To give our students and staff the education they need to flourish in a changing world
UAL Education Conference 2022
These are the most recent versions of our abstract and text for the social gathering at EdEx21.
Abstract for our 25 minutes discussion panel on the 7th July
How can we disinvest ourselves of age old myths about how we learn? Ideas of ungrading, assistance instead of assessment, compassion pedagogies and decolonising the curriculum / university amongst other ideas are being discussed fruitfully at the moment. But we still persist with teaching and learning methods an course structures that are ridged and oppressive? How can we radically change our thinking about the myths of education so that all our students now and yet to come can thrive in inclusive and eventful spaces? Come and join UAL’s Experimental Pedagogies Research Group (EPRG) in thinking about these urgent questions
Proposed text for our hosting a social space on the 6th July from 3pm onwards
UAL’s Experimental Pedagogies Research Group will be your hosts for this social event where we charm, accommodate, swarm, entertain, invite, and welcome you to this chatty occasion. We will entertain you and you will entertain us. Come as you are, as you were, as you are going to be, as you want to be. Come and play with the EPRG in a series of creative conversations. This assembly will traverse and converse the gaps, fissures, pauses, silences of our digital pedagogical world. Come and experiment with the opportunities it offers to chat about pedagogies beyond the norm, find advantageous places, make a small plot of new land at all times for rest, chat and conviviality. In summary, come and practice the pedagogy of picnicking with the EPRG, lay out the rug, kick off your shoes and Bring Your Own ideas.
Draft of EdEx21 and the EPRG to be changed in collaboration with conference steering group.
Title of session: Bodies without Organs: Experimenting in the Gaps and Fissures of our Actively Blended Pedagogically World?
Abstract: (This will be published on the EdEx webpage and in the event materials. Max 100 words
Join UAL’s Experimental Pedagogies Research Group (EPRG) in a series of creative actions. Through co-created thought-practice pedagogical experiments: active- listening, multi-vocal conversations, online-performance-workshops, unfolding- papers, assembled-charming-panel-discussions, fleeting-talks. smooth-spaces- sessions. We will inhabit the gaps, fissures, pauses, silences of our digital pedagogical world where we can, ‘experiment with the opportunities it offers, find advantageous places, find potential movements of deterritorialisation, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continua of intensities…have a small plot of new land at all times…causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for Bodies without Organs.’
Description of sessions and activities
(What participants will take away from the session? Max 250 words)
Using Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of a Body without Organs (BwO) as a starting point for its organisation and through a series of liminal actions, as described in the abstract we will collaborate with the participants in forming ideas of how experimental pedagogies can be researched and put into practice at UAL.
Members of the EPRG can be available throughout the conference in the gaps in between other sessions. It will be something like a continuous performative interactive conference poster show, where participants can find out more about what we do and how to join in with our adventure.
The participants will get to know what the Experimental Pedagogies Research Group is and what it’s aims and objectives are. If interested we will discuss how to join the EPRG as active members in the coming years with the participants.
The EPRG was set up in July 2020 from a growing demand from UAL staff and PhD students to have a place where theoretical and practical ideas of experimentation in creative educational pedagogical contexts could be explored.
Three concurrent aims were quickly established. The first was create more spaces where experimental pedagogies could be discussed and put into practice. The second was to look for funding streams for creative experimental projects that we wished to develop. The third was to explore the possibility of setting up a research centre at UAL that was dedicated to developing, with our multi-talented practitioners, new ways of practicing and thinking about creative education.
(We are happy to go at anytime wherever the organisers want us to go. From 5 to 15 minutes before, during and after the conference we can be available for conversations to develop and evolve.)