Teaching Beyond the Curriculum
Abstract
The 2020 and 2021 pandemic lockdowns in Australia focused attention on the social and material contexts of art-making and art education. Within our institution, Bachelor of Fine Art students studying photography online lost access to darkrooms, cameras, and materials, and, perhaps most importantly, to their peer communities. Post-lockdowns, enrolment numbers remained low in face-to-face classes, reflecting anxiety about returning to campus, and many students struggled to reconnect to peer networks. To address this, we stepped outside our institution’s structures and created an informal meetup group to reach out to our students: PhotoContact. PhotoContact is a weekly lunch-time peer group meet, held in the middle of our small campus courtyard, that is open to all students of our institution, whether they are studying photography formally or not. The informality of PhotoContact is its strength: there is no requirement to attend, no assessment of content, and all are welcome. There is often food (social practice has taught us well) and there is always a hands-on demonstration or workshop of some aspect of photographic practice. Since establishing PhotoContact, both photography’s profile on our campus and enrolment numbers in our photography courses have increased, comprehensively demonstrating that informal engagement activities may lead to formal commitment. PhotoContact communicates an unofficial curriculum of creative photographic enquiry, based outside of the classroom, that has afforded meaningful community building across degrees, year groups, and discipline areas, and has created a community based on mutual interest and care.
Yvette Hamilton is an Australian artist and researcher of Mauritian descent who is an Associate Lecturer in Photography in the School of Art and Design at the University of New South Wales. She has been teaching photographic practice and theory at a tertiary level for the past eight years. In her interdisciplinary practice she explores the evolution of photography and vision in the post-photographic era and has exhibited widely across Australia and internationally.
Dr Rebecca Shanahan is an Aotearoa-born Australian artist and Lecturer in the School of Art and Design at the University of New South Wales. She has taught in tertiary art institutions and exhibited in Australia and internationally for many years. Her practice enquires into materiality, trace, and transience within a framework of feminist and political critique.