The Paraeducation Department

A reader by Sarah Pierce and Annie Fletcher, eds., Interface:Belfast 2006. With contributions by Luca Frei, Craig Smith, Simon Sheikh, Chris Evans, Elisabeth Mayerhofer, among others.

Memo from The Paraeducation Department

As a counter balance to debates that occur within institutional and educational contexts that hinge on a distance between speakers and listeners, together we will produce an ethics of group exchange, where the purpose of dialogue is to discover common points of reference as well as to discover what the terms outlined in a particular text mean to us, the people in the room on a given day.

Paraeducation has no agenda other than to gather and reflect. It values thinking as an act in itself. We set forth without a destination, through a permissiveness that allows for u-turns and diversions along the way.

-Sarah Pierce and Annie Fletcher, Dublin/Eindhoven 2008

Most learning happens casually, and even most intentional learning is not the result of programmed instruction. -Ivan Ilich

You have to be able to knock ideas off of other people and hear them get beaten down in order to find out what you actually think. That's learning as distinct from indoctrination. -Noam Chomsky

We feel young, free and pure. -Novembergruppe Manifesto 1918

Participants in the Rotterdam open day : Wapke Feenstra Chris Evans, Phil Collins, Leslie Robbins, Thomas Michelon, Karin Arink, Laurie Halsey Brown, Anton Hoeksema, Suzanne Kreiman, Hans Maarten van den Brink, Renee Turner, Femke Smelting, Rieke Sijbring, Renee Kool, Nous Faes, Craig Bell, Paul O'Neill, Craig Smith, Gerard Byrne, Fergal Gaynor, David 'Dobz' O'Brien, Sean Kelly, Tara Byrne, Hinrich Sachs, Barbara Visser, Hilde de Bruijn, Catarina Ochio, Gabrielle Sleijpen, Amalia Pica, Elisabeth Mayerhofer, Liesbeth Bik, Jos Van der Pol, Renee Ridgway, Suzanne Van de Ven, Birta Gudjonsdottir, *Anke Bangma, *Jason Coburn, *Jeremiah Day, *Aletta de Jong, *Annie Fletcher, *Annabel Howland, *Maria Pask, *Sarah Pierce, *Apolonija Šušteršič

*Members of the Paraeducation reading group, Rotterdam.

Paraeducation Department open day, Witte De With, Rotterdam, 26 September 2004

Can education produce affinity?

Pursuing the question of whether education is an activist position, and thinking about how artists might organize in different situations, the Paraeducation Department developed along the lines of an affinity group. Affinity groups are self-sufficient support systems of about 5 – 15 people. A number of affinity groups may work together toward a common goal in a large action, or one affinity group might conceive of and carry out an action on its own. Sometimes, affinity groups remain together over a long period of time, existing as study groups and only occasionally participating in actions. Affinity groups serve as a source of support and solidarity for their members. Feelings of being isolated or alienated from the movement, the crowd or the world in general can be alleviated through the familiarity and trust which develops when an affinity group works and acts together. Every Affinity group must decide for itself how it will make decisions and what it wants to do. This process starts when an affinity group forms. (Act UP! Civil Disobedience Training Manual)

The first meeting of the Paraeducation Reading Group was held on 15 July 2004. Here, the Paraedcuation Department provides moments of collective learning within institutional space. Rather than staging outward instruction, the Paraedcuation Department 'learns' through impulses gathered in the reading group, along with other informal group and one-to-one exchanges. Paraeducation is a process that opens to a range experimentations and forms of dissemination, and as defined here, that uses casual conversation and personal encounters as a kind of social analysis. Over the course of several months the Paraeducation Department practiced education as a way to organize a response to a larger cultural situation in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, and beyond.

Layout of Paraeducation room, Witte de With/TENT., Rotterdam 2004

Organizing and Art Practice

In 1996, Tom Finkelpearl, then Director of New York City's Percent for Art Program, interviewed Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educationalist and philosopher well known for his approach to education and liberation outlined in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. At one point, Finkelpearl noted the very broad influence of Freire's methodology, not just on education, and he asked if Freire ever experienced people overlaying his process onto other fields. Freire responded that of course this happens; that the only way to avoid it would be not to produce and not to think.

By thinking and producing one risks being misunderstood. What Freire recognized is that the response to misunderstanding is not for the speaker, in his words, 'to commit suicide', but rather to recompose one's ideas in order to clarify one's position. A process of understanding requires testing information in both directions. When misunderstanding occurs, it is crucial that it is not the end point of a process, but is somewhere in the middle of an ongoing exchange between speakers and listeners. A process of education based on dialogue involves thinking and producing, reflecting, imagining, building, observing, sharing, translating, leading and following in a generative manner that does not always move along one path; there are u-turns, diversions and distractions along the way.

When artists strategically apply modes of practice or methodologies used by other fields such as social work, education, community organizing, etc. to their own work it is often to build certain relationships (social, economic, political) and/or to subvert others through what might be termed 'socially engaged' practice. In many ways, this transfer of technique is an unambiguous response to trends that emerge through the institutionalization of art and its marketability, as well as to established patterns of trade regarding the instrumentalization of artists under the welfare state and their subsequent disenfranchisement under neo-liberalism. The artist does not function outside of society, but under what terms the artist will/can/should function under is open to debate. What we do know is that artists often use modes of practice relevant to, or originating through other fields in their own work. At times this process might lead to misinterpretations or distortions. At others, it can lead to understanding and respect. Here, practice is an ongoing channel, a way to learn from and relate apparently disparate pursuits (art-work and social-work) in order to impart common concerns.

An important step in this process requires pausing and asking: What is the role of the artist? How can the artist act in a given situation? What is the artist's purpose? Much of the criticism surrounding art-work that models the types of interactions rooted in social-work (or community-work, or education) either faults a generic instrumentalizing of art, (which is sometimes but not always the case, especially in artist-led projects) or faults the artist through an assessment of their effect. Analysis of 'positive' effect habitually alleges that the artist is filling-in where social service providers, and thereby the state, have failed; and analysis of 'negative' effect usually lapses into a plea for artists to leave social-work 'to the professionals'. In each instance it is important to ascertain whether a particular discursive moment is looking closely at the project at hand or is speaking generally, and more importantly, whether it functions to further a dialogue between different models of social interaction or end one.

The Paraeducation Department began as a way to use a platform provided by two institutions, Witte de With and TENT., in the form of an exhibition. The initial invitation asked six curators to seek out the city of Rotterdam, to check its cultural pulse so to speak, and to convey these stats back through an exhibition or project that would also mark the first collaboration between the two institutions, all with the originating purpose of celebrating TENT's five year anniversary. As we started, faithfully following our remit, the word that resonated for us was 'collaboration'.

One aspect of 'paraeducation' is that a community relies on the input of volunteers to augment its resources. This often occurs in places that have little resources to begin with. The aim behind paraeducation is to build a network whereby individuals in the community provide 'back-up' to local schools by offering in-school instruction, usually to small groups of children or in one-to-one sessions. In the U.S. paraeducation has developed into an established practice that does not simply manage a deficit in public schools, but that actively adapts curriculum generated by the paraeducator's input. This has significantly localized the educational agenda in areas where paraeducation accompanies other societal imperatives, such as the federal literacy program No Child Left Behind.

When applied to a cultural institution in a city where very few artists are 'left behind', paraeducation takes on different meaning. In doing so it asks us to consider what our common goals are. In one aspect, the use of the Paraeducation Department has allowed us to consider the institutional agenda, which consecutively led us to evaluate what purpose we share in relation to institutions. While a definition of community might include a notion of the 'local' (shared backgrounds, common geographic location), through the Paraeducation Department we propose that community-forming bonds can occur among people from very different backgrounds. But what it takes is time, recurring encounters, dialogue, and a temporary yet communal space to nurture bonds that might occur as a matter of course elsewhere. A primary phase of our investigation included setting up a reading group that met regularly within the institution as an autonomous body to collectively pursue questions related to artistic practice, politics and society that arose from our reading. Much of our discussion revolved around the role of the artist, and how as artists we rely upon, perpetuate and even subscribe to precepts of behavior determined by institutions.

This small, self-sufficient body consisted of 10 people. We organized our meetings via email, and chose articles together to read as a group.

In thinking about our process as a parallel platform to the exhibition format, we began to understand Rotterdam and the two institutions in question, TENT. and With de Witte, as generative of a communal activity which was not necessarily bound to the institutions' shared architectural, administrative, or spatial (municipal) parameters. While we could break down the group demographically (four Dutch, two American, three British, one Irish, or, four educators, three artists, three curators, or, five administrators, one educator, two dancers, one architect, one curator, etc.) the purpose of the group was to participate in a collective activity that did not subscribe to the limits of representation, and therefore of institutional promotion.

Three ground rules were set up in the first meeting with the aim of creating this collective space within the institution: 1) no one had to represent a given role in relation to their practice, meaning that those of us who worked directly with institutions did not have to speak on behalf of that institution, or on behalf of all independent curators, or on behalf of all artists, etc.; 2) in the course of conversation anything said could be retracted, taken back, questioned, and repositioned; and, 3) there is no audience present. Together these rules formed a ethics of group interchange, where the purpose of dialogue was to discover common points of reference as well as to discover what the terms outlined in various texts meant to us, the people in the room on a given day. This generated a high degree of affinity among group members, which we recognized as a counter balance to debates that occur within institutional and educational contexts that hinge on a distance between speakers and listeners.

As part of the Paraeducation Department's activities, we organized a one-day seminar on 18 September 2004 that included presentations by others involved in the process of applying systems of education to an art practice, including Bik van der Pol's involvement in Nomads in Residence and the School of Missing Studies, and the Cork-based collective Art/Not Art's current development for the Cork European Capital of Culture 2005, called Caucus. Each initiative stems from a base of self-organization in relation to local context. Nomads in Residence reproduces a sense of participation particularly in relation to transient populations of artists in large urban centres such as New York. The SMS seeks to uncover lost knowledge through unofficially and officially instituted moments of education, specifically in regions where there have been dramatic shifts in population. Art/Not Art is an independent artist initiative based in Cork, Ireland concerned partly with exploring the potential of art activity in a localized context. The Cork Caucus mobilizes the language of political representation to organize a framework of group learning within a European-wide cultural imperative. Both the SMS and Caucus are still very much in the planning phases. However, even in their early stages these projects reveal varied articulations of the 'local' by producing invested moments of participation.

The aim of the day was to gather people together with similar interests in collective learning, whose art practices involve models of education or who organize projects around unofficial or alternative frameworks. In order to encourage a focused discussion the number of participants was limited to 45. While the focus of the day was in part to think about how autonomous moments of collective learning can occur within institutions, it became apparent during the day that we needed to decide how this group of 45 understood the term 'education.' Is education itself always a form of institutionalisation? Does a process of education imply a set goal? Can an educational experience occur informally? Education is a fundamentally cultural experience; one that rarely occurs spontaneously, or autonomously, but is mediated through any combination of inter- governmental, political, clerical, cultural and economic inputs. The agencies that moderate an experience of education, effectively limit 'agency' as regards to an individual's potential to 'educate' and intervene in the very systems that manage education. In recent years an important, yet often uncharted function of the artist within arts institutions has been a bi-lateral construction of 'educational' programming, where the artist's output in an exhibition serves as a temporary, and continually replenished source of educational material for the institution. Indeed, education and outreach often function as a dual strategy for enlarging an institution's points of public contact, all the while using the exhibition's visual and conceptual substance as a pedagogical 'aid'. The role of education within the cultural industry needs further deconstruction. For our purposes, the use of the TENT./Witte de With framework is crucial not only to consider artistic output as it is subsequently 'revealed' and reused by the cultural institution in (public) education, but to radically reposition the role of the artist in this equation.

Throughout these exchanges, and again in the seminar in September, people spoke about a lack of critical debate happening right now in Rotterdam. While the explanations vary, many read this shortfall as part of a pervasive anti-intellectualism operating at present throughout Holland. As a result, there exists a sense of urgency among those interested in participating in platforms for serious, in-depth, and ongoing cultural analysis. Perhaps the Paraeducation Department is one way to make sure these debates happen, and to locate them within a building that is shared, not just by two institutions, but by a trans-cultural community of artists, curators, students and educators. The institutions are only part of an equation—the other part involves those within this community who want to self-organize, self-program, and self-educate. In the form of a conclusion, but in the spirit of a beginning, we invite you to participate in an open call from the Paraeducation Department.

(Sarah Pierce, "Organizing and Art Practice", The Paraeducation Department, eds. Sarah Pierce and Annie Fletcher, Interface:Belfast 2006. Also published in Tracer 2, Wittte de With/TENT:Rotterdam 2005.)

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