BRIEF: Experimental Pedagogies Research Group 2024-5
Dear X
In brief:
The EPRG are sending you this package, for your enjoyment, and to engage you in our ongoing work. It is made up of various elements, including a publication from our 24hrs ON EARTH event (March 2022). Designed collaboratively by students with its participant contributions, it is intended as provocation for pedagogic response. Also included here is a packet of seeds, relating to a previous event (Epizoochory and the EPRG, March 2021??). Epizoochory … was about the dispersal of potential, activated via sharing: bodies working together toward flourishing. The lolly stick can be utilised as marker or reminder; but also might serve as a mast for a paper boat.
As an aspect of our conversations around practices of pedagogic research, the EPRG have been considering moments where a seemingly-small event in an educational environment can have a greater affect. Thinking with others (e.g. Erin Manning, 2016) we want to recognise the pedagogic importance of the minor gesture. In your experience as a student and/or teacher, was there a moment or occurrence, which may have passed unnoticed but that you can note (and cite) as meaningful? Would you consider sharing this with others, in some way? What would that look, or feel, or sound, or taste like?
So we would also like to invite you to contribute to a subsequent EPRG project – to be a part of this movement – by offering-up a response. This would be something that you might give as an example of a minor gesture that had some effect or affect. Examples might be an impromptu smile at some point of relevance, a moment when you remembered someone’s name and so welcomed them in to something, the feeling when you were handed back the glove (or ball or idea) you’d dropped, an occasion that an other showed you an easier way to do that thing you were struggling with, small acts of care you have perceived in living and/or working environments, the surprising and affirming eye contact, an acknowledgement of your effort when you really needed to be noticed, a time when you were reminded of your own agency, a point of difference, a connection of relation ….
The contents of this parcel might give you ideas about ways of responding to this request. We would appreciate any physical contribution that occurs to you, and we also have a platform for virtual submissions {Padlet? Miro? Blog?]. Our hope is to work towards a gala of minor gestures to take place around September 2025, though this is all undecided. We have ideas to host events on UAL campuses, but the event is intended to be global in nature: such as a 24hrs OF MINOR GESTURES, maybe? Therefore we would also like to know from you what you might like to happen with this work of yours. The desire is to create a wider and multi- event, from our collaborative intentions and efforts, which we can share and explore and develop together.
Our group, the EPRG, is amorphous and inclusive, and if you are not already a member and would like to join us, we would be delighted! We are an open group welcoming colleagues from within and beyond UAL, who are interested in research into creative and experimental pedagogies. Monthly meetings hosted on Teams are fluidly emergent, with a drop-in-and-out ethos, as suits your particular time and space.
Love, the EPRG
To join the EPRG please contact:
Mark Ingham: m.ingham@lcc.art.ac.uk and
Jonathan Martin: j.r.martin@chelsea.arts.ac.uk
University of the Arts London
272 High Holborn
London, WC1V 7EY
UK