UAL’s EPRG is a daring and safe place and space where new pedagogical knowledge is created and put into practice for the benefit of all UAL students and staff. It is a creative and critical learning space. We ask our students to take risks, to be daring, to try new things out, to experiment: we need to do the same in our pedagogical research. We should have the theoretical and practical tools to challenge what has gone before and to make new educational environments fit for our world now and that to come. The EPRG has demonstrated through its diverse community that it is possible to carry out new ways of qualitatively researching how our students feel about their experiences at UAL through funded projects like Falling Through the Gaps. We have shown how we can be a global group that takes into consideration all our students wherever they are in the world and at whatever time they are ready to learn, and demonstrated to our staff and ourselves how in the space of 60 mins x 24, new work can be created collaboratively with strangers (24 Hours ON EARTH). We have used online spaces and their breakout rooms to meet new colleagues, collaborate and create hybrid artefacts (OUR FUR OUR FUR). We have presented at conferences including EdEx21 (Bodies without Organs ) We will engage our postgraduate students in this pedagogical research as we are already doing with the twelve PhD students currently members the EPRG and through our ongoing funded projects (Talking Heads: How Did I Get Here?)
Three concurrent aims were quickly identified.
To create and imagine more informal, online in person spaces. where ideas of what experimental pedagogies are, could be discussed and put into practice. This has been initially established in our monthly meetings.
To locate funding streams for creative experimental projects that we wished to develop. This work is in progress, and a LCC Research funding bid has been successful.
To explore the possibility of setting up a Research Centre at UAL dedicated to developing, with our talented practitioners, new ways of practicing and thinking about creative education.
“It’s not so much that it preexists or comes ready‐made […] you make one, you can’t desire without making one. And it awaits you; it is an inevitable exercise or experimentation, already accomplished the moment you undertake it, unaccomplished as long as you don’t. […] It is not at all a notion or a concept but […] a set of practices. […] you can’t reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit.”
(Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia, vol. 2)