Spaces of Encounter

Artists, conversations and meaning-making

(project by artist Dan Robinson: http://black-dogs.org/)

My interests in research/practice• Conversational forms of learning; dialogic rather than ‘banking’ theory of

education (Freire)

• Working between universities and other research/practice communities –the state of being ‘in between’

• Network spaces: spaces which enable interchange and learning: what are their characteristics?

• Theoretically informed reflective practice: practitioners/professionals analysing and reflecting on their own situations/dilemmas

• Co-construction of knowledge – using technologies and open processes

• Artistic practice as musician/collaborator/educator, and activism…

Researching art…

• Art as a form of knowledge (knowledge in and through art-making)

• Knowledge about art

(borrowed from Phil Taggwww.tagg.org, who in turn borrowed it from Herbert Read: knowledge about art, knowledge in/through art, knowledge for art)

Ways of „knowing‟

• Academic discourse privileges language

• But artistic communication encompasses more than language –music, art, dance, performance, image-making etc. Otherwise why wouldn‟t we just write it?

• Writing, speaking and acting are different –academia often privileges writing and more „fixed‟, apparently less fluid ways of knowing

• „Performative turn‟ in accounts of practice – more dynamic, fluid, but also difficult to explain

• Academic research requires argumentation and „proof‟ – can practice provide this?

Situations not objects of study…

• ‘The world is a making; it is processual; it is in action; it is ‘all that is present and moving’ (Williams). There is no last word, only infinite becoming and constant reactivation.’

• The world is constituted through activity

• Talk is there to do things (not just rule-bound, concerned with exchanging meanings)

(Nigel Thrift: Afterwords)

„Theory‟ and „practice‟

• Theory – theorein (Greek) – to see – contemplate -essentially to think about

• Practica – to do, practice (complex word)• Praxis – the interplay between theory and practice –

reflection in action, knowledge in/through action

Underpinning every practice there are sets of theories –an implied ways of seeing the world –worldviews, standpoints, set of values and learned behaviours – research unpacks this.

Raymond Williams: from medium to social practice: making work in the arts and media, (we can reify the products as ‘objects’ AND think about them as a social practice).

praxis…?

Creativity

• Meaning-making

• Combination/recombination

An ‘interdisciplinary turn’?

• Dialogue becomes prominent

• Meanings less settled

• Emergent processes: play, improvisation, chance, generating situations rather than objects

• Artistic work that illuminates a situation

Theories/Mythologies of Creativity

• Collaborative• Social• Socially and culturally

constructed• Everyday creativity• ‘High’ creativity• How creativity is valued, and

what kinds of creativity are valued most…

• Individual• Psychological• Cognitive• Modernist• Romanticist etc etc

Creativity = agency/autonomy – the ability to be able to reshape the world

Is this why creative work/labour is so sought after? It’s generative: a sense of agency?

Creative milieux

• The city

• The neighbourhood

• The organisation

• The programme

• The project

Creative places and situations are both

designed

and performed

(by who?)

A creative situation is both a question of design AND performance

Top-down/bottom-up – but more complex than that

The ‘creative city’

• From mid 1990s, creativity has moved closer to centre of urban and national policy rhetoric..

Place-making? Artistic interventions

artists’ organisations; media co-ops; cultural enterprises at various scales

Knowledge

In traditional research/schooling – “acquiring knowledge is largely separated

from the situations in which, through knowing in action, knowledge is

constructed and used” (Gordon Wells)

(Friere – „banking‟ theory of education)

…and knowing (in action)

We mobilise knowledge through practice.

Why the arts matter…

• Artistic approaches are powerful because they embody the ‘knowing in action’ paradigm.

• Learning ‘about’ the arts (history, context, convention, tradition, etc)

• Learning through the arts – through practice

• And learning through encounter with the arts (E.Bosch: The Pleasure of Beholding); again, illuminating a situation

• Active, agentive, engaged, not passive

Locating practice

solitarySocial/conversational

Interior/privatecollaborative

Spaces

Domains of practice

Disposition

Economy/resources

Institutions

Traditions

Interests

Questions

etc

Locating practice…complex/dynamic

solitary social

Interior/privatecollaborative

Working in private?Working in public?

Exteriorising the interior world? The imagination/the imaginarium

Two collaborations

• Both cast and funded as ‘professional development/professional learning’

• One formal – an accredited CPD programme, Teacher-Artist Partnership

• One informal – artist residency: ‘The Cave’ (BBC SSO) – a ‘project’

Teacher Artist Partnership Programme

Artist-educator pedagogies

• art and design (and some traditions of performing arts) education has championed the ‘artist-teacher’, in which the skill and craft of the arts practitioner is blended with pedagogical knowledge

• a rich vein of research from Dewey to Stenhouse to Schonhas championed the idea of teaching as a type of artistry, which involves making rich, complex judgements about teaching - a form of empowered, active professionalism

• Now - Creative PartnershipsTMand a host of other policy invocations based on ‘partnership’ have brought these debates to the surface

• Arts-led approaches supposedly enhance learning outcomes. But this is not unproblematic, (US: ‘arts integration’; UK ‘creative/cultural learning’)

‘Teachers’ and ‘artists’• Embodied roles -

performing identities

• Interpersonal -psychosocial AND occupying ‘positional role’ within institutions

• Pervasive mythologies -using highly loaded terms in everyday language

• Reference orientations/generative metaphors/controlling discourses/organisationalnarratives

‘Mediated conversations at a cultural trading post’

• mediated conversations at three levels:

• Firstly we have recorded and analysed literal conversations between teachers, artists and tutors in various combinations.

• Secondly, we treat ‘conversational learning’ as a broader aspiration implying a particular set of social, intellectual and pedagogical commitments.

• Thirdly, the programmes themselves as a complex ‘instructional system’, and the discourses of policy and pedagogy that they mobilise, act as a kind of ‘holding framework’ and conversational form that uncovers some of the paradoxes, tensions and debates that characterise the territory.

TAPP stories

• Artistic/pedagogic research practices

• Applied problem solving – for whom?

• Complexity of artist roles and teacher roles

Thurle Wright: critique of TAPP

• There is something suspicious about the TAPP constant call for ‘collaboration’ which denies the essential self referential nature of the artist.

• Art forms have their own communicative idioms, whereas TAPP prioritises verbal communication.

• Residencies imply a deficit model (‘redressing an inherent lack’).

• Equal partnerships is a myth (‘circumstances do not allow it’)

• The blurring of the artist into the ‘arts educator’ creates role confusion.

• The apparent TAPP over-emphasis on process over product is misplaced (‘as an artist I must value product’).

• Artists should not be expected to perform an instrumental role with respect to other areas of the National Curriculum.

Dilemmas/tensions

• Pedagogy implies dialogue/collaboration/conversation

• But many artists (and artistic thinking?) need solitude

• Achieving a balance?• Signal/noise ratio in

schools (and HE) can be very poor….

• The ‘quality of time’

The Cave

Creative places, projects and proceses

Situations/events are enabled by conversation: we imagine and talk things into existence

Questions of design and performance

Illuminating situations – is this what artists do?

“If we knew what we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”

(Albert Einstein)

Contacts/web

generalpraxis.blogspot.com

Graham.Jeffery [at] uws.ac.uk

uwspracticeresearch.blogspot.com

uwscreative.blogspot.com

twitter.com/grahamjefferytwitter.com/UWScreative