Teaching Beyond the Curriculum
Abstract
In response to Art, Design and Media students’ returning to learning in-person, we sought to understand how web-enabled modes of learning may have influenced students’ creative, exploratory, and learning practices. While learning online during the pandemic was possible, working in physical and social isolation was not ideal for inventive, material, collective creative practices. Online learning creates inherently time-limited spaces within parameters of tidiness and immateriality. We wondered how losing studio time and diminished sociality had affected attitudes towards creative risk-taking and experimentation. In 2022 and 2023, two groups of students participated in four five-hour exploratory and participatory workshops. These explored how students’ identities as learners and creative practitioners were affected by working digitally. We recruited MA students because they had experience as creative-practice students before, during and after the pandemic. Thinking about processes of handling material, something going wrong, and work being unfinished, we considered what is the current state of knowledge generated through practice? Especially linking concepts from practice-based research and the way materialities of practice occur, we explored what the work of being an art / design / media student is – that of making a mess, experimenting, trying things out, making mistakes, doing things again until a rapprochement with the process/es occurs. We created an experimental space of open dialogue to discuss relationships to hands-on making and feelings about creative risk-taking and experimentation in students’ practices. Students’ concerns related to: having time to experiment, encouragements to ‘professionalise’, the over-structuring of time, homogenised ‘models’ of creative risk, and censorship.
Jane Madsen has taught at University of the Arts London for many years and is a senior lecturer in Academic Support and a researcher at London College of Communication. She has taught theory and practice in fine art and moving image. Her work is experimental and interdisciplinary. She has written and published on film, art and architecture exploring the themes: home, place, space, territory, landscape, absence, poetics and makes films and installations. She has a practice-based PhD from the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.
Christie Johnson studied at Shahid Ashrafi Esfahani University and the Universities of Cambridge and London. Christie taught at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, as well as the Institute of Ismaili Studies as the programme leader for the Graduate Programme in Islamic Studies and Humanities before becoming Head of Academic Support at London College of Communication. In addition to thinking and writing about the interface of performance art and lens-based media in Chile, Christie is researching the impact online practices during the pandemic is having on young artists’ and designers’ attitudes to experimentation in their creative and learning practices.
10:30 am - 12:00 pm
Thursday 16th November, 2023