Introduction

What is Contemporary Art & Open Learning?

This School of Art course will enable you to make your own contribution to opening access to and broadening participation in artistic learning; it will inspire you to support your peers by codifying and sharing you practice.

Art education today is porous and ubiquitous: it exists in a wide variety of formal and informal arts contexts and in can be found in many different cultures and societies. It takes many diverse organisational forms, traversing virtual communities, small artist-led initiatives, international biennials, art academies and artistic practices.

This course combines and practises a range of peer-based learning theories and theories of knowledge production. You will consider how to extend online open access into the types of 'Third Places' (Soja, 1996) frequently produced by artists (galleries, schools, studios, workshops, public sites, virtual environments....) by learning how to practise paragogics, a set of learning principles that offer a flexible framework for peer learning and knowledge production. The course is scaffolded to begin. It slowly removes this scaffold to enable peer-support for each other's learning, then, finally, requires you to lead teaching and feedback.


Three Parts

The course is split into three iterative part:

Part I: P2P

The first series of workshops introduce you to D-I-T (do-it-together) and P2P (peer-to-peer) methods of artistic practice through responding to weekly art assignments. The assignments are short and simple to engage with.

Your work for them forms the basis of critical discussion (critiques) each week on art-as-education and education-as-art. These crits will take place in your small peer-support group (Basho), within which you will remain for the duration of the course.

The rationale and context of each of the assignments is supported by this Open Educational Resource (OER) published, in part, on the MA CAT WordPress.

This OER includes flipped learning resources in advance of the workshops which can be viewed online and supporting materials which scaffold your practice and your role as a supportive peer in your crits.