A monthly forum for teachers and those interested in education. The group considered the intersections between teaching and artistic practices. 

“School,” despite its many disappointments in actual experience, is a concept that still manages to retain an idealistic place in imagination. There is often an implicit sense that the learning relationship to teachers, to subject, to environment, could have, or ought to be different. I think we are attuned to the artificiality of school, because we experience so many different learning relationships throughout our lifetimes. And whether or not we know how to connect those learning experiences to a vision of what school should be, the dissonance between school and life is one that fuels and protects the ideal.  

In many ways, this is also the case with “art”—that despite the narrowness which sometimes constitutes the professional field/market, there is also a vision of art as a context for understanding and expressing the world around us that resists restriction. 

The intersection of art and education pushes for redefinition of both in ways that broaden these contexts as places for encounter and transformation. The observations of art practice, suggest different approaches to learning; the shared space of the "classroom" engages art, not only for personal expression, but as tool for communal understanding.

Can this process of redefinition lead to new forms of both? A renewed understanding of arts role in society? More creative, or aesthetic forms of learning?

Readings

• Art as Experience, John Dewey
• The Dialectic of Freedom, Maxine Greene
• Home Economics, Wendell Berry
• James Baldwin Selected Essays
• The Ignorant School Master, Jacques Rancier
• Writing Without Teachers, Peter Elbow
• Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks
• The Struggle for Black Education, Brian Jones
• Anthroposophy in Everyday Life, Rudolf Steiner
• Deschooling Society, Ivan Illich
• The Unknown Craftsman, Sōetsu Yanagi
• The End Of Ignorance, John Mighton
• Zen and the Art of Archery, Eugen Herrigel
• Anna Halprin, Dance, Process, Form, Wittman, Schorn, Land
• To Know as We are Known, Parker J Palmer
• Resistance to Learning: Overcoming the Desire Not to Know, Marshall Wise Alcorn Jr.
• Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre, Keith Johnstone
• Thinking About Art Thinking, Luis Camnitzer
• Education for Socially Engaged Art, Pablo Helguera