Commoning the teaching of art in a museum context

SMOOTH reflections

Abstract

Drawing on the experience of a series of multi-art education workshops run in a museum of modern art with the participation of a group of upper secondary school students, this paper reflects on how the philosophy of educational commons might help us rethink the role of the educator in museum-based art-education initiatives. By focusing on the transformations, the challenges, the failures and the openings experienced by the educators of this program in their attempt to work on the basis of the philosophy of educational commons, we arrive at an articulation of what might be referred to as patterns of commoning teacher agency. More specifically, based of an ecological model of teacher agency that Priestley et al. (2015) proposed on the basis on the work of Emirbayer & Mische (1998) we identify patterns of commoning museum educators’ agency that operated on an iterational, a practical-evaluative and a projective dimension. On the iterational dimension, a commoning approach to teaching led museum educators to re-evaluate past experiences, received ideas, and cherished practices, inducing a process of unlearning. On the practical-evaluative dimension, it enabled museum educators to implement new ways of working and relating to students and their worlds, and to come up with ideas and tools that expand “The social, structural and material ‘here and now’ of possible agency” (Philpott & Spruce 2021, 290) and its distribution. On the projective dimension it enabled museum educators to imagine alternative ways of exercising agency, envisioning a way of commoning the museum. The resultant reorientation of the role of the teacher in museum-based, commons-derived creative art-education practices might be seen as providing a much needed alternative to the pervading neoliberal colonisation of education initiatives in cultural institutions.