Contemporary Art & Open Learning

Art education today is porous and ubiquitous: it exists in a wide variety of formal and informal arts contexts and can be found in many different cultures and societies. It takes many diverse organisational forms, traversing virtual communities, small artist-led initiatives, international biennials, art academies and artistic practices. How can artists contribute to today’s politics of education vis a vis edutech, the open paradigm and para-academia?

To address these issues, I will present a reflective analysis of a new open course that I ran over 12 weeks from September 2020 at Edinburgh College of Art. This enabled art students to open access to, and widen participation in, artistic learning by peer-producing, codifying and sharing learning practices. The course was taught entirely as an OER hosted on www.eca.ed.ac.uk/research/art-learning The course practised a range of peer-based theories of learning and knowledge production to extend open access into the Third Places frequently produced by artists. In particular, it practises paragogics, learning principles that offer a flexible framework for peer learning.