My own teaching practice is informed by over a decade of experience as an artist educator in museums, galleries and alternative education spaces such as PRUs (Pupil Referral Units). Most of these projects were about facilitating creative learning in unaccredited but deeply important ways. One of the most significant was Supersmashers, an after-school arts club for care-experienced children in partnership with social services at South London Gallery. I was the lead artist on this project for 2013-15, and it deeply impacted my teaching practice; developing pedagogies about inclusivity, materials-based enquiry and the importance of play. Now my energies are focused in H.E. I still want to bring some of the energy and vitality of these alternative creative learning spaces with me.
On the 11th of March I went to the book launch of Anna Colin’s ‘Alternative Pedagogical Spaces: from Utopia to Institutionalisation’, where Colin’s reflects on her own experiences of setting up and then running the alternative art school Open School East between 2013 – 2021.
Before I go on, I do have a fundamental question about how appropriate it is for formal educational settings to borrow from these alternative contexts? Is it a form of colonisation, the co-opting of the outside by institutions? My motivation is that I still want to be about creating possibilities as a human being, a parent, an artist, and a ‘teacher’. Within the formal education context, we are still, supposedly, about experimentation and creating possibilities and I think there is much to learn from alternative education spaces. As bell hooks (1994) writes,
The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created. The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility, we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom. (Ibid, p. 207)
At the book launch Anna in conversation with Cindy Sissokho reflected on the necessity of reconfiguring the ‘how’ of the institution and as part of that a reworking of the notion of time. Colin (2025) surmises Barbara Adam “linear time (clock time, machine time, synonymous with temporal efficiency) is indifferent to change and infinite insofar as it excludes the concept of becoming” [Ibid p.109-10]. Art school is precisely about the process of becoming, and as such we must find ways of reconfiguring this linearity of time into something more fluid, more multi-modal and more playful. Anna raised the question as to whether institutional bureaucratic slowness can be reappropriated as a slow practice, akin to garden time.
Biesta (2022) argues that education is a practice of cultivation, drawing on Dewey; “His [Dewey’s] argument is that ‘since growth is the characteristic of life, education is all one with growing; it has no end beyond itself” [Ibid p.31]. This way of thinking about education as an organic process of cultivation opens many rich possibilities that move beyond the limits of the institution.
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References:
Biesta, G. (2021). World-Centred Education. Routledge.
Colin, A. (2025). Alternative Pedagogical Spaces: From Utopia to Institutionalization. MIT Press.
hooks, b (1994) Teaching to Transgress : Education As the Practice of Freedom, Taylor & Francis Group, ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ual/detail.action?docID=1656118.
Created from ual on 2025-03-12 11:20:09.
Goldsmithscca.art. (2025). Goldsmiths CCA — Alternative Pedagogical Spaces: From Utopia to Institutionalization event page [online] Available at: https://goldsmithscca.art/event/alternative-pedagogical-spaces-from-utopia-to-institutionalization/ [Accessed 11 Mar. 2025].