How can we develop supportive and inclusive strategies that do not rely on traditional models of expert teachers and passive students that acknowledge fluidity, risk, not-knowing and chance as key elements of the development of any creative practice?
What does it mean to engage in 'learning as becoming' rather than learning for accumulation or measurable success?
How can teaching be a form of being an expert on learning, in a manner of being alongside the learning?
Mary O’Neill
Mary O’Neill is an artist, author, and educator whose practice engages with profound cultural issues that often leave us mute, such as isolation and loss. Through her artworks and publications she explores the search for meaning in the face of life experiences that can render the world chaotic and incomprehensible.
Dr Paul Alexander Stewart
Paul Stewart is a socially engaged artist and curator, based in Newcastle, using film, performance, and sound to explore how histories are shared, and how knowledge can be embodied when working with multiple voices and communities.
Anouk Mirte Hoogendoorn
Anouk Hoogendoorn is an artistic researcher that works with text, textile, and performance. The (spoken) texts,textiles, sketches, and sounds that come out of this practice are moments of processes rather than presentations fixedonce and for all.
‘The Expert Learner’ experiments with how to learn (or learning how) rather than what to learn. Refuting the master/pupil duality and acknowledging learning as a continuum, where individuals are at different stages in their learning which changes their position in the continuum. ‘Show Don’t Tell’ is a collective doing/exploration where information sharing uses a variety of methods including demonstration, dialogue, and practical co-making. Aiming to acknowledge the roles (makers, dreamers, filmmakers, observers) that offer modes of engagement, reframing collaboration. ‘Convivial Parallel Play’ explores cooperation growing organically rather than the dominant prevalence of enforced collaboration as a learning strategy. Collaboration can be more complex and not beneficial for some learners who are neurodiverse or not easily welcomed in the university due to class or race. Our research focuses on processes of learning that allow for individual outcomes/insights/breakthroughs.
Logbook
“Alongside: learning as a parallel action to proximate peers, projects and things in the neighbourhood” will be explored through three propositions: “The Expert Learner” which alters the master/pupil duality into learning on a continuum; “Show Don’t Tell” where sharing is rethought and remade; “Parallel Play in Conviviality” where conviviality is thought as a learning side-by-side rather than one-plus-one. The propositions posit the commons or commoning, not as collaboration, but working in parallel or alongside, recognising difference and avoid the conflation of collaboration as agreement or singular but multiple. Our collective of three exists of teachers and students from different generations, where x tutored y, y tutored z, and z will tutor a student to come. But rather than seeing it as a formal system of hierarchies, we somehow ended up following each other's learning in a matter of being alongside, as being each other’s expert-learners. We want to explore how this came to be and how we can give this forward. The project isn't pre-existing but it builds on a legacy of over 30 years of combined learning and making around the topics of commoning, learning, becoming, and activism through art and pedagogy. As a trio, we strive to all be present for the programme with at least two of us at all times. The expert learner doesn’t dismiss prior knowledge or experience but acknowledges the multiple ways knowledge is held and shared. It positions the teacher as not the expert on knowledge but the expert on learning, they have learnt how to orate or share. Through ‘being with’ both others, materials, and ideas, the ambition is to explore without prescribed notions, using durational working, following energy, stopping, not aiming for end goals but experiencing the process. This method allows for individually negotiated or defined notions of ‘success’ and acknowledges that each member of the session will be at a different learning stage, it shifts the capitalist malaise from learning as a thing to get through for accumulation to becoming the essence of commoning, the activity of being with and of the world