Radical Pedagogy
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Radical Pedagogy challenges the paradigm of modern educational systems, conceiving education as an instrument for personal or collective emancipation. Politics and education intersect in the space defined justice and equity. The main concerns inspiring the Subtramas project stem from research into collaborative practices in cinema and art, an the need to reframe them as social practices of representation in terms of political and pedagogical experiments and cooperative methodologies. One of the starting points in our research is the idea of mode of address which Elizabeth Ellsworth imported from film theory and media studies to education. She posits that, as films are positioned to appeal to particular hypothetical audiences- with the aim of generating acceptance leaving no room for disagreement or rejection-, teachers, too, address their students in order to appeal to who the teachers think the students are. However, while the mode of address in film is a socio-semantic construct, in education it may function as a performative, and therefore opens the possibility of revising what we think we know about ourselves and others. Who does this film/ this school system think you are? Who is addressing you? From which power relationships are they addressing you? How are they addressing you in terms of class, race, gender, sexuality, etc? How does the mode of address change the way you watch a film/ you learn?.Genealogies of practice
- The Locked Room (UK / Reino Unido) Garth Evans, Gareth Jones, Peter Harvey, 1974
The Locked Room. Garth Evans, Gareth Jones, Peter Harvey (UK,1974)In the late spring of 1969 Peter Kardia, Peter Harvey, Garth Evans and Gareth Jones four members of the teaching staff in the Sculpture Department at St. Martins School of Art in London began work on a project for students who would be entering the new three-year degree programme in the autumn. Their unique pedagogic experiment, which came to be known as the ‘A’ Course, was an extraordinary and inventive teaching programme that had a significant impact on what was taking place in British art education at the time. The experiment tried to disrupt the students’ habits and all their previous training and preconceptions, confronting them with the ‘raw’ (physical as well as social) materials of artistic practice in the most authentic, unmediated possible manner. As tutor Peter Kardia said: “I wanted to put them in an experiential situation where they couldn’t grasp what they were doing. What I wanted was ‘existence before essence’”. Partly in response to what was deemed by some as a misrepresentation of the experiment in the BBC documentary A Question of Feeling (1973), this film tries to show what really happened in the Locked Room in 1969.
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