Shift Happens: Developing Participatory Workshop Models for Educating Contemporary Artists

This paper is a critical analysis of Shift/Work from its genesis in the winter of 2010 up to the April 2012 ADM-HEA Workshop 'Developing
Participatory Workshop Models for Educating Contemporary Artists'.

Shift/Work has arisen from a number of learning experiments conducted in Edinburgh College of Art and Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop. Our shared concern is with addressing the failings of art education that focuses solely on nurturing personal ontology. The unquestioned assumption here is that art (and education)
is concerned with personal development, self-awareness, auto-critique, self-confidence… Today!s artists and art students compete to develop a private index of values, and thus to invalidate the research-value of their
work as a transferable contribution to knowledge. The self-centredness of creative personal ontology encourages an apolitical and fallacious solipsism that does not develop practice or generate research. Shift/Work supports social actors who are learners within communities of practice. Key to this is an open engagement with practice (work) as a means of both generating and transferring new knowledge (shift).

Shift/Work is an attempt to establish a collective ontology for practice, creating process-led pedagogy, critically reflecting upon the learning processes involved, and disseminating research on a share-and-sharealike basis.