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Rekindling the spirit of resistance in Ludruk folk art
Get PDFIndonesian artist-activist Moelyono and arts worker Riksa Afiaty engage in a deep conversation focusingon the East Javanese folk performance called ludruk. Ludruk is a medium of art that voices theresistance and struggles of the lower classes through humour, improvisation and popular narratives.This Javanese traditional cultural expression has survived through the dark history of Indonesiangenocide followed by decades under an oppressive military regime. Ludruk has been historicallyelevating gender pluralism and galvanising community participation in attaining self-sustainability,including during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this dialogue, Afiaty and Moelyono reflect on how art isintertwined with social movements, self-organising, independence, and sustainability, and how artworkers’ are increasingly challenged in traversing their roles as facilitator, agitator, innovator,motivator, curator, and networker
Staff Experiences in the Victoria University’s First Year College during the Transition to Block Mode Teaching
No full textIn 2018, Victoria University created a new First Year College and moved from a ‘traditional’ university structure (i.e. 12-week semesters, with students studying four units/subjects concurrently) to an intensive ‘block’ model, where students study one unit at a time for one month. One hundred academic staff (76% full time and 24% part-time) were asked to complete a staff experiences questionnaire (15 items including demographic, close-ended and open-ended questions). Mixed methods analyses revealed high levels of staff satisfaction mixed with concerns about workload and staff pressures. Variations between 2018 and 2019 staff responses indicated that despite improved overall satisfaction, staff were concerned about awards and recognition, involvement in management decisions that affected them and support to conduct their role. As such this paper extends the literature that examines academic models and tertiary staff satisfaction feedback and experiences
Embodied Futurities: Alecia Neo’s Socially Engaged Art Practice with Caregivers in Singapore
Get PDFThis article began as a critical essay of the same title, Embodied Futurities, commissioned to accompany the exhibition of the performance project and video installation Between Earth and Sky (2018-) by Singaporean artist and cultural worker Alecia Neo. Working with a community of caregivers of persons with mental illness and degenerative disease in Singapore, Neo’s work and this article connect the physicality of care work and carer-choreographed movements as forms of embodied praxis. This article focuses on the co-created work by Neo, the Caregivers Alliance (CAL) caregivers, and the movement artists, as guided by Neo's commitment to socially-oriented art, a school of practice that seeks to problematise traditional models of authorship or creatorship through dialogic or collaborative processes. Neo’s socially engaged artworks are situated in this article as forms of public pedagogy.Embodied Futurities engages participatory ethnographic methods to develop a critical arts writing model which advocates for enhancing polyvocality in both art-making and critical discourse around work. Exploring art-making; movement as autopoiesis (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994); living with mental illness and degenerative disease; the act and arc of caregiving; and the everyday choreography of survival (Cox, 2015), this article’s focal points are drawn from the perspectives voiced by caregivers.Embodied Futurities explores how Between Earth and Sky posits and reorients the body as a site for expression rather than maintenance, re-envisions the potential of community support networks, and considers the possibilities of self-care for carers for whom mutuality may seem remote
Front Matter
No full textThe Journal of Block and Intensive Learning and Teaching (JBILT) is a peer-reviewed publication which is currently accepting applications for new reviewers. The Journal is a scholarly and practitioner journal that publishes quality work in the field of block and intensive mode delivery to enhance teaching, advance scholarship, and promote experiential learning. All submissions are subject to a double-blind peer review process. The Journal is an online journal and accessible on the International Block and Intensive Learning and Teaching Association (IBILTA) Web page.The Journal of Block and Intensive Learning and Teaching is published twice a year
Sensing Sideway: Co-editors' dialogic introduction to artist-led approaches to public pedagogy in the Asia Pacific region
Get PDFThe importance of developing a metric to classify student experience in mathematics within the framework of intensive block teaching
No full textThe number of students enrolling in higher level mathematics units at high school have been in decline for a number of years. This is of particular concern when they then continue their studies within undergraduate STEM disciplines at University, leading academics to search for better methods to support mathematical instruction. The aim of this study was to investigate the development of a simple and robust tool to classify students’ mathematical capacity within a time compressed block teaching environment. One hundred and seventy-six first year students completed a survey reflecting on their level of comfort, competence, and enjoyment of mathematics, including their highest level of previous study in the discipline. Students also completed a short quiz to establish a pre-learning numeracy skill baseline. The survey provided data for development of the metric, from which, three groups ranked on their mathematical ability (low, medium and high) were identified which were then matched with scores arising from their baseline assessment. The classification grouping was uniform across all four offerings of the mathematics unit taught and matched with common baseline assessment scores. The importance of this tool shows both reliability and robustness in being able to identify students likely to have difficulty in studying undergraduate mathematics especially within the context of the time limited intensive block teaching, permitting early intervention to help students at risk of failure to succeed
Composting our practices (and organisations) through artist-led pedagogy
Get PDFComposting as a pedagogy is about cultivating a transformative practice, in and with community — forrelational and affective assembly. Thinking with composting as a pedagogic (and more-than-human)metaphoric device, this article introduces composting our practices, an online pedagogical exchangedeveloped and facilitated by the author for the 2021 disorganising project. Included are conversationsshared between the author and practitioners who gathered to compost their practices — to ingest,digest, and churn their practices — by collectively attuning to the rhythms and temporalities of practice,including the chronic stress and cumulative impacts of operating under capitalist, neoliberal logics ofproductivity, growth and expansion, job casualisation and precarity, and competitive and scarcefunding models. Our shared conversations are an offering to readers to forage what is useful to theirthinking. In doing so, we propose that you ask yourself: what aspects of your practice are transforming?What needs to transform? And how might we be able to do this, at different scales, through sharedpractices of reflexivity? Composting as a pedagogy is a situated, practical, and ongoing labour towardsthe maintenance, repair, and where necessary and possible, decomposition and transmogrification ofour institutionalised habits and behaviours — including those we enact, knowingly or otherwise,through the organisations in which our practices operate
Fugitive Bakery's un-recipe-like recipe book: Friendship as pedagogy
Get PDFOur reception and consumption of cultural scholarship often fall under a hierarchy of mediums, wheretext-based pieces are deemed superior to alternative and digitally porous forms of knowledge transfersuch as YouTube videos, social media content, verbal and gestural activations, and more. Thisemphasis is reinforced through traditional forms of pedagogy that operate in a one-way social orderbetween lecturer and pupil. This structural obsession toward text-exclusive, one-way pedagogicpractice limits the contaminative possibility of knowledge. The incorporation of public pedagogy in thecontemporary art domain enhances the potential for commoning. Likewise, an artist's increasingagency in initiating public pedagogy correlates with the expanding definition of what a contemporaryart initiative can be.Fugitive Bakery is a concept bakery that invites its collaborators to share their personalresponses to and interpretations of scholarly and non-scholarly texts with Anathapindika Dai and LizaMarkus—collectively known as Dika+Lija—in exchange for handmade baked goods provided free ofcharge. In an anti-academic spirit, the duo ‘digest’ the books through baking and dialogue. In line withtheir anti-capitalist beliefs, they provide each Bake free of charge while resisting set menus and rigidworking hours. Through this, the duo aims to address untraceable productivities, abstract values oflabour, hoarding of resources, profit maximisation, greed, hierarchies of scholarly credibility, theinsatiable need for factual accuracy, and the bias of statistics, ego, and pride
These three words; community activation, knowledge sharing and collaboration through letterpress printing
Get PDFCommoners Press is a small, newly established experimental letterpress studio in North Coburg,Australia. As part of the 2022 Melbourne Design Week, Commoners Press presented the project thesethree words in response to the festival’s theme of ‘civic spaces’. This article discusses the project as anexample of a mode of public pedagogy (Charman & Dixon, 2021) which enables moments of collectivereflection, inclusiveness, community activation, local knowledge sharing as well as collaborativemaking, creative exploration, social aspiration and being together. The project asked participants torespond to the provocation: Thinking about the future liveability of your community, what three wordscome to mind? Participants set their ‘three words’ in type and they were letterpress printed in a momentthat externalised and materialised participants’ concepts in ink and paper. Thus the redundanttechnology of letterpress introduced – through its labour and slowness – a sense of mindfulness,achievement and ‘access to the means of production’ that elevated participants’ words into a publiccollaborative endeavour. As each participants’ printed words were revealed, they were celebrated anddiscussed within the group. A week later participants were given the opportunity to attend a roundtableto reflect on their own and others’ ‘three words’ as a collective imagining of possible futures, alldifferent, all together (Escobar, 2017). The pedagogy here brought participants together to form an“interpretive community” (Santos, 2017) by allowing them to teach one another new things aboutcommunity, collaboration, creativity, and what the future may hold
To read or not to read: Do students really have the option?
No full textReading continues to be a critical skill for success in university studies. However, students have competing interests and activities which make academic reading less of a priority. The aim of the study is to explore the reasons why students do or do not engage with set reading tasks using an extant survey instrument. The literature highlights several factors, including a lack of interest in the academic subject, family duties and work obligations, which contribute to this behaviour and indicates how it might possibly be addressed. The theoretical foundations of this work stem from areas such as strategic learning, reading non-compliance, curriculum structure, and student engagement. The aim of the study is to explore the reasons why students do or do not engage with set reading tasks using an extant survey instrument. Building on the literature which discusses why students do not read, the pilot study presented in this paper examines the reading behaviours amongst a group of first year business students studying in block mode at Victoria University (Australia). The paper explores the implications for teaching practice and the potential for further research