Artist presentation by Taeyoon (20 minutes)
Introduction, expectations, schedule.
Expectations for students. You will create material for your workshop. You will try teaching in real life.
Introduction of students, what are you excited about? Why did you decide to take this class?
Why Art matters?
- Why it's important to think about 'Teaching as Art'?
- The art of teaching and teaching of Art
- Art has a uniquely transformative power
- There's a potency in Art's resistance to utility
- For an educator, there's a lot to learn from Art and Artists
Taeyoon: What is art?
Student: Art is just an act of making something. Artists or audience can bring meaning.
Taeyoon: Is it just an expression?
Student: I can do whatever and call it Art, if I can explain it.
Taeyoon: You can only get so far. I think Art professionals have a pretty good bullshit filter.
I agree Art is an expression, but Art is more than just a delivery of expression. Art is a way of finding a meaning.
Art matters because it's very material. Digital art or even Conceptual art has a material impact on how we see and experience the world. Our perceptions change through art.
Art gives a different way of communicating. It's closer to affect compared to language. It's the intensity and transmission, before we recognize what emotion it is. It's prior to taste or 'understanding.'
Art has a sublime quality which gives a chance to question our being. I have relationships with artworks, and I'm speaking broadly about art, including painting or music, literature or cinema. Each time I see the work, there's something more for me. It gives something new to me. And every time, I change a little bit by experiencing the artwork. It's different from commercials that are designed to give you a feeling, a certain kind of feeling, as an outcome of their material.
Art is often times not useful. It's not meant to be used. Although many forms of art, like what I make or what my friends make, are effective in everyday situations, sometimes blurring the distinction between design, technology and art. However, as artists, we have a right to make something that does not do stuff. This resistance to utlitarian function, that's where we create a space beyond function. It's not only about making things beautiful or expressing yourself. It's about opening a space where you can be anything, anytime, anywhere.
I take art seriously, almost religiously. Without art, life would be really dull. We have been able to survive without art. There have been times when authoritarian government suppressed art, censored art.
The art of teaching and the teaching of art are different. I need to talk about Art to talk about teaching.
Teaching as a gift
- What is my teaching philosophy?
- Teaching is an act of generosity. When I give a gift, I'm not expecting anything from you. Gifts are supposed to be a celebration of our relationship.
- Teaching
- Assesment, feedback mechanism, mechanism to understand the work
- Where does the learning stop? Or, what are the obstacles in learning?
- A classroom in conflict, or finding–creating a learning environment in a site of conflict
Student: But a Gift, in sociology, is something people give to each other in hopes of a reward or compensation?
Taeyoon: Gift is different from trade, it's not transactional.
Teaching and learning can be a reciprocal relationship. Students can inspire the teacher and help the teacher learn.
Student: How about bad teachers? Teachers who approach teaching as a purely professional task?
Good teachers and bad teachers are different. There's a lot to learn from bad teachers. It can be a bad curricular system that makes a bad teacher.
Kant's notion of education stresses discipline over creativity.
It feels like much of the public education system enforces discipline to tailor people to fit into society.
Education, in a traditional understanding, is taming the nature into utilitarian purpose. It's like cutting a tree into a log, and then making a pencil from it.
Learning is about learning to learn. You may remember learning to ride a bicycle. Verbal instructions offer little help. You need to ride the bicycle and fall a few times, learn to take risks, each time balancing your movement.
Student: "especially after No Child Left Behind."
Taeyoon: "Can you elaborate?"
Student elaborates
"In learning an action, instead of having it given ready-made, one of necessity learns to vary its factors, to make varied combinations of them, according to change of circumstances. A possibility of continuing progress is opened up by the fact that in learning one act, methods are developed good for use in other situations. Still more important is the fact that the human being acquires a habit of learning. He learns to learn." – Democracy and Education by John Dewey
Teaching is about lifting up the students. It's giving a chance to see beyond the fence.
I was thinking about "what you want to learn, how you want to learn" When I was preparing this class.
Teaching as learning
The secret of teaching effectively is to think from the perspective of someone who is learning
Teacher and Student. Being a teacher and student is like playing a game of musical chairs. The player's roles may rotate. It's a play as in the 'appropriation of power'.
Anni Albers is a very important figure. Unfortuantely, because history was written by men about men, she's often introduced as the wife of Josef Albers. While Josef is also important, he set the academic rigor and research of formal qualities and color, Anni contributed to the teaching philosophy and curriculum. I think of her as the archetypical coder and designer. Her textile works as well as prints show the systemic approach to patterns and abstraction.
– Handweaving Today: Textile Work at Black Mountain College by Anni Albers
Anni Alber's approach is radical, because she focuses on the materiality of textile as a starting point for design. It's not relying on a dream of what the work is going to be, but emerges in the material and lets the form emerge out of the process.
Student: Is this similar to The Logic of Sense, a book by Gilles Deleuze?
Taeyoon: Could you elaborate?
/details to work on. Deleuze's notion of the painter coming with many ideas about what the painting can be, and subtracting it to give form...
Drawing of my desk. I read, write and eat there. I have some knowledge, opinions and experiences that don't mean much on its own.
One option is to organize them on a shelf. It's neat. Another option is to distill the all of it into a book. This process is like fabricating knowledge into a new material.
– The Experimenters, Chance and design at Black Mountain College, Eva Díaz, 2015
Experimenter
"To Fuller, investigational prototyping was inextricably part of any experimental method—“I designed this thing so it would deliberately fall down, would not stand.” As disorderly as the process of constructing the dome may have appeared to participants—wet Venetian blinds scattered throughout the landscape of Black Mountain’s Lake Eden campus—the dome was, according to him, engineered and “measured by comprehensive and strict practices of calculation and test.” Fuller wanted students to think structurally about buildings, questioning underlying engineering principles without accepting formal architectural conventions. He excoriated the way most art and architecture programs “teach otherwise innocent students to make pathetic attempts to out-Mies Mies while overlooking the energetic and economic fundamentals governing development of truly evolutionary design initiative, and design responsibility.” – The Experimenters, Chance and design at Black Mountain College by Eva Díaz
- Uncertainty and unknowns. being okay with not knowing what will happen
- The Black Mountain College Experiment Revisited, a talk by Eva Díaz
- Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art by Vincent Katz
Buckminster Fuller, an eccentric futurist
Utopia, utilitiy, futility, Industrialism.
Institute of Design, Chicago
The trouble between Fuller and Kenneth Snelson, Fuller's student who was upset about a credit to his invention and contribution.
Constructivist Theory of Learning, simply put is learning by doing and making.
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One dot is just information.
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There are two dots, you made a connection between two pieces of information.
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You make more connections between them, it becomes knowledge.
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By now, you've created as association of knowledge, which you can reshape.
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Now you've abstracted the assiciation of knowledge, emotion, and memories.
Learning is like connecting lots of sensory data and the abstracted associations, and building a world with it.
Learning is building a habit. People learn by making muscle memory of doing something, repetition is important, necessary.
Teaching is making a habitat, an environment where one can build the habit.
In the comic, I illustrate the theory of creating a habitat literally. The dots and lines become a tent, in which a person can sleep.
“authentic education is not carried on by “A” for “B” or by “A” about “B,” but rather by “A” with “B." – Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paolo Freire, pg 93, Problem-posing education
Words coming up in the horizon.
- Care
- Maintenance
- Attention
- Assembly
- Potentiality
- Constructivism
- Blocks and connections
- Remember the time you learned something
- Mapping my learning (how do I learn something?)
- It's like a manual for your learning. Manual for someone to teach you.