Wednesday, 27 January

At Konstfack, our daily work is about engaging in teaching and learning; to engage with the arts in thinking and acting. Including the moments of ache, and the sometimes painful moments of disorder and disbelief, before the thoughts find their form and expression.
Through the triad Thinking, Aching, Acting, we invite the participants of the node to reconsider aesthetic learning processes as offering particular method(s) for blazing trails through unknown territories. Inspired by Gert Biesta, we want to investigate how these may offer conditions for the creation of what Biesta (2006) has discussed as “timely spaces” where unpredictability and risk may support “the arrival of a new subject” (ibid). How can we conceptualize thinking, aching and acting in an educational setting where measurability is a core function? The tension of embracing unknowing as a goal of knowledge is ever present in methodologies that pertain to the realm of art as well as that of knowledge production. This node wants to conjure a timely space that may support the arrival of new ways of thinking, aching and acting in the realm of educational research and practice, as well as new ways to arrive as thinking, aching actors in the world today.
Dialogue is at the centre of how we think about education, art and becoming the subject. However, to quote Biesta, “Dialogue is not necessary about conversation – but about being-in-the-world – a way of existing with the world.” (2017:16)
Following this line of thought and still engaging in the conversation – however in a hybrid version – we have also invited Spekulativa Juntan to help us to develop the ideas discussed from and with Biesta into another form(at). In a performative collaborative session – at a distance – we will investigate how far we can stretch these ideas into the future(s).
Participants should be prepared to do some small tasks, connecting to Biesta’s lecture, and share this online. The second day (Thursday) contains a collaborative session with Spekulativa Juntan where the participants will produce an “object” which is possible to present at Konstfack, as a collaborative assemblage. Material for this session can be collected at Konstfack beforehand.

Gert Biesta has for the last twenty-or-so years been writing extensively about education and democracy from the perspectives of educational philosophy and educational theory. Between 2015 – 2018 he was an associate member of the “Onderwijsraad” (the Education Council of the Netherlands), the main government advisory body on education. Biesta has worked at several European Universities and held visiting professorships for example at Örebro and Mälardalen Universities in Sweden. He is currently Professor of Public Education at The Centre for Public Education and Pedagogy, Maynooth University, Ireland; Professorial Fellow in Educational Theory and Pedagogy at the Moray House School of Education, University of Edinburgh; as well as visiting professor at the University of Agder in Norway.