A whatsapp conversation and Engagement with Masters students from the graduating batch of 2021. (Minor edits have been made to the original messages for readability.)
Snippets from the chat are presented on the page with an option to download the full chat conversation that emerged over twenty days in a book format (pdf) for deeper engagement.
The excitement of this form of pedagogy that is shaped by the use of technology has been working in real time with students as the painting evolves. The students have shown an immense and continued interest in the entire evolution of the work, even as we discussed several other things in between. This time and this mode have been new, strange and precious.
The pedagogy created here was experimental, unexpected, unplanned and emerged out of an organic flow of interaction and participation. Some of the significant observations that have emerged are in the following areas.
Technology: We explored whatsapp as technology in education- The innovative use of whatsapp to share the creative process of emerging a painting led to real-time interactions over the first 5 crucial days of the painting followed by another 15 days of reminiscing, musing, accepting the work, pondering through and about it. What is incredible is the way it has brought us together as a community. What I have been unable to find a way in the regular model of classroom engagement within the constraints of institutional time in the last one and half years, I was able to find a way to reach my students seeking to understand intuition, creative process, reflect on their own processes and get into the exhilaration and reflection of making.
There were so many modes of engagement through technology that this process opened up. Sometimes students responded back to messages, they pondered with me or encouraged me, appreciated something, and were intrigued about a moment in my creative process. They reflected in longer emails or chat messages sent privately. They spoke to me over phone or MSteams as we discussed their capstone projects and seamlessly reflections from these whatsapp engagements emerged in the space.
Safe Space and Sharing: I wonder why technology has enabled such comfortable sharing on my side as well as the side of my students. Perhaps screen provides a private safe space where it is possible to share life experiences, metacognition which in-person learning may not allow.
We each also had our own time to articulate a thought, a feeling and find a way to share it that we were comfortable with in our own time and space. Even though the time of this process has been a dense and intense twenty days, we each found a time-space that worked privately for us. Since silence was accepted, and there was no testing, questioning, or expectation for people to participate, students chose to also read in their own pace, moments of interest to engage and reflected back on select part of chats as and when they wanted. The continued access to the real-time conversation also enabled slow processing of thought, learning and reflection. It also allowed some students who chose to do so, to build their practice alongside mine, while painting and making in their space, as I was working in mine.
Attention: One of the things that amazes me is this quality of attention that we have been able to generate. Different kinds of attention have emerged in the process in students at different points of time, evident in their reflections and responses available in part 3. I would say that the qualities and kinds of attention that have emerged are
- Rapt and wondrous,
- Reflective, curious and interrogative
- Thoughtful, engaged and creative
- Self-aware and metacognitive, and self-healing
- Contemplative and meditative
If one were to measure learning success through using chat in an art/design class- the way it holds student attention over extended period of time and promotes student creative expression in a deeply meaningful way seems to be one thing to take away as a critical feature.
Equity in education: Online interaction has allowed for a different kind of equity to emerge from the way we think about equity in the classroom. This here is equity of imagination and intuition and how these creative processes unfold in time. Each of the students have their own reasons, beliefs, traumas, conditioning that have blocked both their intuition and imagination and also the access to free flowing creativity. To me, creativity is a fundamental right, albeit, bound by ethical values and responsibility. This has been the premise with which I open the curriculum, the program and creative work from the first semester that they enter. The first course/ unit that I teach is “Cultivating Being: Sadhana as Praxis”. It is in our very first class that we began our deliberations on being and building a culture of equity, intuition, creativity and excellence for our classroom. In this unintended unit emerging with the painting of coucal and dancing frog on a waterfall, it seems that we have refined and distilled our notions of equity, and the pact has become firmer between us. This is evident in the confidence of their voices as they ponder, the way they have encouraged each other’s voices and creative works, found a solidarity that is emerging from who we are to each other as creative people, irrespective of our backgrounds and ages.
Reaching out: At this time of COVID-19, one of the biggest challenges has been managing anxiety and stress and finding a way to embrace virtually each other’s poignant stories of fear, loss, family illness and grief. We need time out of time, to make sense of this lock-down and forced isolation. We need time to find the meaning of solitude when it is imposed, or needs to be emerged from isolation and loneliness. And at such a time, this pedagogy has created a humane space for reaching out. To find ourselves, and be gentle with ourselves, be creative at a time of crisis, resting assured in the knowledge that there is warmth at the other end of the screen. Intangible, tacit and invisible warmth that can flow between all of us because we care, and we are reaching out to each other through the vitality of art practice and artistic research, through the utopian hopes we have for ourselves and the new relationships that have emerged out of this process. In reaching out, being vulnerable to each other, offering encouragement and support, the practice of art and artistic research, done together as a community have become our pedagogy of hope.
Extending Practice: Each of my students has been able to extend their practice through this engaged and resonant process of interaction that they developed with my own creative process as I shared it. Further to our reflections and participatory conversations, I have also offered a space of making together in our individual one-on-one meetings on teams, where we create something each for the same idea, and then share our processes and outcomes together. We deliberate on practice and imagination, the ways of intuition, what blocks our perception, what new possibilities could be emerged…In this way, our pedagogy has become recursive. We now build on the basic pattern that we created by asking – what does form mean to the artist?
Refining pedagogy in online mode
I fashion our chats in the form of a book, trying to retain the flavor and format of a cell phone/ watsapp on laptop format, and also capture the voices that are hidden in these real-time conversations. This opens numerous insights for me on the medium and technology and how these short bursts of texts, and the nature of posting as one would to a friend or family, without thinking too much, sharing the momentary thought has built a certain camaraderie among all of us as a collective. It seems how we think about time is critical to how we can refine pedagogy for both online and offline modes of teaching artistic practice, and research.
Privacy, trust, and culture of the classroom
I think humorously of the children’s book “Ms. Malarkey doesn’t live in Room 10”, by Judy Finchler (Author), Kevin O'Malley (Illustrator), where kindergarteners curious about their class teacher are shocked to discover that Ms. Malarkey in fact does not live in the classroom. I smile as I find my students discovering that I too am vulnerable, scared, confused and overwhelmed when I make art, much like them. I find their rejoicing in my foolishness and silliness, and how human it suddenly makes me to them, endearing. I find their curiosity to peer through my head to understand how it works strangely welcoming of my creative being. I don’t feel they are being intrusive. They too take care to be gentle in their probing and reflection and are respectful of my privacy, both creative and personal. But this is a safe-space, a trust bound collective that we have taken time to build for one and half years. This did not happen in a day. We have invited one student outside this close knit group to engage with us and allowed him to find his own space and place of trust. I see him watching us when we meet, partly perplexed, and partly enamored by the joyous and boisterous welcoming we give each other and the delight we feel in meeting each other in person after the sudden lock-down of universities over nine months. It is only one day, one afternoon that we met for, before we went back to the online mode. But it enriched us, confirmed our faith in each other and renewed our sense of hope in ourselves, our work together, and the possibilities of each one of our individual practices. To me, it is a we, them and me. We are not on two sides of the educational space and as redefined in Srishti Institute of art, design and technology last year, as one of the core beliefs of our educational approach, we are community of practitioners and aspiring practitioners.
In part 2 and part 3, what I have unpacked here qualitatively are evident in the conversations, reflections and responses of students, and also the vast opening of hearts and minds, and the way we have found a malleable and porous quality to both space and time in our engagements. At this point I wonder, is utopia really that far-flung? It seems that between our sleep and waking state, we reach out to each other, and we find that we can allow ourselves to free fall, for it seems one or the other of us, is waiting, alert and will hold anyone who chooses to fall with care and cherishing. And in that both artistic research and pedagogy, move for me from the individual private spaces of artifact and practice to community, social engagement, action, friendship and ethical responsibility for each other.