“Periphery of the Curriculum?!” (Working title) is an artistic research project in the department of art and design foundations at weißensee school of art and design berlin, and follows the interest in bringing both the teaching practices in the workshops and the foundation department into a productive exchange: Thinking through the workshops about the foundations and with the foundations about the workshops, with the aim of making the context-specific teaching and learning approaches practiced there, more visible. How can these local knowledges strengthen each other and learn from one another? What about them is (supposedly) peripheral, where are they central, and how is their curriculum defined?
Spatially, the project situates itself in the specific context of the weißensee school of art and design berlin, which marks its starting point, and also represents its very resources. It pursues a processual, experimental approach, articulates itself through design processes, and understands rendering knowledge tangible, actualizing it, performing it, and making it public as an essential part of the research process. Following the understanding that teaching in the context of art and design always involves research, it includes the development and implementation of collaborative teaching formats, as well as the reflection on them. Questions critical of power are central, not only with regard to the structures within the institution, but also with regard to the transfer of knowledge.
Temporally, the project is situated one and a half years after the beginning of the worldwide pandemic, which has significantly changed working, teaching and learning at the weißensee school of art and design berlin. This has revealed in a new way the relevance that, on the one hand, the physical spaces of the workshops have and, on the other hand, the one that interdisciplinary learning and social arrival at the university in the foundation year have for artistic-design studies. The different conditions under which study takes place became visible, as well as which aspects of study could be transferred to the home office and which could not. Now it seems that we first have to learn again how to occupy the spaces of the university.
What do we actually gain from the use of digital tools, online formats, or hybrid teaching? How can analog and digital spaces complement each other in a meaningful way? These are questions that relate both to specific teaching formats and to the accessibility, visualization and mediation of workshops not only as production sites, but more so as knowledge spaces that are in principle open to all students at the university.