TEACHING PHILOSOPHY

Gert Biesta describes in Letting Art Teach (2017) that there is a precursor to meaning-making, which comes from being attuned to the world and from being affected by the world. Biesta reminds us that we don’t intentionally create the phenomena that come to our senses, but we do open ourselves up to be affected. He suggests that because we are “in dialogue with what is real, what is material, [and] physical, what has its own integrity” (p.79) that our job as teachers is to allow students to move through the frustration, resistance, the surprise and joy of encountering the materials and processes of art (2017).

One of my concerns in my teaching regards how to loosen objects. This is Lauren Berlant’s term for our objects of desire––our passions and our attachments to ideals (2022). So my concern is not only how to help students to piece apart, dissect, dis-organize and encounter the material world of physical things but also to approach their ethereal counterpart, the dialectical world of material, in the same manner. The practice of encountering and interrogating our physical and conceptual materials in the art studio helps us to do the same with our beliefs about life, society, ourselves, one another. My second concern is how to prepare and fortify students to continue making work in this particular time and scene, where we are encouraged to give up our passions for the possibility of ‘a secure life’.

What’s transformative about art education is the opportunity to help students to construct a life for themselves and each other––to make a different kind of a life happen through the process of their work and within the infrastructure they develop in their creative communities. We want our students to be able to sustain a practice of seeing and engaging with the world, making and developing their work, and to have an expectation that curiosity toward the world is a given. We want our students to reformulate the infrastructure of the art world to suit their own needs and purposes, and this takes critical community, dialogue, curiosity and creativity. 

I ground my units with short readings, activities, artist meetings, presentations of artists work, field trips, and demos as prompts for discussion and work-based responses. I try to build into each project plan opportunities for both success and failure, and methods for response to each. I build into each course options and plans for sharing what students have made outside of the confines of the studio and classroom, formulating diverse ways to share work based on readings, examples and class discussion. These range from webpages and blogs; exhibitions for the public or private parties of friends and family; roundtables; to alternate venues and various opportunities for the public to happen upon the work.

Above all, during divisive times and times of great loneliness and grief such as ours, the lessons and examples we show students while in school will be the lifeblood of the coming creative community. The challenges that we address now in our own practice, and assist our students in addressing––the inventiveness we employ with our students––are critical to their continuation as artists.

References

Berlant, L. (2022). The Inconvenience of other people. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Biesta, G. (2017). Letting art teach: Art education ‘after’ Joseph Bueys. ArtEZ Press.