developed as part of the research give insight on how art and design can forge meaningful connections to the world by considering aesthetics “in the wild”, as well as what this means for art and design practices and pedagogies.

Embodies Research Technologies

Eline Kieft

Coventry University, United Kingdom

The academic enterprise has been strongly shaped by its emphasis on the mind, reason, and thinking processes. This has trickled through in teaching approaches within the arts. However, there are many other ways of knowing that get limited attention, such as learning through silence and meditation, arts, or nature. In the field of dance research we are excellently equipped to explore movement as a way of knowing to inform embodied research methodologies, not to replace cognition, but as a valuable addition that, through its different texture and corporeality, will often lead to other insights, shifts of focus and appreciation of elements that would not necessarily have come up through solely cognitive inquiry.

This workshop offered an opportunity to explore movement as a way of knowing, and integrate this as an essential part of embodied research, writing, and teaching. We will investigate the knowledge within our own bodies, as well as knowledge available outside of us, for which the body can function as ‘antenna’ to pick up information.

Small discussion groups were formed to look at issues around:

• the role and value of types of knowledge we can identify in daily life, research practice and movement, and how those may inform each other;
• how we can develop and practice movement as a way of knowing (forms of transmission, levels of skills required for it to serve as a vehicle for knowledge creation, characteristics of specific practices that help to access and produce knowledge);
• the socio/political/institutional pressures and possibilities for movement as part of research and dissemination, and as an academic teaching tool.

Participants took away some concrete tools for using movement to engage with abstract concepts and theories, and translate these movement-based insights to help inform their approach to research, writing and teaching.

Practices of Enquiry: Making Teaching Visible

Elliot Burns, Catherine Smith

University of the Arts London, United Kingdom

A growing body of research into the signature characteristics of arts higher education indicates the prevalence of project work, student-driven active learning and research-based approaches to investigations and processes (Shreeve, Sims and Trowler 2010; Shreeve, Wareing and Drew 2008). These are all forms of enquiry-based learning, where, ‘The tutor establishes the task and supports or facilitates the process, but the students pursue their own lines of enquiry, draw on their existing knowledge and identify the consequent learning needs’ (Kahn and O’Rourke 2005:1). Fostering curiosity is the main driver of enquiry-based learning. Tutors design triggers, ask exciting questions, pose open problems and then offer tools, ways of seeing, methods, situations, different places, experiences and people to help the learning unfold, all the while keeping students at the helm. These myriad methods of cultivating curiosity often remain hidden from view, but their influence has a profound impact on learning.

The aim of this workshop was to consider how we might share this scaffolding in ways that harness our creative disciplinary expertise. This workshop began with a brief presentation and evaluation of the University of the Arts London’s first exhibition of teaching, Practices of Enquiry, held at Chelsea College of Arts, 14-18 November 2016. The exhibition was conceived, researched, designed, curated and produced by a student-graduate-staff team and operated as a co-enquiry. It presented 11 case studies of teaching practice as interactive installations, offering visitors to the exhibition tastes of the teaching.

Workshop participants were invited to share the elements of their own teaching practice that best support their students to develop into curious, enquiring practitioners. We then considered how this practice might be articulated, considering two factors: harnessing modes of disciplinary practice and working with students. This work was intended to enable us to collectively question what constitutes pedagogic research output in the arts.

References

Kahn, P. and O’Rourke, K. (2005) ‘Understanding Enquiry-Based Learning’ in Barrett, T., MacLabhrainn, I. and Fallon, H. (eds.) Handbook of Enquiry and Problem-Based Learning: Irish Case Studies and International Perspectives. Dublin: Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching, NUI Galway and All Ireland Society for Higher Education. Available at: http://www.aishe.org/readings/2005-2/ (Accessed: 20 October 2016).

Shreeve, A., Sims, E. and Trowler, P. (2010) ‘A kind of exchange’: learning from art and design teaching, Higher Education Research & Development, 29:2, pp.125-138.

Shreeve, A., Wareing, S. and Drew, L. (2008) Key aspects of teaching and learning in the visual arts. In Fry, H., Ketteridge, S. and Marshall, S. (eds), A Handbook of Learning in Higher Education. 3rd edn. London: Kogan Page.

Enabling all art and design students to be a part of Social Change

Emma Shackleton

Central St Martins and London College of Fashion, University of London, United Kingdom

There has been a significant change in higher education (HE) through massification and internationalisation. This appears promising for arts graduates who are ‘likely to have the complex set of skills that are highly useful in highly innovative occupations’ (Winner et al 2013). However, beneath the surface, the outcomes for working-class students from art schools have declined (Banks and Oakley 2015), while international students have lower outcomes than home students (Ryan 2011).

In a time of uncertainty, all art students need to be enabled to develop curiosity, communicative flexibility and abilities to analyse in order to be innovative and resilient. This requires elasticity in the approach of institutions to students’ growth so students can stretch to respond to creative destruction and apply their creativity to the situations they encounter.

Writing is an assessed activity carried out alongside students’ creative practice; it represents a medium through which students develop their learning, and qualities in communication, curiosity, research and analysis. Approaches have been developed to enhance the process of writing for students with visual and kinaesthetic preferences (for example, see Lockheart 2007, Francis 2009, Gröppel-Wegener 2012), yet writing can still be adversely challenging for students: a source of anxiety despite their agency and curiosity (Gourlay 2009).

The London College of Fashion has an active widening participation programme with attainment gaps lower than the national average between white middle-class students and students identified as BME, with a disability and low socioeconomic status (Universities UK 2015, Finnigan and Richards 2016). However, the findings from interviews with undergraduate and postgraduate students correlate with wider published literature:

• the students were empowered by their prior knowledge, their own agency, reading and the College’s support services (Cousin and Cureton 2012, Shields and Masardo 2015, Smith 2015, Wingate 2015)
• however, they were disempowered by the lack of comprehensive tuition on academic writing within their disciplines and feedback they received for their assignments (Gourlay 2009, Wingate 2010, Wingate 2015). They also faced additional challenges from dyslexia (HESA 2010, RCA 2015, Connelly 2014)
• self-theories were evident as mediating influences that were enhanced or diminished by interactions within the College and individual perceptions (Molden and Dweck 2000, Yorke and Knight 2004).

These findings can be seen within current and historical international and national socioeconomic discourses relating to language and academic writing. They can also be connected to the prevailing education structure and pedagogy of the UK’s compulsory and post-compulsory arrangements.

'Tell Your ArtTale'- The Ultimate Museum Game

Eva den Heijer

University of the Arts Utrecht, Netherlands

The presentation contained a short introduction, about the game ‘Tell your ARTtale’. The rest of the workshop consisted of playing the game.

‘All Art derives from Play’. This quote of the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga got Eva den Heijer thinking in how we look at art nowadays. As a visual artist she recognized this quote. Yes she plays: She plays with meaning, with shapes & materials, with imagery, with concepts etc. Most artists recognize themselves in this quote. As a teacher den Heijer asked her students to play as well. With material, concepts, etc. Play is super important in making art.

Looking at art from this perspective, you could say that all these museums and art gallery’s have a great deal of playfulness hanging on their walls and standing on pedestals. So how does a museum or gallery relate itself to this playfulness? And how can we as a visitor relate ourselves to this playfulness? How can art education help in this perspective?

Games can be a great help to museums and artgallerys. But of course, not just any game is good to implement. Art shouldn't become a toy or instrument to play with. The power of art lies in the imaginative aspect and that is what young professionals or any visitor should discover. That art truly can appeal to the imagination, that we can all experience art, that you yourself can give meaning to art and that this meaning can amaze yourself! This is what a game with art can and should do.

‘Tell your ARTtale’ was initially designed for first year students Fine Art (who really would love to become famous artists). During a museum visit den Heijer found out that they didn't really know what to do in the museum, how to behave and how to look at art. She also noticed they had this weird conception of that there is good art and bad art. All this together made it really difficult to engage students and having conversations with them about art. So den Heijer looked at what is important in looking at art: and that is to be astonished and amazed by art. To come at that point, you need to look very carefully at art, use your imagination and give meaning to art. Well, this is what the game does, you become amazed by art and your creative self.

A Shadow Course

Frederic Gunve

HdK, Gothenburg University, Sweden

With this abstract Frederic Gunve proposes a performance-lecture(workshop) using art(as)teaching/teaching(as)art through examples and methods experimented within the formal university course: What are you doing? Contemporary art as an educational action; an evening course initiated at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. The course is placed at the intersection between the disciplines of art and (art)teacher education program and experiments with the concept of the teacher and artist being two archetypes and professions in a complicated relationship to each other, like siblings.

A fundamental part of the course is the interdisciplinary meetings, and the joint learning that occurs in the meetings between students, teachers, lectures and others taking part in the educational/relational situations taking place. It’s a course that sets out to connect and blur the borders between art, teaching, everyday life and the process of becoming in teaching and art, a performative and intra-active course (Barad, 2007). It does so through a parallel and informal shadow-course that runs along(in)side the formal university course during the semester.

By introducing the perspective of and taking action within an in-ground position, as a new understanding of an institutionalized underground within the frameworks of formal education and institutional art and (art)education, the shadow-course claim to make real experiments possible. Experiments that are allowed unclear and elastic outcomes that might end in unexpected and unintended ways or without seemingly useful outcomes except from the experience of the experiment in themselves.

The shadow-course hides from the university’s formal structures by being elastic, amorphic, shapeshifting and by refusing to be precise. The method or concept of the shadow-course aims toward making transdisciplinary outcomes possible within formal educations such as institutionalized (art)education. This is of importance especially today when new ways of (ethical) livings and understandings of the world are needed for adapting to new nature culture environments and climates of the future. It´s not “only” a meta question for art and education, it’s a question and methods for survival in a nearby future for everyone, non/humans and humans all included.

Teachers talk about learning

Action research the impact of feedback on learning in higher arts education

Govert Anschütz

LUCA, Belgium

There is such a vast amount of research on education. And there is so little of it that gets through to the people that do the teaching. John Hattie has changed a lot with his meta-analysis Visible Learning (2008), and the subsequent Visible Learning for Teachers (2011). But this research mainly focuses on primary and secondary education. What can higher arts education learn from Hattie?

A small group of lecturers of graphic and digital design at LUCA School of Arts in Ghent, focused on two things in Hatties work:

1. He refers to research that says that teachers talk about learning for 1 minute a month. And he found evidence that puts “Teachers talking together about learning” near the top of possible influences on student learning (effect size 0.91 – Keynote speech by John Hattie, Visible Learning conference Amsterdam, 2015).
2. There is this central message of Hattie’s work: “Know thy impact”. He states in an interview, that when every teacher is focused on that question, the rest will follow. Wow!

This group of lecturers decided to give it a try, as they concluded that they had no idea what the impact of their feedback was on the learning of their students, and that they never really talked about learning (not even a minute a month!). So, on a Wednesday morning, they started with what you could call action research: they talked about what that means, getting to know the impact of your feedback on the learning of your students, they did little experiments, they came back, they analyzed and evaluated, and they talked a bit more.

They found out a lot of things in very little time:

• They found out how little they knew about learning. The difference between experience and expertise that Hattie talks about exensively, became very obvious to all.
• They found out how much fun it is to share insights about this intense job of teaching.
• And they found out that there are so many possibilities to deal with the challenges we face every day, that we had no idea about.

When the final meeting ended, they felt obligated (to themselves, to their students) to keep going. So they met again. And again. And again. In short: they became eager learners.

A/R/T

Gudrun Beckmann, Martin Boven, Nathalie Beekman and Corinne van Beilen

Hanzehogeschool Groningen, Netherlands

Artist/researcher/teacher – how to deal with these different but complementary roles in artistic-educational research. In other words: where do the artist, researcher and teacher meet when an art teacher carries out research? In the end, the central idea relates back to the quality and meaning of artistic-educational research by optimising the use of the artistic powers, pedagogical sensitivity and research skills of the artist/research/teacher. A/R/T is the concept.

Research from the perspective of these three roles is highly relevant against the background of increasing hybridity of art & education.

Habla Con ELIA

Guido Tattoni

NABA, Italy

As creative people, we are always in search of something new, original and never seen or tried before. This is what keeps us alive and productive, what fuels our daily activity; we do that in many different ways, depending on our fields of expertise, but we normally collect a variety of new inputs and we elaborate on them with our creativity.

Imagine if you could go deeper and instead of finding new inputs, you could try a whole new way of thinking: wouldn’t it be a much more powerful experience?

Well, this is what the workshop “Habla con Ella” aims to do. The act of coding a computer application takes students to a different dimension, where they have to put themselves in a new mindset, and where they will have to think differently. Developing a software requires them to think like a computer would, and to learn a new way to lay out their thoughts.

In the workshop students learned the basics of software engineering and learn how to think “in logic” by developing a fully functioning application from a to z.

The breakout session “Habla con ELIA” was intended to be a much shorter version of the workshop, which was conducted in more than one occasion over the 2016/17 academic year, to a wide variety of international students and in different countries. The workshop normally takes two full days, therefore in this presentation some parts will be summarised, and some results/outcomes will be shown but there will be some practical work in the game development / computer programming field.

Studio Inside and Outside

James Corazzo, Becky Shaw, Jerome Harrington

Sheffield Hallam University, United Kingdom

Studio Inside and Outside is a practice-led investigation into two educational studio sites in a UK University that has recently relocated its Art & Design Department to a newly renovated building. As the fine art and graphic design courses settle into their new studios it has become increasingly apparent how influential educational studios are. Each discipline demands a different kind of space. Each discipline uses space differently. Space and its models of occupation influence how students work, understand their discipline, how they learn, and how they engage. The studio ‘vernacular’ – the way it looks and sounds – not only encompasses the educational needs of the student, but is fused with visions of what professional life in that discipline might look like. The studio not only houses the daily activities that make up learning, but is a powerful part of student subjectivities and engagement.

Given the significance of the educational studio, a group of staff across fine art and graphic design will instigate a series of experimental processes to explore our spaces with our students.

It is anticipated this paper will report on:

1. The experience of involving students in the exploration of their own disciplines and histories, through the material and social qualities of their spaces. 
2. By undertaking a close reading of two related but different studio sites (graphic design and fine art) we hope to show the particular ways disciplinary histories, appearances and practices of each studio impact on teaching, learning and practice.

Studio Inside and Outside is conceived as a series of workshops for undergraduate students from fine art and graphic design and will run between November 2016 — March 2017.

Doing art’s elastic narrative(s): Risk and unlearning as art’s pedagogical practice.

John Baldacchino and Jeremy Diggle

University of Wisconsin-Madison, Unites States

This session was intended as a seminar-workshop, co-presented from two perspectives with a specific goal: to engage with art’s paradox of unlearning. It crossed art’s philosophy of unlearning with the pedagogy of performance painting.

This would invite arts practitioner-educators to reflect on the elastic nexus that emerges from an engagement with art as a pedagogical performance of risk. Here risk is not understood as a form of testing the limits of a particular art form or a student’s ability. Instead, risk is regarded as a performance of unlearning what is often expected of art, particularly in institutions like the school, the museum, the gallery, or the so-called creative industry.

Baldacchino and Diggle consider risk as an endeavor to unlearn. It is a skill by which we are expected to reverse the time-old assumption that learning is somehow a realization of one’s forgotten abilities, or as Plato put it, a recollection of the soul’s forgotten omniscience. Their argument is the opposite: art’s pedagogy confirms that risk is the affirmation of a refusal to learn; indeed a refusal to know what one is expected to have known had he or she learnt what was anticipated. This aporia is often denied by the assumption of learning itself, even when the claim is posed within progressive and student-centered contexts.

More so, unlearning is refused by those pedagogists who see art as a form of incremental growth and appropriation, where we are told that art’s experience amounts to an organic way of creative discovery and experimentation.

By turning the assumption of incremental creative learning on its head, we want to show how art teaching always instigates the rejection of learning in favour of an elasticity that has always favoured art’s aporetic perfomances to those anamnetic mechanisms by which students are expected to “realize” their creative potential.

In a nutshell, this session’s objective was to provoke and invite participants to challenge the “safety” by which art education is often used as a tool to neutralize art’s autonomy. To do so, presenters decided to mic philosophy with painting.

Collaborative Art-Making/Intentional Community: How a transdisciplinary, experiential, integrated arts curriculum promotes elasticity in teaching and learning

Kate Hewson and Marina Kelly

University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States

A recently formed division at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Arts Institute is developing an “Integrated Arts” curriculum of transdisciplinary and experiential courses in the arts. These courses emphasize collaborative artmaking, arise out of and also contribute to intentional communities, and prepare arts students to apply their knowledge to complex real-world problems. By experiential learning we refer to teaching using direct experience and focused reflection, including hands-on art-making as well as community-based and applied learning.

In this praxis presentation presenters explored these concepts through a collaborative art making activity. For example, leading the group in creating a spontaneous composite work by combining individual members’ expressive gestures (through movement, drawing, written word, etc.) is a simple and relatively short activity that can generate a greater sense of community and trust in the group. By reflecting on their experience, participants unpackacked the whys and hows of creating a safe community environment conducive to creativity, elasticity, and transformative learning.

What is powerful about transdisciplinary, collaborative arts encounters with real-world implications? When students are given the opportunity to work on finding solutions to real problems that address genuine needs, and for which there are no preconceived plans or expectations, they develop knowledge, skills, and values they will be able to take into the world. They also gain invaluable self-knowledge and confidence.

In this presentation Hewson and Kelly explained the larger campus context and justification for the new Integrated Arts curriculum, and how it a) fulfills the goals of a new arts division in the university, b) advances university-wide Essential Learning Outcomes, and c) responds to arts student and alumni feedback on their educational experiences and needs. Challenges in implementing curriculum that reaches across disciplines and university structures are also going to be addressed.

The presentation then introduced the long-standing interdisciplinary and experiential arts programs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that gave rise to the Integrated Arts curriculum: the Interdisciplinary Arts Residency Program; The Studio Creative Arts and Design Residential Learning Community; and the First Wave Scholars Program. The Integrated Arts courses build on the most unique and impactful practices from each program. The presenters also addressed future initiatives such as interdepartmental certificates in Integrated Arts, with tracks for the Artist Teacher, Artist Curator, Artist Entrepreneur, Artist Activist, and Creative Placemaker; and an arts research lab to study the impacts of transdisciplinary arts practice in diverse maker spaces on campus climate and inclusiveness.

View on the Other - View of the Other: The Reflective Potential of a Photographic Approach to Pedagogical Processes

Katja Böhme

UdK Berlin, Germany

What interests pupils when they are involved in an art project or what do they appear to be interested in? How can their individual attention become visible or perceptible to others? And how could students in particular, be supported in developing a sensible, reflexive reference to educational processes and to the presumed perspectives of pupils?

The framework of Böhme's research is the debate about reflection as a central component of teachers’ competency. In her double role as researcher and university teacher Böhme has developed a specific format for art teacher students which supports their reflections on pedagogical phenomena. This is a photographic format which is based on twoperspective images – that means: two people (a pupil and a student) take photos simultaneously in one art lesson. Back in university the students work with this photographic material. In dialog with an university teacher they combine the photographs to different constellations. By laying out the images in pairs, rows, clusters or sequences they can approach slowly – picture by picture – the pedagogical situation. This reflective process is not only seen as a discussion of a certain object but also as an examination of one's own view on pedagogical practice. Studying the motivation, intention and artistic interest of pupils always is connected with one's own view. The pupil appears in one's view and perception as the other (Wimmer 2014).

The attempt to develop an image-based and playful setting in which students can reflect on pedagogical processes has to do with current concepts of reflection developed mainly in the educational science. Those concepts view reflection as mainly linguistic, and emanate prominently from paradigms of quantative research. They also follow an instrumental logic with the aim to control and optimize pedagogical processes. Concerning the methods of pedagogical reflections one can notice a devaluation of ambiguity, of the simultaneity of divergent interpretations and bluriness – dimensions that have a fundamental relevance for aesthetic experiences and artistic processes.

Thus the starting point of the research is the need for discipline-specific methods which inspire a pedagogical reflection without excluding the perception, aesthetical awareness and embodied sensitivity in their epistemological meaning.

The project is based on phenomenological theory (inter alia: Merleau-Ponty, Meyer-Drawe) and combines discourses in contexts of educational science, art education and philosophy.

The Transferable Skills of the Dance Artist: Challenging Dance Education (Erasmus+Project KA2 Strategic Partnerships)

Kim Lokers and Ulrika Kinn Svenson

Fontys Dance Academy, Netherlands

Our societies are rapidly changing as well as sustainable employability options for art students, and in our case dance students. To re-inforce employability in a meaningful engagement with society, the Erasmus+ project Inclusive, The transferable skills of the dance artist started. Duncan Centre (CZ), Artesis Royal Conservatoire (BE) and Fontys Dance Academy (NL) and their partners set off on a three year project (September 2014-September 2017).

Why, how and what can be challenged and innovated in our dance education in order to offer a future proof education that helps creating careers on and off stage, in a variety of sectors? The starting point are the immanent qualities of dance: What qualities of dance can we make explicit and shareable with other sectors and generations? How can we build educational programmes to further develop these Transferable Skills with a cross disciplinary approach, connecting to (new) work fields and contexts? What role can digital means have in this process and way of educational development for dance. Especially intriguing since in dance the physical body is the creator, the performer and the reflector all at once. This integrative quality of dance means in terms of dance education, that as a dance student you are your own homework.

The project offers a space to explore and experiment with these questions and brought up new questions as well. Lokers and Svenson have developed 3 intensive study programmes with the 3 partner schools in 2015 and 2016 with on- and offline components. The last phase of the project is the creation of a platform for sharing, exploring and meeting of our networks. The presenters use different strategies for engagement and development of this community. As part of the presentation they will share the platform www.inclusivedance.eu, video works as well as interaction in dialogue and practice around the three statements.

European Academy of Participation

Lars Ebert

ELIA/Castrum Peregrini

European Academy of Participation (EAP) is a Strategic Partnership supported by the ERASMUS+ programme of the European Commission. It run from September 2015 to August 2018 and brings together 10 partners from all over Europe, including higher education institutions and arts and culture organisations.

The ambition of EAP is to tap into the existing potential of higher education and the unique and hard won endeavours of creative projects and organizations scattered across Europe that are engaging the public as active agents in their work. Through interaction both sectors impact on the diversifying societies of Europe, valuing participatory practice in the arts. The composition of partners and their role in the project embraces the dissolving of boundaries between academic and artistic disciplines and those between the policymaker, the artist, the curator and the audience. This increasing flexibility brings about a new practice profile: the creative producer.

The project aims to make a contribution to a more inclusive Europe, in which people live together in mutual respect of their differences. The EAP partners consider participatory practice in art and culture as a central tool to involve communities in a positive process of constructing a shared cultural space. The project addresses participation as a key priority for funders and its claim to foster social cohesion. It discusses ethical questions around responsibility and authorship and participatory practice as a means to communicate through art and culture.

EAP looks back on an exciting 18 months of research, discussions and collaborative exercises that have produced a considerable body of expertise and insights. It has produced a Tuning document Participatory Art - based on the methodology developed by Tuning Educational Structures in Europe – and intensive low residency course module for post graduate or mid-career artists that will be piloted in July 2017 in London. See for more information here.  

Planning or Improvisation? Project Development and Coaching for Artists

Mahir Namur

Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Turkey

Being a tool of self expression and self reflection on one side and the experience itself on the other, artmaking actually is a micro-cosmos of the life itself. Due to the nature of art making, artist is mostly forced to deal with existential questions more than in any other profession.

There is no way to separate the professional life of an artist from their private life. Art making is on one side a production and business activity which requires planning and implementation, on the other side a mental-spiritual activity which requires creativity and inspiration. The rules of project planning and management which focusses on setting goals and reaching them is not fully relevant for artmaking in which the process is usually the priority.

Namur made a presentation of a course that he has developed throughout the years of his teaching experience to art managment students at Yeditepe University and art students in Mimar Sinan Fine arts University and of his professional managerial and coaching experiences leading a creative social entreprise and two NGOs . The course Project Development and Coaching for Artists combines the subjects of strategic planning and project development with existential coaching.

The course came to its present format and content with time. Project development for art management students was conventional in which students had to develop a project and implement it collectively. But when Namur began to train arts students he recognized other challenges. They needed more guidance in positioning their art practice and education within their lives, seing both as one. So, a holistic approach had to be developed. The focus was not anymore on a one shot project but rather on the artist as person and his life. The aim was not anymore the products/services to be produced but the development of the person itself searching for meaning in life.

Existential Analyses of Viktor E. Frankl assumes the human to be made of physical, psychological (emotions and thoughts) and noetic (reflection, self reflection, creativity, transcendence, conscience) dimensions which are the integral part of their existence as a whole. The course is designed with the three dimensional perspective to human and to its activites. It deals not only with artist's activities in the physical world, but also with their relations to the pshychological and mental worlds. It intends to give basic tools for successful planning and self reflection.

Creating Pedagogies of Social Justice

Melodie Holliday

University of the Arts London, United Kingdom

The Purpose of this Workshop was to show participants the groundbreaking work that Shades of Noir are doing. Funded by the University Of The Arts London, Shades of Noir is developing new pedagogy by making use of the cultural capital of students, alumni, and lecturers at UAL with the aim of transforming the curriculum. Creating an inclusive environment in which people from previously marginalised groups within and beyond academia can feel a sense of belonging.

Research / Education / Praxis : What are the key issues today in pedagogic research in Art and Design?

Michael Gorman, Sally Wade and Chris Owen

GLAD, United Kingdom

GLAD is the UK Group for Learning in Art and Design. In this session members of GLAD explored the ways that scholarship and research about teaching and learning in the visual arts have developed over the last 25 years.

Looking at the UK context and reaching out to draw in voices and perspectives from across Europe this interactive plenary workshop will offer delegates opportunities to forge wider teaching and learning networks. The speakers traced the development of interest in creative pedagogy, citing recent pedagogic developments in art and design teaching. This was followed by break out discussion groups, to explore key questions relating to arts pedagogy in 2017.

Drawing – Talking. Interdependences between student-teacher interactions and drawing processes in art education classes

Nadia Bader

State Academy of Art and Design Stuttgart, Germany

In art education the individual dialogue between teacher and student plays an important role in the development of creative processes. This dialogue consists of verbal and nonverbal communication and interaction (gesturing, showing, demonstrating). The project „Zeichnen – Reden | Drawing – Talking“ focuses the interdependence of dialogue and drawing during an art education class. The data collection took place at a secondary school in Switzerland during a lesson on observational drawing. Video documentations of drawing processes of students and individual student-teacher interactions allow for a close observation of real life situations. The data is analysed with qualitative empirical research methods. The main question is how do dialogues influence drawing processes? What signs of potential influences can be observed? Based on video data it is possible to pay close attention to the development of communication, understanding and potential outcomes on a microscopic level of social practices. Through this lense seemingly familiar and banale phenomena of everyday classroom communication and interaction by and considering drawing become intricate, complex and challenging.

First results show, for example, how important it is to view the interaction of teacher and learner as influential for both sides. The research not only considers the student‘s drawing process as formed by teaching interventions but also the teaching process being influenced by students. The drawing class can therefore be characterized as a particular, emerging event unfolding in a very unique setting and involving all participants present in the classroom. This leads to the assumption that the outcomes of a lesson in art education – and also the drawings produced – are not only determined by teaching and learning objectives but rely extensively on situational factors. This also includes spacial (classroom), temporal (sequential dramaturgy) and material aspects (drawing setup). The different believes and understandings of teachers and students concerning the drawing process and outcomes play an important role. The case studies show how different understandings are communicated explicitly and/or implicitly, how they collide or merge, how they can be transformed or lead to sometimes unnoticeable missunderstandings.

To conclude: the study encourages to view routine daily practices with new eyes and to rediscover the curiosity for what is actually going on. In many, if not most, cases it‘s not what it seems at first glance. On a didactic level it can be shown how crucial situational and procedurale aspects are for teaching and learning in the arts. The case studies can provide helpful insights for educating art teachers towards a sensitive attentiveness for teaching and learning practices in drawing.

Managing Hybridity: Linking Art, Science and Technology

Nina Horstmann

UdK Berlin, Germany

Inter- and transdisciplinary project and research work is gaining popularity within universities, private-public partnerships and funding schemes. It can be conducted across disciplines, across sectors or both, aiming to create some new insight and innovative result. Alongside the proliferation of such projects the number of books on inter- and transdisciplinary work and methods increases. And yet, there is a conspicuous lack of information on how to conduct interandtransdisciplinary work across art, science and technology as such and in particular within the institutional context of art education. Here a new set of structures both administrative as well as institutional is required to allow for an innovative and progressive work with partners beyond the own realm. Also tools, methods and knowledge sharing approaches need to be adapted to the new hybridity of work. In short: Designing these cooperations is a challenge for everyone involved.

Nina Horstmann illustrates this challenge using the example of the “Hybrid Plattform”, a joint project of the University of the Arts Berlin (UdK Berlin) and the Technische Universität Berlin (TUB) that encourages and organises cooperation between scientists, designers, and artists. She argues for the provision of an infrastructure in support of hybrid project work and of a new culture of knowledge and science. Transdisciplinary project work requires specific instruments and methods that need to be developed yet. She highlighted the gaps but also refer back to experiences made with specific methods and instruments of presentation and reflection. For the irritations and divergences specifically appearing in transdisciplinary contexts develop their creative potential only if we manage to transform the perspectivally related irritations and divergences into an innovative project work.

Embodied Education: Performance as a Research Strategy and a Collective Learning Experience

Philippine Hoegen

Avans University, Expertise Centre for Art and Design EKV, Netherlands

The Self as Relational Infrastructure in Process is a practice based research, commissioned by the Expertise Centre for Art and Design at the art academy AKV St Joost. It is an exploration of unstable notions of ‘self’ and ‘other’, taking performance as an investigative tool. Departing from the proposition that performance, besides being an artistic medium can also be a research strategy, Philippine Hoegen initiated a pilot group within the art academy to test and practice this proposal, bringing together students and teachers who are not necessarily familiar with performance but who are looking to investigate the subjects of their artistic or educational work in innovative ways.

Hoegen's research is theoretical, practical and discursive. In the theoretical and practical I am exploring histories of personhood, the human body and the potential of the notion of cyborg. What we mean by human, subject, citizen depends on our understanding of the category in which these are assembled: the person. Consistent in the many views on how this is defined, is that the person is perceived as something more than the biological state: that which, within the human body, is beyond the body. In the contemporary Western context, ones person is, but ones (living) body is not by law ones property. Repelled by the idea of the body as a commodity, the law is silent on its ownership. The notion of cyborg, perceived as an ambiguous and more fluid identity, might offer relief from this deadlock, embracing the human condition as a self and a body that exists fundamentally in dependency relationships with 'foreign' elements and in various versions of itself.

Embodiment is the pivotal theoretical and practical part of this research. To connect this research directly to the institute and to open it up to students and other teachers, I initiated the performance research group. This work group differs radically from conventional educational formats, playing out on the cutting edge notions of education as a joint quest, rather than handing down knowledge, and on performance as a research strategy. We observe absolute equality and absolute 'commoning' of all contributed experiments and methods, resulting in a novel experience in education and research.

Map my Ethics! An interactive journey through Art Ethics

Pratap Rughani

University of the Arts London, United Kingdom

"Justine" (Lotus Films, 2013 UK, 26 mins) is a documentary film that offers a glimpse into the life of a young woman with profound disabilities. Since making it, the director is developing an interactive open-source tool to reveal the decisions made to bring the idea to the screen and open these choices to new questioning. Would you make artwork with someone who is not able to give consent to filming in the way we normally understand it? What ethical issues are in play? The workshop explored the development of a new interactive teaching tool that examines how such ethical questions became the neural pathways in the art-making process. Rughani lays bare the fine ethical judgments through which the film was configured as a basis for asking the viewer and workshop participant: what might the film become if I made it and what if I did things otherwise? Key ethical questions raised include:

1. How to work in a documentary environment built on the principle of informed consent, with a subject who is not able to give this consent? Should we even make such work?
2. What limits are there to the director's 'artistic freedom'? What are the tensions between this freedom and responsibilities to a subject?
3. Whose film is this? Exploring collaboration and power. When and how is editorial ‘control’ shared and what are the ethical implications of this for makers?
4. The ethics of representation. What say do contributors have in their representation and how does the maker/student handle pressures to change their vision to accommodate contributors in the film?
5. Politics of responsibility. What does it mean to have an ‘able-bodied’ filming team working with a subject who has advanced neurological disorders?

Curiosity in Practice

Rebecca Thomas

University of Hertfordshire, United Kingdom

The aim was to work in relation to one of the conference’s sub-themes, that of curiosity, using an approach developed at the University of Hertfordshire over three workshops held in 2015, giving an outline of a project designed to encourage that elusive but essential quality, being curious: exploring the possibilities of establishing teaching formats, and testing the elasticity of seemingly fixed boundaries. The art and design world has a long history of, and serious concern with notions of moving beyond fixed ways of thinking and making, a history that is largely driven by curiosity-the desire to discover what will happen if something is pushed in new directions. The session looked at a new publication of how a new creative learning module was developed.

This presentation/workshop described, critically considered and also initiated a practical exchange based on the Hertfordshire workshops. The intention behind the meetings was to produce a ‘collaborative text’, which was, as its name implies, a jointlyproduced object (the working definition of ‘text’ was deliberately kept open), something through which the rich variety of interests, skills, attitudes and industrial experience held by staff were brought together to form works which could be then later taken, to a further stage. Using questions and other remarks gathered from the students, staff worked together on a large number of provocative poster works. These asked, many questions, such as: ‘What excites us about teaching?’ ‘How can we inspire the students?’ ‘What do the students want from their education and how can we achieve this?’ Staff enthusiastically entered into intense discussion around ideas of teaching, learning, inspiration, motivation, and student development. We then had to translate the benefits gained from these meetings so as to apply them to teaching itself.

Un_University

Teaching and learning as collective listening

Ricarda Denzer and Jo Schmeiser

University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria

In April 2016 Denzer and Schmeiser held a platform called Un_University exploring the elasticity of academic art institutions at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna: Un_University discusses forms of teaching and learning, both within and beyond art universities. How do academic knowledge transfer formats, such as seminars or lectures, shape what is being taught? How can such formats be reconsidered from the viewpoint of artistic practice? And which formats and approaches are being developed elsewhere, including outside academic contexts? Teaching at TransArts department at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna the presenters have been questioning classical borders between disciplines and methods, criticizing and re_defining them, creating hybrids and inventing new artistic formats. What takes place, then, is collective listening – on the level of structures, of teaching models, and of artistic methods: speaking, reading, language and text become objects and media of (audio) visual engagement. As an inter- and transdisciplinary department TransArts is well-suited to such a de_constructive focus on aesthetics of knowledge and their socio-political significance.

The underscore in the presentation’s title – Un_University – expresses a critical oscillation between negation and affirmation. We want to use artistic means to reflect on teaching at art universities. We want to discuss forms of un_university thinking, speaking, listening and reading, as well as inventing new ones. And we want to examine both academic and non-academic contexts and institutions to see which current forms of critical knowledge production they facilitate and/or prevent.

The presentation began by asking the following questions:

What is an (art) university? What is it not? What part does the (art) university play in society today? Where and when do we study? Who is “we”? Who has access to the (art) university? And who does not? What is taught at (art) universities? What can be learned on the margins of society? How can an (art) university contribute to the recognition of marginalized knowledge production and the contexts where it takes place? Which knowledge must be unlearned and untaught if we are to have an egalitarian society in which all people – regardless of origin, gender, social stratum or historical background – have the same right to free access to knowledge, education and the expansion of society’s reservoir of knowledge via one’s own (artistic) research? Which form(s) does studying take? How is knowledge embodied? Which knowledge?

Artonauts. Explorers of the post-human world

Ruben Jacobs

Utrecht University of the Arts, Netherlands

As a cultural sociologist Ruven Jacobs is interested in the relationship between art and society in general. Together with his students Jacobs investigates in what way art reflects on society, and vice versa, how society influences our perceptions and ideas on art in life. In his current research Jacobs is especially interested in what way our technological culture is transforming our Romantic notions on art, authenticity and self-expression into something yet unknown.

In the intersection between science, philosophy and contemporary art a new hybrid field is opening up. One in which artists are engaged in what Jacobs would call 'post-human imagination'. Post-human is a concept originating in the fields of science fiction, futurology, contemporary art, and philosophy that literally means a person or entity that exists in a state beyond being human. It is a post-anthropocentric thought which encompass not only other species, but also the sustainability of our planet as a whole. With the encroaching power of artificial intelligence, the spectacular developments in the bio- and neuro-technology, the irreversible global warming (the era of the Anthropocene) and the growing awareness that our anthropocentric treatment of animals is no longer tenable, there seems to be an urge amongst these hybrid artists to rethink and re-imagine the fundamental pillars of our existence. Romantic notions about ‘nature’, ‘self’ and ‘art’ are being contested on a fundamental way, and a different 'non-human' aesthetic is being explored.

Jacobs calls these hybrid creatures ‘artonauts’.

With the same wonder and curiosity of an astronaut, these artonauts explore the limits of our human imagination. A world that we (still) cannot see and know, and maybe we don’t want to know: the world beyond human. Artonauts do not only to think and feel as a human being, they also try to obtain the consciousness of a species, a planet, and technotope.

What does this all mean for our ideas on art and Higher Arts Education? Can we still speak of Romantic notions like ‘self-expression’, ‘autonomy’ and authenticity’ in these post-autonomous and highly technological mediated practices? What is the role of ‘artificiality’? How would a post-human arts academy look like? And which kind of ‘competencies’ and ‘attitudes’ do we cultivate?

A few relevant books:

Canclini, Nestor (2014) Art beyond itself. Anthroplogy for a society without a story line, Duke University Press

Latour, Bruno (1993) We have never been modern. Harvard University Press. p. iv. ISBN 978-0-674-94839-6

Morton, Timothy (2013) Hyperobjects. Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Post humanities series

Kagan, Sacha (2013) Art and Sustainability. Connecting Patterns for a Culture of Complexity, (2nd emended edition 2013)

Moving Thought- The Hidden Choreography underlying our Lives

Trude Cone

University of the Arts Amsterdam, Netherlands

This was a practical, experiential workshop where participants moved together in space through the organizational patterns they will need to accomplish to be able to progress through different stages of development from total dependance to independence. These stages first taught us to participate in simpler interactions and later allowed us to become more pro active in complex contexts. By revisiting and reactivating these patterns we can gain insight into the stages we might be stuck in, have skipped or need to dust off. This can make our participation more effective and be with more ease.

At the end of the workshop participants reflected on how these developmental stages influence individuals, groups as well as organizational structures and how these insights can be applied into sequencing events to be more effective.