Thinking Through Practice, New Ways to Record Learning:
Speaking and Listening, Joint Practice Development.

 “I have a practice where I don’t have to speak.” Gaffney (2017) I never broke it down like that before, but I too have an art practice where I don’t speak and a teaching practice where I do a great deal of talking, discussing, reviewing, debating and counselling, non-verbal – all visual art practice, speaking and listening teaching practice. Gaffney has a point, as practicing artists and designers we sit dead silent, making, painting, drawing, designing. We don’t speak.

As Emin said in her BBC Arts video, What Do Artists Do All Day? Emin, is loath to break off from practical work to talk to accountants, “sometimes I get up in the morning and think, “I really want to paint today” and then I remember I have meeting with the accountants and it’s really important but also really dry…and it’s the last thing I want to do, it’s almost like it’s killing me, physically killing me because I want to be doing this.” [Gestures to paints, brushes, canvases and the studio.] The outside world of bills, keeping house and cooking is a juggernaut of interruption through our head space, whichever practice we engage in as our career. Making art is a solitary business, and there is a great deal of interior dialogue, a great deal of decision making, good and bad judgement making, in my head as I make.

 

Gaffney (2017) ameliorates Emin’s extreme view by saying, ‘Writing stops work but polishes thinking’ acknowledging that a life unexamined is no life at all, be it art or teaching. As this thesis is at pains to point out, praxis can be defined, reflected upon and captured in so many ways, not just the strict academic and scientific rules of measurement, metrics and provability. It is achieved in much more subtle ways; hairdressers may verbally analyse and make critical judgements of their last cut, which in FE we would call a peer review using speaking and listening. Mechanics working in pairs may collaborate, diagnosing and recommending solutions to complex mechanical problems, which Feilding et al (2005) and Gregson, Spedding, Nixon and Kearney, (2013) would call collaborative working and Joint Practice Development.

 

As artists we have solitary making time but to balance it may have group crits, group shows, salon gatherings, where we discus, argue, passionately hold forth about our work, receiving comments, advice and manifestos (sometimes) from colleagues. This may also take place online. Artemis will often post paintings he has done on Facebook and Instagram actively asking to engage that community of inquiry out there, all the fellow artists and interested bystanders who will thoughtfully and pithily reply.

 

Thinking through practice happens all around us, we just have to have eyes to see it, and hearts to comprehend the multiplicity of embodied practice. Academia does not have the high ground, it just has one privileged perspective, which rests among a range of views, strategies and theories all of which have something to teach me about being a teacher, a collaborator and a member of the community of inquiry, with my students, with my colleagues, at my University, open to learn and to change. 

 

Emin, T., (2015) - What Do Artists Do All Day? BBC Arts video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZBkxqNJC9g accessed 26 February 2018.
Fielding, M., et al (2005) Factors Influencing the Transfer of Good Practice. Sussex: University of Sussex.
Gregson, M., Nixon. L., Spedding, T., and Kearney, S., (2013) Unlocking Improvement in Teaching and Learning: a leaders guide to joint practice development in the FE System. Coventry:LSIS
Gaffney, S. (2017) The Sickness of Being Disallowed: Premonition and Insight in the ‘Artist’s Sketchbook’, Oxford  Artistic and Practice Based Research Platform, Issue 2 October 2017  http://www.oarplatform.com/sickness-disallowed-premonition-insight-artists-sketchbook/ accessed 11 march 2018
Baggini, J.,  (2005) Wisdom’s Folly, The Guardian newspaper,  https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2005/may/12/features11.g24, accessed 3 March 2018.
Mortimer, J., (2013), Joint Practice Development a different approach to CPD?
file:///C:/Users/staff/Documents/Documents/MPhil%20suncett%20LSIS%202017%202018/books%20and%20notes%20on%20books/Jamie%20Mortimer%20-%20Research%20Report.pdf research excellence gateway, accessed 26 February 2018.
Image: the Memory of your Touch Tracey Emin 2017.




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