Emily
Workshops:
For reference our SAR SIG Workshop at SAR Forum 2024:
My adapted workshop for the Master Scenography at HKU Art Academy Utrecht (NL): https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/2844930/2847528/0/1563
Attached you'll find my recently published Dutch article Essaying as (collective) process, sorry there is no translation, but perhaps translatable with AI or google translate if you'd be interested.
Some background info:
Introduction to my current PD research 10 min.
Essaying as collective performative practice:
Lecture performances
On an unmethodological method
On Pitbull's (verstion 3)
Jo O'Brien
Essay workshop instructions / education plans
"What We Need to Be Here" While this workshop isn't specifically about essays, it is usually the first workshop that I run with students on the first day of class. When talking about essayistic practices and the trying to expand the horizon of what an essay is (especially in an academic context) I refer back to the specific outcomes from this workshop quite a lot – it offers a framework through which we can talk about expectations around essaying, and how we might want to adapt those expectations. (see the section titled "How do we bring what we bring?" for a description of the pragmatics of the workshop.
Workflow/education plans – I don't have a good summary document that I can share here (though this is good motivation to develop one) because the structure of our courses/institutions means that information tends to mostly exist on our inward facing course management site. But I'll bullet point a couple of things that have been really important for me when teaching essaying:
- Encouraging students to do early work for the essay or writing assignment in whatever language they would prefer. Often this means that students submit pre-writing work in a language that I can't read, but because of how I use labour-based grading (see below) this is not an issue from an assessment point of view.
- Open up conversations around writing genres by using artistic media as a comparison. Generally, my students have a much deeper knowledge of artistic media and different art historical movements than they do writing genres. Expanding their understanding of writing starts to destabilize what they expect/feel is expected of an "essay"
- Making art as response/reflection/commentary to what we are doing in class. I tend to do this mostly with first year students as a way to get them to start thinking about art as a discursive modality. In upper division courses I often have projects that encourage them to entangle their creative practice with their thinking, writing, and researching as well.
Suggested evaluation/assessment criteria
"Labour-Based Grading" (attached) and Labour Based Grading Contracts – I've been using various forms of labour-based grading in most of my courses for a few years now. Much of what I do is adapted from Asao B. Inoue's book Labour-Based Grading Contracts to fit an arts university context – and also to be more focused on questions of access and accessibility. If folks are interested in knowing more, and/or talking about the outcomes, I'm happy to share my experience and/or share a paper that a colleague and I developed for a conference a few years back about it.
