IN-PERSON Prague Research & Teaching Conference

Abstract

We are a group of artists and university educators investigating contemporary approaches to Fine Art pedagogy with a focus on the studio as a space of creative uncertainty and speculation. Via open calls for participation to tutors and students, we have gathered films which make visible diverse studio experiences and reveal the acts, tools, communities and spaces necessary for learning in creative practice. During 2023-24, these compilations have initiated workshops and discussions at a series of UK conferences and seminars including ‘On Not Knowing: How Artists Teach’, Glasgow School of Art; ‘Studio Culture and Pedagogic Change’, Council for Higher Education in Art and Design; ‘Gentle Gestures: Midlands Conference for Critical Thought’, Nottingham Trent University; ‘Essential not Optional: Celebrating the Arts in Higher Education’, University of Lincoln. Participants’ contributions at these events have augmented our repository of knowledge about experiences of making, teaching and learning at a time of profound change and challenge. This presentation will share findings from our project to date, examining the strategies, tactics and pedagogies currently used to support speculative practices and embodied learning in creative education. We will bring an analysis of what we have discovered in the UK into dialogue with the conference’s broader European / international / interdisciplinary contexts. We want to ask: which forms of creative pedagogy – both the newly-emerging and the long-established – are most needed now? How might these methods help to produce the states of creative uncertainty so essential as we work to imagine and produce more sustainable, equitable futures.