*KACES International Arts Education Workshop : The International Arts Education Workshop is an intensive, participant-driven workshop that is much enhances by the presence of arts and culture education experts who have been invited from abroad. As a places where local participants and internationally renowned speakers gather to discuss and develop arts education programs and methodologies, it also serves as a platform to share their knowledge and experiences on current issus facing the education field. 

Justin and I(Betty Sargeant from PluginHUMAN) are constantly experimenting with new technologies and exploring new approaches to making digital art. So, it was delightful to be invited by KACES to participate in their International Arts Education Week. We are keenly focused on educating everyday people with our participatory artworks. Through our work we involve people in the process of creating new technology artworks.

In order to prepare for our visit we collaborated with a specialised team who helped us prepare for our visit. This included working with a Korean designer who advised us on our use of Hungal for The Word Tree sculpture. We were so excited to be involved in this wonderful week of activities. We worked hard to create a program that would be of benefit to those wanting to learn about art and new technologies.

THE WORD TREE WORKSHOPS

During Word Tree workshops participants learned how to use Social Networking Services in arts projects. Most people have access to smart phones and SNS services and this technology does not require people to have specialist skills. Therefore this technology can be a cost-effective tool in digital art projects.

During workshops we focused on how SNS services can be used in art projects to socially engage people and how it can help connect us to our surrounding environment. Workshop participants worked in groups to hide small sculptural pieces around the workshop area. They logged the location of these pieces on SNS and on a printed map. They were then set the task of finding another group’s hidden pieces. Once all of the pieces had been found, participants bought them to the workshop space and connected them onto a central sculpture. In effect, each group created and engaged in a treasure hunt and made a collective sculpture.

The aim was to build closer bonds between participants and encourage them to explore their surrounding environment in new ways. We were delighted to see how enthusiastic everyone was, they were really engaged in the process of making this participatory artwork.

We also worked with participants to develop their own creative ideas. We provided them with a methodology that can be used to realize any creative project. This methodology provides a simple structure that helps develop an initial idea into a fully realized project. Creative people often formulate exciting and new ideas. The real work is in developing and delivering this idea in the form of a finished, viable project. We helped participants develop their own working processes and workshopped their ideas assisting them to understand the processes involved in creating fully realized art-technology projects.

BRAINWAVE ART WORKSHOPS

During our Brainwave Art: Design your Dreams workshops we engaged participants in technically challenging software and hardware experiences. We provided participants with opportunities to make their own dream inspired image. By wearing an EEG headset participants could use their own brainwaves to animate and affect their original dream image. We also taught participants relaxation methods, showing them how they can control their mind. Each person could see the effects of relaxation by watching their dream image. The more they relaxed were, the more still their dream image became.

We also discussed participants’ own creative projects, providing them with opportunities to workshop their ideas with assistance from other workshop members and from PluginHUMAN. Our aim was to help them understand how they could better develop their ideas, how they can involve people in technology processes and how they can create and deliver viable art-technology projects.

During the week we were so impressed by the workshop participants’ creative ideas. Many of them shared their future project plans and we helped them to further realise their concepts. There was such a variety of ideas and we engaged in rich discussion on the numerous ways these ideas could be bought to life. So many people are eager to use creative technologies in the classroom and in their artworks but many people need to update their skills for this to happen. This week of workshops was an ideal way for participants to upskill and learn more about art, technology, collaboration and engagement in Industry 4.0

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PluginHUMAN is an art-design activation led by Australian artists Dr Betty Sargeant and Justin Dwyer. They have exhibited in Europe, North America, Asia and Australia. PluginHUMAN develop site-specific installations. They construct three-dimensional sculptural works and allow audiences to have an impact on the final creation. Their work focuses on how art and technology can help people be more socially and physically engaged. They aim to bring about greater connections between people through playful design.

PluginHUMAN holds the creator-in-residence position at the Exertion Games Lab, Centre for Game Design Research, RMIT University, Australia. They are collaborating with the lab to create a series of interactive art installations whereby the interface becomes integrated with the human body. They won a 2018 Good Design Award. In 2017 Betty Sargeant and Justin Dwyer won the Premier’s Design Award (Australia) for their interactive media art installation The Storytelling Machine.

In 2018 they created DREAM 2.2 an interactive art installation that allows audiences to use their brainwaves to control an audio-visual immersive environment. This work was on 5-month exhibition at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (TAIWAN).

It has taken four years but we have lift-off!

Last month Kadenze, one of the world’s most successful online learning platforms, announced:

Our newest Program is available now: The Basics of Teaching Artistry. Created by Kadenze Academy in partnership with three major performing institutions—Lincoln Center Education, Sydney Opera House, and Queensland Performing Arts Center—the four-course Program is designed for artists and creatives who want to give back, expanding and incorporating their art practice into education.

Teaching Artistry refers to artists and creatives across the world, who seek opportunities to participate in community and cultural development projects. It draws in and supports those who aspire to careers centered on social engagement through the arts.

This intensive program will teach students and creative professionals the skills to integrate arts-centered curriculum in schools, after-school programs, prisons, social service agencies, and more. Students will learn the foundational examples of the teaching artist practice to aid them in creating their own projects.

The story began back in 2014. I was a co-convenor of the second International Teaching Artist Conference (ITAC) in Brisbane Australia, a conference which featured the work of Korean teaching artists in a keynote address by KACES. In the final session it was carried from the floor of the conference that a priority for the field ‘was to develop an online, accredited program for those wanting to become teaching artists’. Boldly three major international arts organizations stepped up to the challenge – to design and deliver an introductory program for new teaching artists; for those  choosing to work in the participatory arts and in community arts and cultural development. The exciting challenge was to present a coherent, entry-level program which would be open to learners from anywhere in the world, giving unprecedented reach to educational resources most would never have dreamed they’d be able to access.

The Program:

After lengthy consideration the Program was developed to be offered entirely on-line and made up of four Courses with a total volume of learning of 120 hours. The structure of The Basics of Teaching Artistry is as follows:

Course 1: Introduction to being a Teaching Artist. I present this short introduction to the basic principles and all the moving parts that inform what it is to be a teaching artist. I also introduce the subsequent courses offered by each partner arts organization. 

Course 2: The work of Teaching Artists examines what teaching artists actually do; the skills required to lead groups, design workshops and activate the artistry of learners. Lincoln Centre Education presents this course which draws heavily on the Teaching Artist Development Labs they offer in New York each July.

Course 3: Teaching Artists, Audiences and Communities addresses key issues which arise when teaching artists engage and co-create with different audiences and communities. The Queensland Performing Arts Centre in Brisbane Australia presents this course which integrates activities from its Out of the Box festival, an internationally acclaimed biennial festival for children eight years and under.  

Course 4: The Places of Teaching Artistry considers where teaching artists work; the various sites and places of their practice. This course addresses ‘place’ as an enabling driver to develop teaching artist skills for creativity and learning and is presented by the Sydney Opera House in Australia. This course also incorporates elements of their highly successful Creative Leadership in Learning program.

The Platform:

Aspiring to reach the world through online learning is ambitious and in 2018 requires sophisticated technical capabilities underpinned by strong computer and data science. In addition we wanted to work with designers who understand the types of interactions arts education demands. A search led us to Kadenze, a smart young educational technology company in Los Angeles who are driven by their passion for the arts and arts learning online (rather than Business, IT or Science learning online).

KADENZE web site

Kadenze is uniquely positioned at the intersection of the arts & creative technology and has built a formidable reputation for offering high quality courses at affordable costs. We were particularly taken by Kadenze’s cutting-edge forum and gallery spaces for arts sharing. In December 2016 Kadenze was ranked by Class Central in the US as having two of the top ten online courses offered globally for the first time in 2016. An exceptional achievement determined after a review of over 2,600 courses.

The Pedagogy:

All partners have learned a great deal by preparing our work for an arts-oriented digital platform. We have had to think through what arts learning can be effectively taught online and what online cannot do well at this point in its maturity.

We believe for example that the learning arc underpinning online learning in the arts can be distilled to the following underlying learning structure. With some variations, this structure recurs from one course to the next; a structure in five steps.

Step 1: Posing Curated Illustrations of Practice

These are rich illustrations of practice which have been judiciously selected and presented by the teaching team. They are selected as pretexts for learning because they have the quality and power to demonstrate elements of teaching artistry in practice and to stand up to close scrutiny.

Step 2: Close Inspection

Each learning illustration of practice is subjected to close and often repeated observation to uncover the layered complexity and dynamics captured within it.  

Step 3: Reflection and Analysis

Learners then identify personal understandings, skills and meaning from each illustration of practice. This happens though structured strategies of reflection recorded in multiple ways to clarify and sketch points of meaning for each individual learner. This process captures the intuitive, tacit and emerging reactions to an illustration of practice.

Step 4: Collaborative Critique

Personal interpretations and judgements are then shared with others in ways which test their soundness. The power of collaborative critique to confirm, modify or emphatically reject is central if knowledge is to be made explicit, personally affirmed and publically shared. 

Step 5: Authentic Application

Newfound knowledge, skills and insights need to be applied in practice. Consequently learners are required to function with purpose and effect by completing tasks which are pertinent to the professional challenges they will face as teaching artists.

Experienced teaching artist will not be spellbound by this structure, recognising that most effective live workshop design in the creative arts and design moves though these steps at one point or another. Our challenge has been to apply and invigorate these steps to maximise learning online. Our hope is that The Republic of Korea, with its extensive workforce of teaching artists, maybe able to access and use this course for professional learning and eventually join us in the larger enterprise to make affordable, high quality content for teaching artists available to artists everywhere.

<NOTE>

The full Kadenze catalogue of courses can be found at: https://www.kadenze.com/courses

Korean teaching artists can enrol in Course 1: Introduction to being a Teaching Artist at no cost at:

https://www.kadenze.com/courses/introduction-to-being-a-teaching-artist/info

The language of instruction is English.

  * Posted by Brad Haseman

In 2016 Brad Haseman completed thirty years with the Creative Industries Faculty at QUT where he was Professor in Drama Education and held a range of senior leadership posts. He has been a pioneer of drama in schools and arts education, and is known internationally as a teacher and workshop leader (Process Drama), arts researcher (Performative Research) and community engagement practitioner (teaching artistry). He has published foundational scholarship in these fields most recently Dramawise Reimagined (with longstanding collaborator John O’Toole) and is currently the lead facilitator and curator on The Basics of Teaching Artistry an online course for Kadenze, a US based platform with global reach, launched in April 2018.