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Introduction: Experience

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Bogotá group  
Both the pedagogical vanguards as the artistic vanguards pointed the experience as its central problem. Perhaps this is its encounter space more specific and deep of research; in consequence the most fruitful and demanding.

Indeed, few things are as difficult as defining the term experience; additionally, different authors with very strong arguments have noted for more than a century "loss of the experience" as one of the most characteristic phenomena of modern life, even if it is recognized -is the case of Benjamin- that this loss could mean slippage to other equally legitimate forms of experience. In this context it is necessary to delimit some reference points, starting with Dewey's suggestion to focus on the perspective of experience in relation to education in general and arts education in particular.

The experience is behind the different languages and disciplines, defines an integral condition that passes through the superficial differences. "Artistic", "artist" are generic words that refer to a language and a common spirit, a way of being in the world, a particular way to build knowledge, a kind of sensitivity and even a common ethic (an ethic of perceptions, we could say).

The research about our experience feeds not only of theoretical framework, if not the records of practices experienced by teachers and students who are part of our communities.

"The conception of artistic practices must not be limited to their actions and objects (drawing, singing, painting, dance ...). These have to be considered as an experience, which convokes on the one hand, reflection on their condition in the contemporary context and on the other, it points a field of action much wider than the production of art works in order to recognize their integral aspects (body awareness, memory, culture), and the renovation of the conventional approach must necessarily enrolling in a historical thought.

The artistic experience specifically calls for a dialogue with the real, based on the recognition of what we have in common with the world: the matter, the structure, the temporal dimension; that dialogue cannot have an external end to itself, it should not be subjected to utilitarian purposes. (...)

It is also important to remember that, from this integral perspective, actions in the field of arts education must not be reduced to arts classes (which have to exist in more quantity and more quality each time), because the experience of the body, memory, identity ... are recognizable in all school activities, whatever its object of study. Arts professorate must be the main militant for the dialogue that opens the routes of collectively built knowledge. Its particular disposition makes it the potentially axis articulating of the entire school experience.

Today Arts education is perhaps the only sector of education that allows proposing the integrality of student´s experience as a condition of knowledge building. Probably a methodological reflection is the right path to achieve an integral education. An education in which its body, its memory, its actions and decisions, even his nationality is relevant. We make art to place ourselves in the world, not to avoid it.”                                                                                                                                                                                         (Arts and Education Unit, 2005, 10-11)

Thinking about the experience has the difficulty that one is part of it, which supposes to recognize ourselves as participants in individual and collective processes of short and long term and understand that transformations mobilize subjects and objects without distinction, this is why theory and practice are not dissociate. From the observation of daily activities place and their registration, their particular referents, their possibilities of dialogue with other experiences, until its conversion into research object, actions near our practices contribute to build processes that activate, recover and transform memory as constitutive practice of experience. These processes receive a strong support from artistic creation and the awareness these encourage, produces transformations of own work in the long term.

Experience is something we earn, which accumulates, even against our will, and earns precisely in time. For thinking about what time of experience is, it is necessary to consider two aspects: experienced time and represented time. When time passes and let us the experience, the human memory records images that remain in it as footprints. For Ricoeur these footprints or "vestige" are present things which are printed on the soul. At the same time, these images are printed externally and constitute what we call the documentary memory.

Our tradition is not that of those in power, as the Academy tells us. Our tradition is one that has left no trace because the teachers have had assigned a subordinate role and we have accepted. Our classes, our dialogues, our battles in the classroom disappear as soon as the bell rings at the end of classes; these does not left any kind of registration because the system has imposed a programming culture that files each beginning of school term, programs of what we will do, instead of memory of what actually was done, which forgets at the same speed as the memory of our communities is lost. Our history is not of the official speeches. The history of our schools would be the experience that nobody seems to know what it is, how to realize about it, or where it is.

In relation to the experience we can think of those signs as dust that falls slowly and it is deposited in layers which can be seen only when enough time has passed so that the layer is quite dense and therefore visible. We say "only time will tell" to refer precisely what we cannot identify, because there is no distance needed to identify it.

Theories, speeches and strategies have been developed in educational fields such as the called Experiences Design, to whom is interested in a design process that moves its object of study from product to the user. It seeks to propitiate moments of subject recognition. It brings together the history that determines each person (Zemelman) and the possibilities of resignification offered by the hopeful understanding and potential arising from the movement of thought in oneself, through the own construction of a political subject (Arendt). In Arts and Education unit "we talk about building micro histories to refer to experiences -many times foundational- that remain outside the large official histories and we encourage a registration culture. These and other similar elements invite to establish the characteristic of each subject, beyond disciplinarily, which is configured in the approach that everyone builds its reality in relation to other subjects.

Recognizing in the empiric of daily experience our own structures, which show why we teach as we teach, we move into a wider horizon: why we think and act as we do? This is the starting point of our invitation to dialogue.

 Text elaborated by the Arts and Education Unit with initial contributions of Marcela Garzón, Miguel Huertas, Mónica Romero, Patricia Triana, William Vásquez.


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