Inheritance, disobedience and speculation in pedagogic practice

ABSTRACT

This article considers relations between inheritance, disobedience and speculation in art practice and art education in schools and other sites of teaching and learning. In recent decades educational practices such locations have been subject to doctrinal cultures of audit, standardisation and competences, invoking what Michael Hampe terms the homogenization of the interpretation of experience. In contrast the article advocates the idea of speculative pedagogies that remain open to the unknown potentialities of students’ and teachers’ learning encounters and invent a future when such a future, demands thought. Speculative practice and the idea of disobedience are elaborated through contemporary art practices, then applied to pedagogical contexts and processes of learning. Focusing upon the relevance of how a learning encounter matters for a student and the obligations required of a teacher, the article then considers an ethics and politics of pedagogical work through the idea of idiotic events and Isabelle Stengers’ notion of the cosmopolitical proposal.

KEYWORDS:

• Inheritance
• speculation
• disobedience
• ecologies of practice
• cosmopolitics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In a similar vein, Lauren Berlant’s (2016) article, The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times, raises the notion of infrastructure as, ‘the patterning of social form, the living mediation that organises life (p. 393)’. Infrastructures include conceptual and affective processes. She is interested in those glitches, disturbances, or troubling times that reveal infrastructural failure and how we might proceed to repair such failures and what that repair might look like. What kind of conceptual infrastructures do we require to construct an imaginary that allows us to manage troubling times? She writes:

Rather than thinking of the ‘freedom from’ constraint that makes subjects of democracy value sovereignty and autonomy, and rather than spending much time defining the sovereign-who-is-never-a-sovereign (Agamben, 1998; Mbembe, 2003), this project looks to non-sovereign relationality as the foundational quality of being in common. (p. 394)

She seeks to ‘extend the commons concept’s pedagogy of learning to live with messed up yet shared and ongoing infrastructures of experience’ (p. 395). In querying the notion of the commons she asks:

… visceral questions about how the commons as an idea about infrastructure can provide a pedagogy of unlearning while living with the malfunctioning world, vulnerable confidence, and the rolling ordinary. (p. 396)