Las Misiones Pedagógicas (España) The Pedagogical Missions were a project conceived in 1931 by the government of the Spanish Republic to bring literacy to remote villages in rural areas. Teachers, school inspectors, artists and intellectuals travelled to the most underprivileged areas of the country to build libraries, show movies, reproductions of artworks, bring phonograph records and gramophones, teach music, organise open-air theatre representations, etc. Literacy was understood in an expanded sense that incorporated visual culture, and the Missions included an Itinerant Museum, a People’s Theatre, and a Cinema Section. Filmmaker José Val del Omar took part in the project and shot about 40 documentaries. He later developed a “Kinaesthetic Pedagogy” project at Spain’s National Library, based on a Photo-Audio-Cine-Archive where audiovisual heritage might be preserved.
Paideia, escuela libre. 15 años de educación antiautoritaria. (España) , 1993 A film in commemoration of the 15th anniversary of Paideia School, explaining how its teaching methods worked during the early years. Paideia Free School was established in Mérida (Spain) in 1978 by teachers Concha Castaño, María J. Checa and Josefa Martín although there had been earlier attempts to implement its Escuela-en-Libertad (‘school-in-freedom’) philosophy, which the authorities had aborted during the Franco regime.
High School Frederick Wiseman, 1968 No educational system aspires to merely pass on a simple “knowledge of facts” to the next generation, but (ideally) aims rather at transmitting a set of values which reinforce social conditioning. This documentary shows us how the process works as it takes us through a typical day at Northeast High School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and we observe the values and the ideologies that transpire behind the interactions between teachers, parents, students and administrative staff.
Two solutions for one problem / Dos soluciones para un problema (Iran) Abbas Kiarostami, 1975 Short film about two schoolboys trying to solve a conflict after one of them returns a book to the other that is torn. Kiarostami exemplifies the spiral of violence and counter violence in an easily graspable way, and strikes a balance which demonstrates that both kids bear equal losses. The alternative solution is a simple invocation to help each other out instead of starting a fight in order to preserve a friendship and not have to cut unnecessary losses. The film was produced by Iran’s state organization called the Centre for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults.
Desacuerdos. Sobre arte, políticas y esfera pública en el Estado español. Cuaderno 6. VV.AA. 2011, This publication addresses the interface between art and education, which is at the root of modernity’s idea of the aesthetic, and indissolubly linked to the political. Starting from the so-called “educational turn” in artistic, curatorial and institutional practice, where all the contradictions in the contemporary art system intersect, the interventions in this volume seek to recover the terms in which the debate- with all its emancipatory potential- was originally framed, helping us to recognise the same impulse in recent initiatives, and exposing opportunistic appropriations.
Self-Education. David Riff and Dmitry Vilensky (eds.) Chto Delat? Newspaper #14, 200, This issue of the Chto Delat? was a magazine published in the framework of the exhibition “Self-Education” at the National Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow, in September, 2006.
Hidden Curriculum. Annette Krauss, 2007-work in progress , A project currently being realized by German artist Arnette Krauss through a series of workshops with two groups of 16-17 year old students from the Rietveld College and the Amadeus Lyceum in Utrecht. A ‘hidden curriculum’ can be seen to exist alongside every learning process both inside and outside of school. This project looks at student behaviour and the unrecognized and unintended knowledge, values and beliefs that are part of the learning process in schools. It focuses on actions that go beyond existing norms and show creative and productive ways of navigating through everyday life in school. The workshops set a framework in which the students reflected on their own behaviour and then translated that reflection into printed material, video and public actions, exposing and challenging the hidden rules of behaviour and the institutional codes underpinning routine activities in a school.
no.w.here summer school London 2013, The no.w.here’s Summer School Forcible Frames is an 8-week programme that aims at the production, discussion and dissemination of practices engaged with the moving image, politics, technology and aesthetics. The no.w.here summer school is not interested in reproducing the structures, canons and learning models on offer in Higher Education; equally it is not an autonomous free school. Though no.w.here cannot operate outside the rampant privatisation of education, it can provide a pedagogical environment that grounds itself on egalitarian, non-profit terms. Forcible Frames will offer participants a combination of theoretical seminars, student-led activities, field trips, guest workshops led by artists and theorists alongside an intensive programme of hands-on film and video making. These components are reliant upon and reflective of one another in a manner that allows practice to enlighten theory, collective experimentation to inform individual production.
