By Dr Katie Lee
As Universities scramble to consider new economic models, we are entering into a deeply unstable transition between “what we did to survive during COVID”, and the “new normal”. During this period, changes that were rolled out during a global emergency, are becoming fate accompli. Unfortunately these decisions are occurring before we have had a chance to find out what post-COVID recovery looks like for our sector, with many Universities already rolling out sweeping reforms to the way Higher Education operates, and is delivered.[1]
Therefore, it is important to have thought carefully about what it is specifically that we value about concepts such as “liveness” and “synchronicity”; concepts that we may have previously taken for granted with regards to teaching. These concepts are important to consider, not because these qualities should be automatically considered best-practice in all educational contexts, but because they link to very particular aspects of delivering creative arts education, that I believe we need to safeguard, and more importantly, know why.
During the pandemic, there was much talk of the “Flipped Classroom”. This model refers to a shift in the way lecturers spend time with students – away from delivering content or “imparting knowledge” during synchronous class-time (face to face) – to a model whereby students are provided with this material asynchronously, and time in the classroom spent discussing material or outcomes they produced alone. These sweeping reforms to the lecture-theatre mode of delivery, risk standardising the way we teach and establishing an economic model that will not suit all subject areas, or all students. Further, it will set up an economic model that will increasingly draw attention to those who don’t or can’t deliver such lean packages, and, in so doing, require that we (in the creative arts particularly) rationalise our pedagogical approach.
In a world now filled with online content, recorded zoom sessions, skill-sharing educational platforms with hours of content, I am increasingly interested in the role “liveness” and “synchronicity” play in our perception, our sense of connectedness to the world, and to what we value. It can be argued the perception that “nothing is happening” is a particularly Western frame of mind. Bundjalung-Murrawari-Kamilaroi artist Dr Brian Martin has written extensively about the problematic way that Western ontologies result in “representationalist thinking”, particularly the way that Western ontologies separate out culture from everyday life. If culture and everyday life are separated, then art can only hope to represent rather than present or be in reciprocal and dynamic exchange with, life.[2]
Within an arts context, the concept of reciprocity, a/liveness and indigenous knowledge applies in particular. As Martin states:
“In the multiple Aboriginal languages in Australia, we do not find the word ‘art’. Art is a Western term and could be argued as something stationary of static and has, at many times throughout history, separated itself from the social and real world. The use of the word ‘Yuka’ in Wergaia language means ‘to paint’ which is a demonstration of the action of doing. ‘Yuka’ has agency and has relationality to the maker, the viewer and to knowing.[3]”
By asking students to come to class ready to present finished work, we once again prioritise final products over active, relational processes, and loose our hard fought emphasis in creative arts research to processes of learning and finding new ways of being and knowing through practice.
Within the arts, provoking a sense that “something is happening” is often accompanied by the term “activation”. Performers are recruited to “activate” and even “oxygenate” galleries and museums. However these concepts; to activate, agitate and animate, simply reveal the all too common mental habit, a kind of ongoing slip-stream that continues to divorce processes from end products. These are the underlying human, cultural, social and physiological forces that we encounter when we look at art and when we make it. Trying to unpack this for our students, to help them glimpse the processes undertaken, the active and time consuming nature of research, the duration of practice, is an essential part of what I believe, an creative arts education should impart.
References
Martin, Brian. “Methodology Is Content: Indigenous Approaches to Research and Knowledge.” Educational Philosophy and Theory, no. March 2017 (2017): 1-9.
[1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/more-universities-planning-drop-lectures-after-pandemic
[2] Martin, B. in Barrett, Carnal Knowledge: Towards a ‘New Materialism’ through the Arts. 185.
[3] Brian Martin, “Methodology is Content: Indigenous Approaches to Research and Knowledge,” Educational Philosophy and Theory, no. March 2017 (2017).
Katie Lee is a cross-disciplinary artist whose creative practice includes sculpture, installation, performance, video, sound and drawing. Common to her work is a preoccupation with how our perception of the world around us can shift and flip: from stable to contingent. Her work attempts to reveal and dissect these un/stable relations, along with the various ways in which these perceptions are held in architecture, bodies and form. Current research projects include making virtual-reality performance environments, live-streaming sculptural installation events and doing video field-recordings at the Fawkner Cemetery. Katie Lee is based in Naarm (Melbourne) Australia where she completed a PhD at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne (2019). She has been exhibiting nationally and internationally since 2005, and is a lecturer in Creative Arts and Expanded Performance at Deakin University.