Deconstructing the Wild - Child

Sun, 24 Feb 2019 13:48:55 +0000

WORKING GROUP: VIENNA
AUTHORS: KARIN SCHNEIDER, ANDREA HUBIN, CARLA BOBADILLA

ABSTRACT

This Learning Unit aims to understand whether the history of the construction of fantasy and creativity as related to the “exotic Other” still informs current methods and ideas of museum, gallery and art education practices (not only) for children – and if so, how these connections work. We propose to look at parts of this history through our own experiences and ideas in respect to art education for children. The figure of “the child” as innocent, in need for guidance and protection with an embedded potential for fantasy and creativity that should not be spoiled by “civilization” is in itself a construction that underpins the concepts of Child Art of the 19th and 20th century and might still unconsciously inform our own ideas and approaches.

This Learning Unit consists of a sequel of four workshops that are connected with each other and build upon each other’s content, but can also be used separately or partly. The Learning Unit provides working suggestions; as well as texts and archival material, for these workshops.

To work with this , the best way is to establish a working group that meets four times in the timeframe of two to four months (this could be a semester course or a supervision group of arts education lecturers par- allel to their teaching, or a group working in the context of arts educators/museum educators training or a private group of critical arts educators who wish to go through a process of self-reflection/history learning, or a group of arts/museum educators who wish to become critical arts/museum educators).

The hosts of these workshop sessions should take the responsibility to prepare the content, to provide a safe-space atmosphere (including finger-food, fruits, water…, taking care of breaks, time, materials, organ- isation and preparatory communication, meeting space) and communication roles including the documen- tation of the process.

The Viennese case might serve as an example to help to discuss the connection between local and global histories, the personal and the political histories, the practices and the discourses. The LU seeks to encourage different art educators to find ways of working on these seams in their specific contexts as well through the Viennese example.

→ DOWNLOAD THE LEARNING UNIT IN PDF (ENGLISH)

- DESCARGAR LA UNIDAD DE APRENDIZAJE PDF (CASTELLANO)

→ RESOURCES HOMEWORK: TOMLINSON

→ RESOURCES HOMEWORK: VIOLA (IMAGES)

→ RESOURCES HOMEWORK: VIOLA (TEXT)

→ RESOURCES HOMEWORK: CONSTRUCTING PARADISE

→ RESOURCES HOMEWORK: QUOTES

The download is free of charge. Please note you need to be logged in to access the PDF.

We would very much appreciate your feedback. Please share with us in the comments below your experiences of working with this Learning Unit, as well as your thoughts, concerns and questions. The authors will do their best to get back to you and continue the conversation. Thank you!

FOLLOW THE PATHS THIS LEARNING UNIT IS CONNECTED TO:

→ “The Artist” - “the Child” - “the Native”

→ Archival Activism

Reengaging Freire: Paulo and Elza in Geneva

Sun, 24 Feb 2019 16:00:05 +0000

WORKING GROUP: GENEVA/ZURICH
AUTHORS: MICROSILLONS - MARIANNE GUARINO-HUET, OLIVIER DESVOIGNES

ABSTRACT

This Learning Unit offers historical information about the ten years the pedagogue Paulo Freire (1921, Recife – 1997 São Paulo), his wife Elza and their children spent in Geneva in the 1970s. It also presents four experiments, realized by autonomous gallery educators, to reinvent and reengage Freire’s thinking in
present-day Switzerland. Finally, it opens some ideas to translate those experimentations in other contexts. The Reenagaging Freire Learning Unit is a first step to reinstate Paulo and Elza Freire in Geneva’s history of pedagogy, from which they are strikingly absent. It is also an attempt to imagine experimentations that
interrogate the topicality of Freire today in Switzerland (as the gallery educators did in developing a feminist choir, a community garden, a construction workshop in a popular neighborhood or a long-term experiment around the future of asylum-seeker youth), imagining how concepts such as untested feasibilities, conscientização, codification or generativity could serve as tools to question the contemporary dominant models of arts education.

→ DOWNLOAD THE LEARNING UNIT IN PDF (ENGLISH)

- DESCARGAR LA UNIDAD DE APRENDIZAJE PDF (EN CASTELLANO)

The download is free of charge. Please note you need to be logged in to access the PDF.

FOLLOW THE PATHS THIS LEARNING UNIT IS CONNECTED TO:

→ Critical Pedagogy and its Critiques

→ Letterwriting

→ Missionary Dimensions in Arts Education

→ Archival Activism

Intertwining Histories's contents tagged with "CRITIQUE OF COLONIALISM"

Deconstructing the Wild - Child

Reengaging Freire: Paulo and Elza in Geneva