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.

The projects of the collective can be seen as ongoing adventures of making-with and figuring out interrelations with not-yet-known subjectivities, localities and situated urgencies of a particular context and site. We learn from and with the site. In my teaching practice, in which ‘not-knowing’ is an attitude to embrace, I learn from and with the students. Mutuality, reciprocity and relevance play a crucial role in guiding me through the not-known.

Somehow, it all starts in the middle. Just like all Pink Pony Express projects start (and try to stay) in the middle, I look at my teaching practice as something in the middle. And just like all of these projects relate to their sites, as a teacher I try to relate to the student – as if they were a site. Theoreticians like Dennis Atkinson and Tim Ingold inspired me to formulate the intentions and the attitudes that help me to stay in the middle. Atkinson, for example, refers to “complex trajectories of becoming with: making-with, questioning-with, feeling-with, talking-with, seeing-with, guessing-with, risking-with and learning-with. It is a process of co-existing”. He also coined the term ‘disobedient pedagogy’, by which he means that real learning has no prescriptive force.

Ingold talks about caring and corresponding as elements of a ‘weak education’ and a ‘poor pedagogy’. Whereas strong education seeks to instil what is desired, weak education is a search for what is desirable. And then, to know what is desirable, one has to be attentive to what matters – to what matters for a learner, but also to what matters for the world we live in. A pedagogy in the middle is not easy. It is unstable and uncertain, and one has to be comfortable with not-knowing, for only then does one acknowledge the processual nature of ‘knowing’.