Reflective Practice Presentation

Art education today is porous and ubiquitous: it exists in a wide variety of formal and informal arts contexts and can be found in many different cultures and societies. It takes diverse organisational forms: traversing small artist-led initiatives, international biennials, art academies and artistic practices. Art education is a distinctly ‘live’, embodied experience. Until the pandemic pivot, there had been few virtual communities of artistic learners. How might artists catalyse the post-Covid recovery of the artworld by engaging with emerging edutech practices such as the open paradigm (Winn 2015), paragogy (Corneli 2011, 2016) and para-academia (Wardrop 2014)?

To address these issues, I will present a reflective analysis of a new course that I ran Sept-Dec 2020 at Edinburgh College of Art. This enabled students to open access to artistic learning by peer-producing, codifying and sharing their learning practices (Lane 2017). The course was presented as an OER hosted on www.eca.ed.ac.uk/research/art-learning

The course practised a range of peer-based theories of learning and knowledge production to extend open access into the communal Third Places (Oldenburg 1999) frequently produced by artists. In particular, it practises ‘paragogics’, learning principles that offer a flexible framework for peer learning.

The course split into two components:

1: DIT P2P

Students were introduced to DIT (do-it-together) and P2P (peer-to-peer) methods of artistic practice by responding to weekly art assignments. Art assignments (Petrovich 2012; Salmon 2013) were metacognitive: participating helped students learn to devise and run their own open assignments. Students play-tested; they experienced what worked in disparate learning environments and gained a sense of how different learners responded to stimuli

The educational rationale for each of the assignments was supported by the OER, which included flipped learning resources that scaffolded P2P learning. This later became an OER generated by the art students. This OER remains a public archive that exhibits the learning of staff and students.

I will apply artistic research methods – developed as part of the artist group Shift/Work (Mulholland 2013, 2019) – to critically reflect on this open P2P approach, using the OER archive as a case study.

2: Art & Open Learning Fair

The capstone of the course supported students to run their own workshops as part of an art and learning event held in public. This year, the brief was to generate an OER in response to Fluxus artist Joseph Beuys’ 1978 provocation: ‘can anyone be an artist?’ Acting as collectivised researchers, each group devised their own responses to this provocation.

Rooted in Beuys’ Edinburgh Poorhouse Projects (1974), his Free International University and his work with the prisoner Jimmy Boyle, this provocation proved prescient not only of the emancipatory potential of the pandemic pivot, but of Open Creation, the Open Paradigm (Ettlinger 2017; Knox 2013), para-academia, paragogy, the undercommons (Moten 2004) and the DIT art schools movement (Thorne 2017; Mulholland 2019).

Thinking more broadly about what sort of publics can be generated through the production of open research objects such as OERs will be vital to my reflective analysis.