Various crucial aspects have grown more important in today's fashion industry. What are clothes made of? How, where and by whom are they produced? And how can they be disposed? These questions pertain to the design and making of textiles and clothes, as well as to the position and role of crafts in the overall production process. The research project on Recrafting Craft concentrates on the interactions between fashion and advanced fashion education. Where these two worlds intersect, various ongoing changes in the notions of crafts and craftsmanship arise.

The definition of what art — and of what an artist — is, has become more and more discursive and circular. Myths of 'the artist' obscure what contemporary artistic practices possibly can be. The discussion of the legitimacy of art education forms lead by artists, theorists and art educators worldwide is only multiplying. So how do we — art educators in higher education BA Fine Arts — teach art?

With my research I am proposing an alternative space for art education at the Willem de Kooning Academy. Using Group Critiques as method, I experimented with creating a space where art education can change its focus from a more traditional object-based approach, to placing the focal point on the students themselves in order to empower them. This way the students will gain the necessary tools to learn and grow in their own way.

My thesis and education project develop and use a methodology for bringing an artist's practice to the centre of a gallery based education programme. With conversation at the core, my methodology focuses on artists' practices in order to extend that practice at the point of exhibition through co-constructive workshops with the public.

This master thesis explores the possibilities of integrating queer pedagogy in the first year of a fine art curriculum, specifically the impact it can have on informing the students' social and artistic identities. I address fine art mostly from a perspective that focuses on the students' self-development at an intellectual level, reflecting in its turn on their personal and artistic growth and maturity. Furthermore, I explore modes through which education can facilitate frameworks for individuals to build their intellect and personality by informed choices and not through presumed parameters that constrain individuals to non-negotiable positions.

Where do students of pedagogical and social work — who are expected in the future to be able to restore, stimulate and maintain the agentic behaviour of their clients — experience and locate their own agency as meaningful?

My research focuses on the renewal of the art curriculum of the so-called Waldorf education. In order to do so, I re-examined its content by studying the theory underlying Walfdorf education, the principles of artistic research, Gert Biesta's view on education and close reading the work of the founder of Waldorf education: Rudolf Steiner. For me this study had two major purposes: firstly to build further on this research by developing an education project for the Waldorf teacher training programme, providing them tangible suggestions to renew their lesson content. And secondly, to provide a new view on the traditional materials used within the Waldorf arts and craft curriculum.

I have taught art for twenty-one years; a period in which I witnessed the rise of the current media society. In the current digital world it has become impossible to imagine modern life without the Internet and digital tools. Nevertheless, this digital world still seems to be largely absent in the current art curriculum in secondary education.

In the practice of product designers the computer has become an indispensable tool. Before the introduction of the computer, the design process was closely connected to the process of making. Since the mid-1990s, digital technology has slowly but steadily changed the field, resulting in a changing role for physical models. Many students tend to see the computer as the most important tool in all stages of the design process.

As a graphic designer and illustrator I was asked, a few years ago, to give guest workshops in a pre-school in Italy, guiding the children to make illustrations for books. This experience highlighted some aspects of how drawing activities are conducted and perceived already in the early stage of three to six year old children, both by teachers and children. The visual language, which is seen as a fundamental expressive tool for children, is often reduced in its powers by the teacher's recommendations and ways of pointing out what is "right" or "wrong", or by the attention to the outcomes more than to the processes.

This study is an investigation into design education and praxis. It calls for an ecological awareness built upon the principles of ecosophy formulated by Felix Guattari in his The Three Ecologies (1989): namely, social, mental and environmental ecology. The rationale for this research is based upon my observations and concerns as a designer and educator that existing design education and praxis largely lack awareness of their ecological implications.

My thesis is about creating a lesson structure for making an exhibition together with students, because this can lead to a meaningful educational experience. In my opinion, visual art education is unnecessarily individualistic and isolated, and exhibition-making can bring about a change here. Cooperation is an essential part of exhibition-making, which involves a common goal that each student can shape in his or her unique way.

Throughout the history of art and design, the practice of drawing has served as a way to explore, test and communicate visual and spatial concepts. In particular, the sketch has been valued for an indeterminacy that allows multiple design paths to stay open for reinterpretations, adjustments and new insights. This unfinished quality positions the sketch in an explorative and dialogical mode, a mode of visual research rather than just being an end-station. Beyond drawing skills, what is at stake in design education is whether a student’s drawing practice becomes embedded in attitudes and motivations suitable to the explorative and dialogic nature of creative practices. Learning conditions should encourage students to explore a range of methods in personal and meaningful ways.

‘Making’ is one of the latest buzzwords in education. It is a highly malleable ‘container’ term that travels between different disciplines in art, design and engineering. Makerspaces carry quite a load of utopian promises: opening up technology, bringing (power) tools to the people, bridging the digital and the analogue, preparing the next generation for the future – nothing short of a fourth industrial revolution, with an emancipatory impulse to match. But is this a real revolution, or just a new phase of capitalism, bringing new mechanisms of control and exploitation, new ways of distracting and alienating people?

My experience in higher art education seems to suggest that there is an over-emphasis on mental abilities, like learning to verbalize, contemplate and conceptualize one’s actions. In contrast, therefore, I have developed a physical exercise emphasizing the senses to balance the attention between mind and body. The Wandering Flock: A Bodily Exercise in Unison aims to create a balance between the body and the mind while the individual is learning through a collective activity.

Living as we do in the Anthropocene, we are facing climate change and global inequality. These ecological issues require inclusive, transdisciplinary collaborative efforts. A city lab, where all of the participants are experts and amateurs at the same time, provides a 'safe' ground for experimentation and the development of new knowledge. City labs are recent phenomena where ‘the city’ is used as a ‘canvas of reality’ for collaboration between various experts, designers and local citizens. Designers take on different roles in these transdisciplinary design practices and have an essential function within these new lab settings.

Over the years, there has been a rising interest in the concept of the learning community in education departments in contemporary art museums and galleries. This development can be attributed to changes on a political as well as institutional level in Europe as well as the US. The change of art policy has meant more funding for community-centred art education projects, while institutional developments have increased the interest in and opportunities for democratically-oriented, critical education in the museum and art world.

This master thesis explores how performative reflection can be used in secondary school art education to create a studio project that reflects on social cultural themes. In contemporary art education, assignments that are set in social cultural contexts and connect with the students’ lived world or that use the class as a learning environment are rare, as are assignments which focus on performative reflection as a way to express feelings.

This research discusses intergenerational learning for families in an art museum. As a museum educator with a professional and personal interest in family learning in the museum, I noticed an increase in educational programmes in museums designed specifically for families. This research shows how this kind of family activity can become a new learning experience, when it is designed to encourage intergenerational learning; in other words, mutual learning between generations.

There is something strange in the back of my mind. My pen hovers above the paper. The clock ticks away. There was something I wanted to say. But my words don’t seem to come out.
“Forced. Cannot produce. Nothing to write. Concentrate. Slow. Not enough. Short. Write. Why. What. No sense. Not concrete.”
There is nothing useful here. Where did it go?
“Spooks and how to exorcise them” is a practice-based research about inhibitors to the creative process in the Creative Writing class: How to find them, why they might occur and what we can do to overcome or prevent them.

We live in a predominantly visual era. Vastly expanded quantities of imagery influence us on a daily basis, in contrast to earlier days where the textual prevailed. People no longer document their lives with diaries or letters. The increasing producing and reproducing of images continuously compete for our attention. If so, can we speak of an expanding visual culture? If there is an increasing production of images, does this mean that other cultural products, like first-hand experiences, are being superseded?
This research questions if a Bilderatlas as an alternative tool in art education might help students to become critically towards their dominant visual culture.

This research investigates the potential of space as a pedagogic tool, especially in the graphic design classroom. Within this context, ‘space’ should be understood not only as the physical space of the classroom but instead as a broad and overarching concept: the space within typography, the space one occupies, the space of the institution, or the social and political spaces that emerge through daily interaction. 
Acknowledging that space is never neutral, I question the institutionalised and normative behaviours in the classroom and higher education by subversive my position as a teacher. How can we change this rigid perception and experience of space? I propose a multi-definition of space as a lens to my theoretical and practical investigation: Open Space, Informal Space and Other Space. These open new possibilities for interaction within the classroom and new ways to relate to authority. A strategy to empower students in their position and hopefully bring these alternative ways of behaving also outside the classroom.

This research is about education in artistic research. Artistic research is a relatively new field in which academic research and artistic practice are integrated. It encapsulates a vast variety and combination of academic and artistic fields, topics and disciplines. Defining this institutionalised field, and the methods and criteria for evaluating its output, is the subject of much debate. Because scientific and artistic methodologies are subject to different criteria, there’s no one universal definition or evaluation in this educational field. Science needs to articulate its sources, as well as its relevance and its context, and it must provide clear argumentation, whereas art is not constrained by these demands. Can we integrate the scientific and the artistic in individual working methods?

[sic] scripture is an investigation into modes of reading, writing, speaking and listening to scripted texts. The intention: situations where you encounter different identities and perform the ambiguity of not knowing. Through performing, I have come to understand that I am trying to find ways to reach a polyvocal position – polyvocality performed alone, my identity shifts in research and writing; and performed in groups, in workshop scenarios.

The research theme for my graduation project, Collecting For User Stories, has been inspired by conversations with students at the Willem de Kooning Academy (WdKA), where I teach Research & Design. In these conversations, the students expressed difficulties in formulating the urgency of a design. After observing students working on several (social) design projects, it became clear this seems to be associated with a gap between the design students’ own commitment to a project, and the needs of the purported user of the project. This led to the subject of this research: how to teach user-centred design.

The unfair conditions of audibility in our society, which consequently affect individual and collective agency, point towards the urgency of a listening literacy on a macro- and micro-political level. Hence, we need to begin in our immediate environments and transform them into communities of conscious listeners. This research project investigates ideas for the transformation of listening. How can we weave artistic strategies and pedagogical methods into a learning structure that facilitates the development of a collective listening consciousness on a micro-political scale?

Because of how easy it is to use smartphones and tablets nowadays, everyone who owns a mobile smart device is able to work with creative applications. It just takes a click or a swipe to create a visual and catapult it into the world for everyone to see it. This global, technological presence of images, the ease and speed with which they can be produced and reproduced, and the power of their pervasiveness, demand serious attention in education. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to show how contemporary visuals made by students on smart mobile devices can be used as an aid in developing a critical attitude in art class.

My research focuses on SKARlokaal, of which I am one of the initiators. SKARlokaal is a concept based on a form of ‘embedded artistry’: artists occupy a studio (rent it through SKAR, Stichting Art Accommodation Rotterdam, hence the name) in or near a school and from there start a relation with this school and its surroundings. As a pilot, SKARlokaal has been in operation for about two years at the former (vacant) kindergarten pavilion of De Toermalijn primary school in Zuidwijk, a neighbourhood in the southern part of Rotterdam.

Convergence is the phase in the design process following divergence. Divergence, in the design context, mainly relates to the generation of ideas and the broadening of possibilities. Although convergence is necessary in order to make choices and move towards the more specific, there is a lack of real insight into the process of convergence. This thesis aims to gain insight into the thought processes surrounding convergence in order to identify a stronger basis for design education. The main question of this research is therefore: ‘What is ‘converging’ in design education?’

The idea of the educator as a critical maker of learning and curriculum, referred to in my graduation research project, underpins my ambition to challenge and transform pedagogical learning environments into spaces of possibility by means of embodied making practices which open seemingly invisible structures and networks within a school.

The programme for which I teach is the Associate Degree Arts & Crafts, a level of higher design education that can be achieved within two years. The incoming students are graduates of a broad range of creative secondary vocational education programmes; they have been provided with basic (e.g. reproductive) professional qualifications in job categories related to trade, craft, or technique and have gone through a solid training oriented to practice and skills. The implication is that this type of student somehow lacks the ability to (re)act, to criticize and to resolve autonomously. Moving these students forward in their autonomous artistic and knowledge development is the main challenge which Associate Degree educators must face.

This research project examines the potential of a pedagogical space for getting design students to focus on ‘the problem of the future’. Its central question is how ‘trans-realist design’ – the act of making the future tangible and bringing it into today’s reality – can create a new attitude that is concerned with opening up multiple potentials for the future.

Look over there. Do you see that group of students, looking at their feet, sighing by turns? They have just been told that they need to write a self-reflective document.
‘I can’t believe we need to do this.’
‘I know man; we are not going to learn anything from this.’
‘Writing is not just “challenging”, it’s oppositional to making art,’ replies another.
They nod their heads in agreement. When the teacher says it’s time to start the class, they shuffle in, their bodies tense with reluctance.

Crisis is ongoing, layered and sticky. And it isn’t coherent. Neither is this text. Shorelines form, shorelines disintegrate. What began as a dissatisfaction with current vocabularies regarding identity and a hunger for more meaningful ways of accounting for the complicated nature of our bodies and experiences would be subjected to further complication through crisis after crisis after crisis. Trying to account for the complexities of bodies otherwise unaccounted for, bodies queered by crisis, bodies deemed invisible, dispensable or ungrievable, bodies confronted with the very real material conditions of a world not built for their survival, [REDACTED] shorelines is a shattered text taking the time to grieve and elegise the experiences of these bodies when there is no time to be taken.

As an art teacher in secondary education, I used to work with students who had little motivation for the subject of Art & Design. Until a few years ago my classes were rather directive and teacher-driven, with a freedom that can best be defined as 'directed freedom' and that certainly did not always contribute to the students' involvement or motivation.

This research project aims to reflect on my pedagogical approach and my role as an artist-teacher working at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam (the Netherlands), a position in which I teach from my own artistic perspective, bringing multiple experiences as a self-employed artist to the classroom. The research became qualitative and active through what I call experimental exchanges in the feminist classroom, based on four pillars that intersect: Voice, Collaboration, Positioning and Archive.

The design process is inherently experimental, and so in essence it has no predictable result. However, the vocational Media Design students that I teach are from the outset very much accustomed to having to adhere to precise goals in their performance. As these concerns are opposite, the students experience tension. They regard creativity as a sudden, ‘mystical’ occurrence. It is difficult for students to know that their performance will be assessed on the basis of something that doesn’t seem to be in the realm of control. At the same time, many students think they need to instantly and constantly be original. Under such pressure, they often find it difficult to engage in a fruitful design process.

“Through the Wounds of Design, We May Find Each Other is an educational research project outlining a Wound-Centered Educational Design through the reflection and evaluation of the study year (during Covid19) 2020-2021 elective module Designing Our Ways Out of Design (DOWOD) at the Master Institute of Visual Cultures (MIVC) located in Den Bosch. I argue for a reconfiguration of design away from itself, away from the centrality of the human, through ontological design, post-anthropocentrism, affirmative ethics, and post-critical pedagogy. I outline a Wound-Centered Educational Design that centers around the wound metaphor, locating the human-animal divide as the primary wound of the Anthropocene condition. I explore two ontological designs that center farm animals in opposite ways: industrial factory farms and farm animal sanctuaries. Based on these subjects, this thesis will elaborate on two main methods, confrontation, and healing, in which I evaluate my educational practice. Overall, design education needs both a critical understanding of the violent world (confrontation) and an empowering, generative, collective space and practices to care for the needs that emerge from these wounds. “

What I Have Been Meaning to Tell You is a collection of short texts, essays and letters in which I try to articulate a working educational ethos that is ‘lived’ rather than ‘fossilized’. I inquire if and how being attentive, tending to, can be a ‘gripping tale’ to tell. How can I honour and articulate what often goes unnoticed?

“But your classes aren’t real classes, right?” Rayaan responded after I told the children that I would write a small report about their progress. I had been teaching theatre at the school for a few years now and we were near the end of their theatre curriculum. I asked the group what they thought a real class meant. “Something where you learn stuff, about history or math or spelling,” Rayaan replied. His reaction did not surprise me, but I could not resist asking carefully: “So you don’t learn anything during these classes?” The children thought about it and it was Rayaan who raised his voice again. “We do learn stuff. But it is different, you know, it’s more like playing.” The others nodded their heads and the room was quiet for a while. Then Romaissa burst out: “All right, can we start now?”

Looking back at my practical experience with the designers’ collective Pink Pony Express, I try to analyse our way of working to see how this can be of meaning within my teaching practice. Pink Pony Express works at the interface of research, design and society. Site-specific research and making are the core principles of their practice, which rely on situationally defined notions of mutuality, reciprocity and relevance.

My experience as a volunteer and later an intern at Niffo Gallery / Recycle Studio – a gallery with a societal and educational function for the Afrikaanderwijk in Rotterdam – sparked my interest in the worth commonly ascribed to ‘reproductive’ tasks such as cleaning, grocery shopping and welcoming visitors in the cultural, care and service sectors. It made me wonder how MBO care and service interns look at and value such tasks. What does it mean for them to be trained in and assessed on everyday labour that is invisible and undervalued?

This body of research explores somatic and embodied forms of engagement through sound. What originated as the appropriation of institutional critique and began as an attempt to practice more accessible art interpretation by means of sensory-based experiences in a museum setting, evolved in light of the Covid crisis into an intimate exploration of one’s own body and being. Due to restrictions imposed by the pandemic, my methods of inquiry were intimate and the scale of my project was very small: only friends and classmates partook in it. As a result, this research not only became an exploration of the medium of sound, but also a record of my own personal journey as a practitioner moving away from formal museum education towards a more hybrid and intimate form of interaction with a small public.

‘Offfence’ was a collaborative experiment with the objective of creating an alternative educational program in Matera, Italy, as part of the Collective Minor semester of the bachelor’s curriculum at the Design Academy Eindhoven. Students reacted to the unaddressed conflicts and often-unhealthy hierarchies at the academy by engaging in a horizontal alternative for an educational process.
Having taken part in this experiment both as a mentor and as a participant, I analyse it in hindsight by taking a comprehensive look at the project’s archive, publications, my personal notes and informal conversations with former participants. The focal points of this research are horizontality and co-responsibility as core qualities in engaging in a shared creation of meaning.

In 2020, people all over the world entered a new era of uncertainty. The global pandemic disrupted societal structures, resulting in a reassessment of priorities. While many, feeling anxious and paralyzed, expressed the urge to ‘return to normal’, there was also a growing realization that this disruption offered the potential for change on both the personal and societal levels.
That same anxiety was present in many of our collective classes during the MEiA Master programme. It became challenging to speculate on and consolidate research arguments in a context that was no longer fixed, where education looked and felt different than before the lockdown. The uncertain space in which one finds oneself in such situations is the liminal space. It often emerges when an unfamiliar element disturbs the existing conditions, and one is forced to make sense of how to proceed from there. The term stems from anthropology, denoting a transitory, disorienting space in which participants in a rite of passage transition from one mode of being to another. This phenomenon occurs when an old system no longer functions, but a new system has not yet been formed. It is a moment when change is possible, when creativity and progress can thrive.

While traditional knowledge in education is valuable for its wisdom, looking at other fields widens the perspective and adds depth to the existing knowledge. This research shows that education can gather methods from gamification to benefit both students and teachers.

Gamification masters the technique of getting the most out of players; using this in education means getting the most out of a student. Gamification reduces education's complexity into two simple groups: positive motivation and negative motivation. This simple method makes it possible for teachers to analyze and design their lessons in a strategic way to find the hidden potential beyond what we can see.

This research is an attempt to learn how to build more respectful interactions and relationships while working with emergent multilingual children at the asylum seeker’s centre in Rijswijk. My interest in this research started with the will to investigate ways to overcome language barriers when working in spaces with children where a multiplicity of languages is spoken and where we many times were lacking a common language to communicate in. I felt that language was often an issue, a boundary, causing a lack of engagement, miscommunication, frustration, limited connection, disempowerment. Observing these effects made me willing to develop practices which are beneficial for situations when we may be experiencing linguistic limitations and overcome language challenges and other boundaries.

In her research, Urtė Baranauskaitė explores the potential of (in)dependent student communities and their ability to facilitate new, unexplored opportunities for interaction, learning, collaboration and building relationships. The research is focused on the process of community-building, sustainability and is centred on Urtė's experience as a member of Archipelago, a student-led community for Master students from the Piet Zwart Institute.

This research examines how to cultivate conditions for artists in education to develop a studio practice by creating or recognising a suspended space. I see the need to encourage ambiguity and spontaneity in art education, for students to become unburdened by the weight of expectation and outcome-focused work during their time in education and thereafter. Consequently, my intention has been to encourage students to develop their intuition and independence in making art, by participating in process-led learning in a studio environment. Fundamental to this research is recognising what a studio is, both in and outside an institution and gaining an understanding of what a ´suspended´ studio practice can be, especially when a physical studio is unattainable.

Judith van den Berg combines artistic exploration with psychological and educational insights. Her dialogical and experimental way of working opens up the possibility of seeing things in different ways. She calls these different ways ‘various views’. When analyzing her previous and current work she realized that she designs exploratory situations for specific groups of participants, and she realized the importance of curiosity in these situations. She wondered what would be needed in a situation in order for curiosity be aroused. This question led to her research project ‘In which situations does curiosity feel welcome?’

This research is an attempt to base my teaching as a theatre teacher at the PABO Leiden on the undercurrents more than on the governmental guidelines. By doing this, I am trying to connect the students in the part-time program at PABO to the content of teaching drama in primary schools on a more personal level, so that their feeling of competence and urgency will increase, and drama and art will play a bigger role in their practice. I’m trying to accomplish this by experimenting with different ways of questioning both my role as a teacher and the content of my teaching through play, scripted classes and making assignments.

Looking back, I understand the urgency of this research. I had just moved from Brazil, from the small town of Paraty where I was immersed in and connected to nature, to Rotterdam in the Netherlands. In this new context, I could not recognize nature in the way I knew it, not only because of the change in the biome, but also because I had moved to a big city. In this new context I had to expand the concept of what nature is, find ways to connect with it and acknowledge its benefits and importance for people’s health and the health of the planet. For that, I re-examined my background as a Caiçara from a traditional community in Brazil to find ways of understanding how the values of community and place are the basis of cultural identity and the feeling of belonging.

In his graduation project, Lorenzo Gerbi proposes a rupture in the broad discourse around inter-, trans-, and multi-disciplinarity by disengaging from the methodological trap of the self-referential academic discussion around disciplinarity. The latter is too detached, in his opinion, from concrete experiences and existing non-disciplinary practices. Therefore, starting from his personal practice and struggles inside an interdisciplinary cultural institution, he decided to sketch an alternative approach that relies on temporarily removing disciplines to help develop a better collaboration attitude between them, not in an interdisciplinary project but by having people from different disciplines learning together.

As Naomi Hodgson, Joris Vlieghe and Piotr Zamojski have proclaimed in their Manifesto for a Post-Critical Pedagogy “there are principles to defend.” Of course, not only are there principles to defend, but there are principles that are to be shared as an invitation for you to defend or reject them in your own way. In that spirit, this is a thesis about seven principles of organised naivety.

I believe that art academies can be a site of study, possibility and rehearsal for a kinder, more just world. Personally for me, the art academy has been the locus for the most important, formative experiences of my life. Good, bad and ugly - all contributing to the person that I am today. Despite our unimaginative neo-liberal politics, the art academy has been a place of hope. It’s where I have felt that together we can make the world anew. Having studied and worked within the art academy, having criticised the academy and loved the academy, I wish to share my aspirations for the art academy in hopes it can be a transformative space for everyone, as it has been for me. And while the art academy is the specific subject of my writings, I suspect that these ideas are relevant for all critical education.

It is also a thesis about love. Love for education, love for students and love for eachother as practitioners. It is through love that we can exist as Jeanne Heeswijk might say “with, within and against” the institution. Part of the institution, working with it, but also acknowledging that there will be many moments in which the humanity that we cultivate through love for eachother will be far beyond the reach of the tactics of the institution. This is no longer institutional critique, or resistance. This is how we transcend education to the spiritual realm. No amount of policy or institutional planning can operationalise the experience of love. That is something that we do together, as friends.

We live in an era that has limited our moments of being with, wondering with and making with real, touch-able materials. Our awareness of our fingers’ gestures is becoming extinct but we still hold an urge to touch and explore the real thing. Haptic arts-based didactics stimulate the sense of touch and turn our attention to the here and now, allowing us to translate abstract contents into tangible artful creations.

This explorative study takes the form of five case studies, which have been conducted with different audiences and at diverse locations, under the framework of a workshop series entitled ‘Haptic Observations’. The research’s main study is to explore how the Haptic Observations workshops foster peoples’ personal perceptions. It does so by structuring the workshops under the notion of ‘attention as a form of education’ and letting participants follow process-driven art-making practices, exploring the not-knowing and being receptive to the new. Some of the workshops in this series study the notion of indirect haptic impressions and explore how haptic experiences could be fostered when touch is not possible. As an educational practice, it invites participants to follow a protocol of actions that aims to navigate them through framed observations toward composing textural and morphological understandings.

“That’s kind of what it feels like: there are these props, these toys, and if you pick them up, you can move into some new thinking and a new set of relationships, a new way of being together, thinking together. In the end, it’s the new way of being together and thinking together that’s important, and not the tool, not the prop. Or, the prop is important only insofar as it allows you to enter, but once you’re there, it’s the relation and the activity that you want to emphasise.”

(Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, ‘The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study’, p. 106)

This research started off by my being intrigued with the ambiguous role that assessment plays in art education. I asked myself: Why, when and how do we judge or are we being judged as one of the instruments in learning in/with art? I designed several prototypes and experiments to untangle the complexity at stake. This resulted in the development of a game, a playful dialogical tool, to facilitate a delicate conversation between all stakeholders involved in assessment, so that all those involved can feel heard in their need to perform.

∞ = 0
I could love my listening
I could listen to me listening
I could perform my listening
I could be my listening

- Pauline Oliveros

Open Field Listening Station is an interdisciplinary dialogue in the context of listening as an artistic practice. As a sound practitioner, the core of my practice – both as an artist and as educator – revolves around listening. Taking my cue from composer Pauline Oliveros, I consider listening a call to action: “Listening is directing attention to what is heard, gathering meaning, interpreting and deciding on action.” (Pauline Oliveros, Quantum Listening, 1999, p. 1.)

But who is listening?
And who is being heard?
What meaning is gathered?
Who decides on the action?
And what kind of action would that be?

“Space comes into being only when we form situations.”

(Lukas Feireiss, Space is the Place: Current Reflections on Art and Architecture, 2020, p. 89)

‘Building Pillow Forts’ is a research project that takes place within the four walls of a maker space at an international school. It is a shared experience, co-created and shaped through the contributions of 177 learners between the age of 8–9 years old and one facilitator. What started with the question of “What does it mean to own a space?” in relation to the learning environment led to the pursuit of a methodology designed to deliver an embodied learning process.

Throughout my life, two things have been constant: the practice of drawing and my desire for community. Wanting to merge these two aspects has taken me on a lifelong journey, culminating in this graduation project which explores how collaborative art-making can foster a sense of belonging. Specifically, within my art mentorship program in Amsterdam-Zuidoost, called ‘Redefine Arts’, I investigate how drawing together can facilitate vulnerability, conversation, agency and creativity. Since the summer of 2018, Redefine Arts has provided its students with an open studio environment where they can create art and be inspired. Beyond creating opportunities for students, I wanted to extend my focus to creating a safe space for students to grow relationally with each other.

The Language of Visual Arts is a graduation project focusing on process-based learning at the intersection of visual arts and creative writing. This project strives to realize qualitative education in visual arts and creative writing by focusing on the creative process. By alternating divergent- and convergent-thinking activities, students are encouraged to expand their ideas and use critical thinking to make selections and develop their written and visual artwork. Integrating moments of reflection and actively making selections throughout the process is vital for the quality of the work and the process.

Over the past two decades, reflection has become an immensely popular term within international educational contexts. This is not surprising, because it seems to have a lot to offer: it contributes to personal and professional development, improves our ability to respond to practical challenges and deal with complexity, helps us challenge our assumptions and expose inherent bias – and the list goes on. Some argue that self-knowledge generated through reflection can lead to personal transformation and emancipation – effects that may not only benefit individuals but even society at large. In the face of today’s issues that are riddled with complexity – and that urgently require well-considered decisions and meaningful actions – reflection is perhaps more desirable than ever.

My graduation project questions how an ignorant host’s pedagogy can facilitate emancipated visitors in the contexts of museums and dance performances. Using movement improvisation principles and Jac­ques Rancière’s work, my research aims to push the boundaries of the traditional art encounter, which is usually regulated by art institutions. Rather than taking an explicatory and instructive approach, I invite to suspend judgment and guide the participants toward reflective inquiry.

This research starts from a personal desire to do things otherwise in my theory classroom, in the context of institutions for higher arts education and in relation to the complexity of today’s times. When pondering my own educational history, especially as a university student, I can easily recall the feelings and bodily sensations that arose in the time and space of those institutions. When understanding education as an affective encounter, I wonder how we can make more sense of embodiment in the theory classroom, while acknowledging that learning is as much about feeling as it is about thinking.