ReViewing BlackMountain College 2024


super excited to be speaking at an art-school in America


ever since living in North Carolina in the early 90s I have wanted to be part of the Black Mountain College community, Robert Rauchenberg, Anni Albers, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, all alumni of this Bauhaus inspired arts school.


Here is a sneak peek of my paper abstract for this conference in October 2024. 

North, South, East, West: 

Connecting Art Students Through Bernstein’s Borderlands

North-South-East-West denotes the reach of the Bauhaus pedagogic method. Black Mountain College is the key to unlocking Modernism in the arts in America between the 1930s and 1950s. This qualitative arts-based research paper is set in a Bauhaus inspired art school in the North of the UK where my parents were lecturers and I also am a lecturer. Yeomans (1987) writes that, key Bauhaus lecturers escaped from Nazi Germany in the 1930s and were welcomed by Black Mountain and UK art schools. My question is, does grounding international arts pedagogy in Connecting Art Practice teaching method, reflect the spirit of the Bauhaus at Black Mountain College, allowing creativity in the borderlands? Art students are often in the borderlands between the city/the land, conflict/ peace, counterculture/cultural capital, critical thinking/ dormant thinking. UK Educator Basil Bernstein considers the concept of the Borderlands (in Bourne, 2003) stating that they represent liminal, interstitial or fragmented spaces. In these spaces stories are the language by which students and educators might connect and collaborate. The Borderlands as seen in a teaching method called Connected Art Practice might offer not a siloed/separated space but one where creativity and thinking through making is a new way for art students to access critical thinking skills and to capture their experience of being on societal and educational boundaries. This paper will explore the implementation of Connected Art Practice. The research is ontologically constructivist (Dewey, 2018) epistemologically interpretivist (Gadamer, 2013) using thematic analysis in the discussion on the dataset. It will consider the successes and pitfalls of this pedagogic method. My teaching practice has developed in light of the teaching of the Bauhaus (Fiedler & Feierabend, 1999). I attempt to emulate the creative, interdisciplinary and experiential pedagogy of Black Mountain College in my own curriculum development.









 

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