Julian Bleecker on Sat, 15 Dec 2007 02:49:26 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> Perhaps a way of teaching media |
Regarding this nuggets of teaching practice for new media, I whole- heartedly agree with what Alan has written. One of the challenges I've found, which has been particularly disheartening and discussed here previously, particularly in US-based programs such as the one I teach in (Interactive Media Division, University of Southern California), is the expectation and emphasis (not my doing certainly) for rather rote vocational skills. That is, students expect to learn tools. They don't want to explore tools, they want to know how they can "apply" them to the kinds of tasks they imagine they will have to do in the job market. So..there's that to contend with. I only mention this because it's a very real contingency that shifts the dynamic in the classroom away from exploration. Sadly, many students see school as a kind of technical "finishing" that prepares them for the jobs they need to service the enormous debt they're usually burdened with. Who could blame them? If there were an item to be added here I would emphasize the importance of teachers always learning something new themselves. My mentor and dissertation advisor mentioned once (snickering which makes me wonder if she intended for me to take her seriously) that you should teach things you are just now learning — just stay a little bit ahead of the students. I've found this one of the things that keeps me engaged in the material. I feel more invigorated and have the same freshness to a topic as the students do. This speaks to Alan's remark about equal footing. It's actually engaging to learn together, if you can fold the students who expect that their teachers are experts. (Teachers can also be experts as ways to learn and ways to approach new things — which I think should be the high watermark. This is far more important and ultimately the thing that must be conveyed to students. Far more important than being an expert in specific practice areas like video or, I don't know, mobile or bioart.) Finally, I wonder hard about the studio model of learning interactive media. Once I ran the numbers to guesstimate what a typical MFA student in this program here at USC spends and my knees buckled. I thought about what could be done with that money and thought about a curriculum that ran basically a different sort of orbit — a distributed model of learning, only good for a particularly ambitious, independent learner. There's no fixed center of learning in the traditional sense. Rather a distributed faculty and a more immersive involvement with the media arts community. Note that this is rather hypothetical. The students here are in the hole for around $40k-$50k/ year — so assume instead of that money going to supply the football coach with a new sports car every year or to maintain the Dean's salary, it were "free and clear" of institutional taxes. In other words, if some student — young or old — had that money to spend for three years (many do not and are forced to borrow it) and wanted to become part of the media arts community, what might be a way to do it? Year 1 — Circulate. Attend the international new media arts/music/ video festivals, workshops, year-end shows throughout the year. I figure you can be at one of these at least every 6-8 weeks. In between a rigorous curriculum of readings across the canon of art history, media history, anthropology, technical documentation, design journals and fictions. Along the way, studio visits and informal cafe conversations with distributed faculty. Year 2 — Create. Explore and create using whatever means the student finds compelling. Emulate work seen. Riff on existing creativity. Start a "conversation" with a specific area of media practice and circulate/articulate within that community. Ultimately find something fresh. Plan for participating actively in that community by contributing to the conversation, whether in words or in expressive artifacts. Year 3 — Participate. Contribute to that specific media community by submitting or facilitating. Propose to run a workshop at events/ festivals or contribute some work to a conference or exhibition. At the end, I feel that engaging through a more immersed involvement with the new media/media arts community will be a much more effective way of becoming a sustaining practitioner, or at least a journeyman. Students will have learned how to be an active participant and learn how to assert themselves and, hopefully, learn how to learn. Julian Julian Bleecker http://www.nearfuturelaboratory.com # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org