IN-PERSON Prague Research & Teaching Conference

Abstract

This paper presents research and findings from a year-long teaching and learning fellowship titled “Observing Spaces Learning”. This unique research project intertwines personal experience, historical, scientific and cultural inquiry and the creative design process in which to seek pathways to understanding “what makes us human”, “what is human about space”, and “what is human about learning”. These questions derived, initially, from sequential semesters of student work, collegial conversations and atmospheres in design and art education, returning to “the real”, defined through sensorial and sentient explorations, projects and processes fully integrating presence, and observation, and individual practitioners responding viscerally in their process. The fellowship combined reflection and immersion into our current states of teaching and learning through dialogue with faculty colleagues and students, study and analysis of current pedagogy and academic work, as well as explorations of creative work outside of academia. The fellowship continued through the faculty member re-entering the classrooms and studios of her colleagues, observing, learning and fully immersing into a sentient space while simultaneously drawing, writing, recording as a means of thinking while being, a process of making and remembering. Concluding the fellowship project marked a beginning of new understanding of how to continue becoming a teacher through practicing learning, practicing being, practicing listening and practicing all roles in the setting of the classroom. The project also opened the possibilities of obervation beyond “learning spaces” as those in schools and universities to be reinterpreted as spaces of exchange, spaces of presence and the spaces where we are each allowed to continue to become and continue to understand what learning is for each of us.