Conversations between Artists and Teachers

Seminar by David Jenkins at Kings College London, March 9th 2010

1. Why an interest in conversations between artists and teachers?2. Inductive v. deductive method and the role of 'theory' in research3. Weak v. strong grounded theory (and coding issues in ATLASti)4. Critical discourse analysis: problems and possibilities.5. Rhetorical criticism (metaphor and 'fantasy theme')6. Research and evaluation, dichotomy or continuum?

ATLASti as interpretation supporting softwareA general introduction to ATLASti as a knowledge workbench is available online at <http://www.atlasti.com/index.php>. ATLASti is a powerful workbench for the qualitative analysis of large bodies of textual, graphical, audio and video data. It is described as offering ‘a variety of tools for accomplishing the tasks associated with any systematic approach to ‘soft’ data – i.e. material which cannot be properly analyzed by formalized statistical approaches’.

Our decision to use ATLASti in this research also arose from a decision to approach our research questions in part through an analysis of ‘primary documents’. Working with ATLASti involves a basic logical sequence, although subsequent iteration is possible. The first task is to assigning primary documents, from which quotations (segments) are created. The quotations are then ‘coded’ (i.e. given a conceptual tag) using one of several methods for doings so (in vivo, open, axial or selective coding). Subsequently annotations and/or theoretical memos can be added. Memos are similar to codes but their main purpose is to capture analytical thoughts associated with particular coded segments of text either in isolation or hyperlinked to other codes. The codes need to be continuously refined, edited and amalgamated, and the codes, memos and annotations (which together make up a class designated as ‘objects’) are eventually sorted into ‘families’.

The task is then to take the analytical stage further. To allow the emergence of complicated phenomena hidden in text and multimedia data through a theory building framework, the software offers a number of ‘visualisation tools’ that can be organised through the Network View Manager. In particular relationships between nodes can be presented as conceptual maps. All this is accomplished within a single space known as a ‘Hermeneutic Unit’ (HU). The term

‘hermeneutics’, of course, began life as a systematic approach to resolving conflicting interpretations of sacred texts, but has long since migrated to deal with similar issues in interpreting social and cultural life, often deploying the intellectual trick of treating them as ‘text’ (Ricoeur, 1981). The purpose of the hermeneutic unit is both to put a ‘boundary’ around the case (Adelman et al 1980) and to specify the data set for the programme. In principle, if would have been possible to have designed the research with two HUs, one for TAPP and one for Eastfeast. We chose to run with a single one.

For the Mediated Conversations research we were able to set up ATLASti in a mode that allowed an exchange of the latest version of the Hermeneutic Unit via the freeware of the FTP surfer, allowing collaboration among the research team. But as previously indicated, ATLASti was brought into this research as an important plank in an eclectic methodology, not as the main method. Following some initial analysis, the results are taken forward and merged with other data to form Chapter 9 on The Language of TAPP and Eastfeast and the Conclusion.

In taking a stance on the social construction of professional subjectivities, a critically important vantage point to bring to this research, we draw upon a number of traditions. All broadly take a phenomenological perspective in the sociology of knowledge (Berger and Luckmann 1966). Ernst Cassirer in Language and Myth (translation 1946) and The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (English translation 1957) argued that symbolic forms construct reality. They are not ‘imitations’ of reality but ‘organs’ of reality since ‘it is solely by their agency that anything becomes an object of intellectual apprehension’.

 

Within the same broad theoretical framework similar arguments were put forward by Vygotsky in his attempt to provide an account of learning and development as mediated processes. In subsequent accounts, particularly those advanced under the heading of ‘situated learning’ (Lave, 1991) more emphasis is placed on the analysis of the material conditions of actual participation and the ways in which individuals function in learning communities, which can be regarded as sites of performance (Alexander et al, 2005). In activity theory, ‘it is joint-mediated activity that takes the centre stage in the analysis’ (Daniels et al, 2007). The underpinning idea is that communities of practice are emergent and dynamic ‘speech communities’ that activate knowledge through a process of cultural acculturation, dialogue and re-interpretation.

 

An equally pertinent theoretical framework for our purposes is Ernst Bormann’s version of rhetorical criticism that goes under the slightly awkward title of ‘fantasy theme’ (Foss, 1996). A ‘fantasy theme’ is an imagined meta-narrative that allows actors to place themselves in a constructed drama of events that

involves other people as well as themselves. It is essentially a method of looking at groups exploring a shared world view, based on symbolic convergence theory. The assumptions of fantasy theme rhetorical criticism are that communication is epistemic, creating ‘reality’; that in small groups (or campaigns or social movements) accounts will converge; and that attitudes and emotions are wrapped up with cognition (so that factors other than arguments will determine outcomes). This convergence is the more remarkable in the present examples because it comes in the teeth of standard occupational myths about teachers and artists and their alleged differential approach to self identity and risk.

One of our tactical hypotheses in this research has been that teachers and artists working together will demonstrate Bormann’s ‘convergence theory’ and develop a shared agreed narrative. As can be seen in subsequent chapters, this appears to have been the case in many of the TAPP and Eastfeast partnerships, although it falls short of being a universal truth.

The intellectual roots of critical discourse analysis go back to ‘western Marxism’, Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School including Jurgen Habermas and Theodore Adorno (Bowles and Gintis, 1976; Darder et al, 2003). A central idea is that linguistic signs are the material of ideology (i.e. ways of representing events are chosen to fit in with ideological beliefs) and can be analysed for ‘ideological positioning’. The purpose of critical discourse analysis is to look at social interaction which takes a linguistic (or partly linguistic) form. It assumes ‘a dialectical relationship between discourse (as social practice) and the institutions and social structures that frame it’.

In the revised order for the second cohort this became Session 6 and as well as considering various kinds of risk introduced past TAPP partnership models by way of encouraging example. For the second cohort this session took place at Stratford Circus. ‘Creative risk taking’ is one of the TAPP standard collocations and is important because of its roots in a romantic view of the artist1 and also because different types of risk can be isolated for analytical purposes but actual risk tends to migrate across the borders.

Tony Fegan introduced the relevant categories of risk as curricular, institutional and organisational, personal, social, economic and other; we can avoid political risks by being ‘canny’ but risks attendant on securing ‘maximum freedom’ are always worth taking. Following the standard TAPP shared process of students filling in the offered categories from their own experience and reflecting generally on the nature of creative risk taking, Graham pulled the discussion together, bringing in some of the relevant literature, including his own. The

1 See Andrw Burn, Shakuntala Banaji and David Buckingham (2006), The Rhetorics of Creativity (Creative Partnerships)

discourse around risk, he argued, needs to take into account a number of diverse arguments, not least the following:

1. The professional identities and mythologies of artists as inspirational catalysts of a kind that might pose problems to a classroom manager.

2. The artist as an oppositional agent, challenging the system (e.g. aspects of the knowledge economy, the cultural industries etc.).

3. Ways of thinking about arts education – the transmission model v liberal individualist models v social democratic models.

4. The need to realise that principles are rarely pure and that the discourses around creativity and the arts in education are ‘fractured’.

Graham is adept and rather impressive at this kind of thing, but TAPP being TAPP this brief teaching intervention was represented as a summary of the student views.

Once again a number of ideological markers are laid down, with Tony making reference to ‘rapacious global capitalism’ as attacking our ‘cultural roots’. One of the students responded immediately suggesting that TAPP students can in their own way ‘be culturally subversive, attacking the crisis that is effecting our definitions of merit’.

We return to the idea of creative risk later in this report when we consider the partnership projects in the schools.

Nevertheless transcripts of tutorial conversations reveal considerable differences in mode. In TAPP, face-to-face tutorial support became a lottery between three distinctive approaches, depending on the allocation of tutors. The variations in practice were observable in three main areas: the balance drawn between the conflicting claims of support and challenge, the degrees of willingness to spoon-feed weak candidates, and in discourse terms the competing claims of theory, methodology, reflection and imaginative curriculum development as the core task of the research tutorial. A further deep paradox emerged; the transcripts made it clear that TAPP tutors, presumably with the Institute of Education requirements in mind, felt forced to compromise their ‘participant-centred’ approach in the tutorials where the proportion of tutor to student talk was unacceptably high, in several instances over 90%.

Sainsbury Centre  

Held significantly at the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, the Eastfeast session on research methodology was in many ways brilliantly conceived and

imaginative, but it is probably important to begin with an account of what it did not attempt. It made no attempt to address how appropriate research methods might be chosen or to introduce the methodological map from which they might be selected, so different styles of qualitative enquiry were not defined against each other, and there was no discussion of potential threats to the reliability or validity of findings associated with qualitative methods. If the recommended background reading was any guide (the two texts which stood out were Ellis and Bocher’s (1996) Composing Ethnography: Alternative Forms of Qualitative Writing and Goodson and Sykes’ (2001) Life History Research) the emphasis was to be on ‘the examined life’ and beyond that to ‘ways of articulating understanding’. It was at this point that the reason for the choice of location became clear.

A sequence of tasks unfolded that began with the return of some journal material that had been completed over the summer holiday. These had been commented on rigorously in a way that offended a few of the students whom previous contact had encouraged to expected an exchange of unearned tokens of esteem, but the double role of teacher and assessor has always had its awkwardness. The rest of the morning was largely given over to ‘navigating the space’ and ‘constructing ways of looking’ from ‘haphazard encounters’ with the permanent collection. The gallery had become what was called ‘a prompt for enquiry’. So the students headed off with their sketch books and cameras to haphazardly encounter.

The discussion on their return to the mezzanine level was lively with some nice insights from UEA tutor Veronica Secules. It was particularly interesting to learn that historically the collection was at first antithetical to children (not allowed in) with the showcases still at adult viewing height, although the Centre now has an educational wing. Veronica also gave fascinating insights into the tension between intuitively understanding a piece of African art (what Clifford Geertz called ‘found in translation’) and the wealth of contextual knowledge required by an academic cultural anthropologist. The task of explaining a collection to the general public was also rendered problematic: at UEA there seemed undue emphasis on the Sainsbury family and their beneficence.

All this might have worked fine had it been made clear that the cultural anthropology of art is just one interesting example of method from which general truths might be gleaned, but any connections to their own situation were left to students in small open-ended groups, and I must say the three I sat in on appeared rudderless [writes DJ].

The final twist in the tail was that when it came to ‘ways of articulating understanding’ the suggestion was that students should form tactical groups based on ‘shared interests or differences’ and present a multi-media installation that reflected their collaborative enquiry. If the implication is that the natural product of research is an installation or any other ‘piece’ of artwork then the corollary must also be true, that what we mean by ‘method’ is the working practices of the artist. This implicit argument was never fully articulated but carried forward to the Eastfeast assessment submissions, many of which determinedly aspired to being aesthetic objects.

To some extent this may be a matter for congratulation. Why should academically approved research in the arts always be about the arts rather than accepting the idioms of inquiry and capacity to make meaning of the art forms themselves?

What of the ‘installations’? We had music played from an overhead location, zombies with cardboard boxes over their head, a game with distorting mirrors and the obligatory washing line decked with quotations. And as a bonus, there was a quite brilliant parody by Ken Farquar’s group giving an alternative ‘naughty boy’s’ exposition of a section of the permanent collection, that physically mishandled the objects and was both grotesquely ill-informed and risqué. It acted helpfully as the missing input on the problems of reliability and validity.

Siobhan O’Shea and Cath Greenwood

An Investigation into the ways in which collaboration between teacher and artist can act as a catalyst for learning and pedagogical change [SO’S]

Siobhan, an art teacher in a comprehensive school, reports on her partnership with TIE practitioner Cath Greenwood, undertaken in part because she wanted to ‘be a learner’ and extend her skills as a teacher. The task was to explore the TAPP model of partnership in support of experiential learning by bringing role play into the pedagogy of the visual arts. There was general agreement, shared by the evaluators, that the experiment was a huge success [see video] and both the video documentation and a rerun of the method in workshop settings has kept it in the forefront of the TAPP narrative. Several second cohort students have cited it as an inspiration.

We have only space to deal with the tour de force at the heart of this artistic intervention. The point of contact with the visual art syllabus was Picasso’s Guernica as ‘political art’ and an imaginative way was derived to stimulate interest in it and reconstruct its historical meaning, seen as having resonance with the London WW2 bombings. The role play centred on a artist, played by Siobhan, whose art has dried up and who is refusing to communicate, instead being obsessed with Picasso’s painting. Cath played her sister, trying to cajole her into meeting the promises she has made to her gallery. Children are pulled into the scenario with interesting consequences. One boy refuses to tear up his teacher’s painting although given ‘permission’ in the role play (‘I found it really hard to rip up her work. You need a reason’).

The subsequent student discussion was lively, with some nicely intuitive responses, as Siobhan and Cath probed how reflection can tackle emotional issues as well, drawing on their experiences. The following lesson was an oil pastel experiment that made parallel technical inroads into the theme, but both agreed that the role play had broken barriers, allowing them to ‘model playfulness’.

The dissertation was one of the few set up strictly within an action research paradigm and carried some interesting reflections. Siobhan had initially sought security in prescriptive planning but learned from Cath that if you have a strong thematic overview you can safely trust the art form, in this case methods drawn from a hybrid of forum theatre (Boal, 1979) and teacher-in-role (see Neelands, 2000). The unexpected profundity of the children’s responses was seen as validating the exercise. There was also a double interest in theory, with both Siobhan and Cath interrogating their ideas surrounding intuition as a cognitive goal and on the technical side going with Dorothy Heathcote’s view that teachers-in-role do not simply retell stories but allow contained confrontations between individuals, thereby offering a safe space in which to take controlled risks.

A selected issue

1. This partnership highlighted the value of mutual learning and an exchange of skills, although the exchange was across art forms (forum theatre/theatre-in-education juxtaposed with the visual arts) rather than between partners who defined themselves as predominantly an ‘artist’ or a ‘teacher’. TAPP enabled both to explore aspects of their professional identities that crossed the divide. There work also went beyond a piece of imaginative curriculum development by making a contribution to curriculum research.

Siobhan O’Shea and Cath Greenwood

An Investigation into the ways in which collaboration between teacher and artist can act as a catalyst for learning and pedagogical change [SO’S]

Siobhan, an art teacher in a comprehensive school, reports on her partnership with TIE practitioner Cath Greenwood, undertaken in part because she wanted to ‘be a learner’ and extend her skills as a teacher. The task was to explore the TAPP model of partnership in support of experiential learning by bringing role play into the pedagogy of the visual arts. There was general agreement, shared by the evaluators, that the experiment was a huge success [see video] and both the video documentation and a rerun of the method in workshop settings has kept it in the forefront of the TAPP narrative. Several second cohort students have cited it as an inspiration.

We have only space to deal with the tour de force at the heart of this artistic intervention. The point of contact with the visual art syllabus was Picasso’s Guernica as ‘political art’ and an imaginative way was derived to stimulate interest in it and reconstruct its historical meaning, seen as having resonance with the London WW2 bombings. The role play centred on a artist, played by Siobhan, whose art has dried up and who is refusing to communicate, instead being obsessed with Picasso’s painting. Cath played her sister, trying to cajole her into meeting the promises she has made to her gallery. Children are pulled into the scenario with interesting consequences. One boy refuses to tear up his teacher’s painting although given ‘permission’ in the role play (‘I found it really hard to rip up her work. You need a reason’).

The subsequent student discussion was lively, with some nicely intuitive responses, as Siobhan and Cath probed how reflection can tackle emotional issues as well, drawing on their experiences. The following lesson was an oil pastel experiment that made parallel technical inroads into the theme, but both agreed that the role play had broken barriers, allowing them to ‘model playfulness’.

The dissertation was one of the few set up strictly within an action research paradigm and carried some interesting reflections. Siobhan had initially sought security in prescriptive planning but learned from Cath that if you have a strong thematic overview you can safely trust the art form, in this case methods drawn from a hybrid of forum theatre (Boal, 1979) and teacher-in-role (see Neelands,

2000). The unexpected profundity of the children’s responses was seen as validating the exercise. There was also a double interest in theory, with both Siobhan and Cath interrogating their ideas surrounding intuition as a cognitive goal and on the technical side going with Dorothy Heathcote’s view that teachers-in-role do not simply retell stories but allow contained confrontations between individuals, thereby offering a safe space in which to take controlled risks.

A selected issue

2. This partnership highlighted the value of mutual learning and an exchange of skills, although the exchange was across art forms (forum theatre/theatre-in-education juxtaposed with the visual arts) rather than between partners who defined themselves as predominantly an ‘artist’ or a ‘teacher’. TAPP enabled both to explore aspects of their professional identities that crossed the divide. There work also went beyond a piece of imaginative curriculum development by making a contribution to curriculum research.

Wayne Cooper and Helen Marshall

An enquiry into the problems and possibilities of an arranged encounter between a teacher and an artist in a primary school [HM]

Video and graphics artist Helen Marshall fits uncomfortably into the TAPP narrative: she was to some extent disaffected by the TAPP experience and critical of its artistic rigor, and for a time kept all reference to her involvement off her web site. This is now rectified: See http://www.helenmarshall.co.uk/tap.html). Yet her partnership with Wayne Cooper remains TAPP’s best example of how even deep-running difficulties in a teacher artist partnership can be resolved by conversations and negotiations around the terms of the encounter.

Helen has QTS but prefers to think of herself as a community artist. The partnership with Wayne was an arranged marriage (TAPP tutors prefer the term ‘brokered’) and placed Helen in the unfamiliar setting of a year three primary school, where Wayne had only come across artists as ‘minor diversions’. Helen, coming from a background in contemporary photography and fine art, stood for aesthetic shock, novel approaches based on the new technologies that control moving images, serendipity (‘letting things happen’) and risk; Wayne felt all the more driven back towards teacher-like qualities of planned learning and responsible stewardship.

At the heart of the tension was a piece of subject matter. As well as considering stop frame animation, sub-titling, the editorial manipulation of truth and other themes, Helen wanted to introduce horror as an alternative genre with Nosferatu and The Grisly Alien. When in a mirror filter the two creatures became one, Helen treats it as symptomatic of her relationship with Wayne (‘the disequilibrium in the psychology of arranged encounters finding its final metaphor in symmetry to most observers’). It seemed that Helen at first saw Wayne as an obstacle or at best ballast to steady her boat but came to respect his skills and insights as their partnership progressed.

The fact that the children managed the challenges well was a part of Wayne’s growing sense of reassurance with the validity of the exercise, but his account in his own dissertation is also partly pathological, offering a natural history of the relationship, charting its break-though moments and the ‘aesthetics’ of their ‘decision making’. But he too saw the monsters as a metaphor for the partnership although in the end the success was due to the willingness of both teacher and artist to engage constructively with the risks and challenges to their established ways of working. The learning, ultimately, was mutual and shared.

Happily for TAPP (and Mediated Conversations) Helen and Wayne decided to resolve their differences in a public arena, tape-recording every discussion and rigorously analysing their debates. The conversations touch on a number of important themes, the professional identities and mythologies of artists and teachers, differential attitudes towards risk and the value of scrupulously examined partnerships in resolving their differences.

Three selected issues

1. Although in general TAPP achieved, whether seeking it or not, a level of compliance that reinforced our view of it as a successful ideological project, there were a minority of students who were perceived, without this being particularly a negative judgement, as being to some extent awkward, difficult to handle and challenging. The same was true of Eastfeast which also contained its own minority ‘deviant’ subculture.

2. More than any other partnership in TAPP the underpinning issue here was the artist versus the teacher with both driven back to defend the stereotypes at stake. Both the conflict and its resolution were framed in these terms and the professional rapprochement did not involve symbolic convergence (Foss, 1996) so much as a subtle boundary negotiation around the conflicting roles and expectations. It also has to be said that Helen was the more

uncompromising of the two, although this was countered by Wayne’s considerable social skills.

Guy Cook’s Discourse (1989) emphasises that discourse is contextual, not just formal, with rhetorical devices like parallelism, repetition and lexical chains (all visible in the language of TAPP and Eastfeast) always serving a purpose. We might follow Cook in identifying a series of language ‘macrofunctions’, particularly in pedagogical or tutorial contexts. These macrofunctions include:

(1) an emotive function (dealing with inner states and emotional responses); (2) a directive function (seeking compliance); (3) a poetic function (in both programmes the tactical deployment of an

aesthetic/expressive mode);(4) a referential function (carrying information); (5) a metalinguistic function (drawing attention to the code itself).

TAPP and Eastfeast appear on a provisional analysis to have different profiles in these terms. Both were deliberately weak on the directive function, but with para-directive suggestive ideological subtexts; both were somewhat patchy on the referential function, but strong on the poetic function. Eastfeast differed from TAPP in its exceptional commitment to the emotive function, while TAPP differed from Eastfeast in its determined commitment to the metalinguistic function, constantly alluding to the code itself, problematising terms and unsettling definitions. The TAPP and Eastfeast discourses both strove to be a less fractured subset of the wider discourse surrounding arts practice and arts policy.

TRANSCRIPT

Anna: David and Lesley are focusing on some partnerships in more detail than others in terms of the research… and we’d like to focus a bit more on you as one of those partnerships. I mean it doesn’t mean you’re going to have…

Fiona: Extra work?

Anna: Extra work! In fact it could be that we provide you with extra input

David: like an extra frame [of reference]

Fiona: I’m very happy to…

Anna: So it’s all right with you. But in fact there’s a kind, there’s a logic to well of course I wouldn’t say, there’s also the logic of there being, having a relationship with your school community. Since the LIFT Teacher Forum in 99, and now the head of the whole school, has asked to come on next year which is kind of irony really, but there isn’t one yet, but there’s something about

continuity in terms of us looking at creative communities in schools, although I know that your bit of it is pretty detached from the [main] school.

LATER

Paul: So for me its, you know, well I guess we’re hoping to have some kind of symbiotic relationship think where I come from and Fiona and Fiona kind of mix um my we, we it seems to be we’re looking at my side is kinda how creative, how it can be a creative thing, although at this age group I’m not sure how it can. I mean I’ve got a pile of books which I’m sort of looking at really, but um, and then Fiona wants to look at how they, you can take something away from this, which can be like a sustainable… process or provision, because you know like you said yourself and other teachers don’t feel confident enough to do anything because [they say] ‘Oooh I don’t know anything about music’.

Fiona: And it seems to be something that and I have been doing a little bit of reading, to agree with what Paul said, I think we started off quite well because Paul came over one evening after school and had a look at what we’ve got, you know in our music area, which I think is quite a nice part and the resources that we have, and we had agreed that Paul would come and just do some informal um observations to see how the children work in other areas, and compare it so you know this is their role play, this is them in their fine art or modelling areas, then there’s Music, um.

Anna: umm

Paul: I think it would be just good for me to spend… an hour a couple of times just watching. Seeing how the children behave, seeing how they interact with, yeah like you say, seeing how you do other subjects, you know, other areas.

Fiona: Even if you’re not a great mathematician, somehow or other your brain tells you can still teach maths. You may not be a great sculptor, but somehow or other you can get the clay out and use it. And then somebody goes, ‘Well we’ll do Music and we’re going to use stringed instruments’, and everybody goes ‘I don’t play any!’ so that um element of um experimenting and trying and having a go, gets lost. And I want to see how we can start, how we can provide that for the children, but also how it affects their other learning, and I know I’m jumping ahead with the conversation, but if my voice lasts out I just want to keep going. The other thing that I’ve noticed what I can see happening is that they connect up other areas of the curriculum… but I can’t see pattern making in music.

Tutor: Tony

Student: Inigo

TRANSCRIPT

Tony: David wants for us to record every one of these tutorials

Inigo: OK

Tony: So that he can kind of compare the different ways in which the three of us do it, ha ha it’s a kind of a…

Inigo Wow!

Tony: Are you FE? No you’re not are you?

Inigo: Well, City Lit, which is sort of FE, but it’s 18 plus, they call it a specialist community college

Tony: Did you send me a, er, copy of your outline?

Inigo: No.

Tony: It’s fine, don’t worry. Let me photocopy this so that I know, so that -– have you got a copy there with you?

Inigo Yeah.

Tony: OK. That’s fine. That’s great, it’s fantastic… um… so… [reads] ‘How can collaborative performance activities enhance the design process? [mumble, mumble] [pause] Innovative chairs?

Inigo: That’s what I’ve been given, really.

Tony: Oh, this is the curriculum that you have to kind of…

Inigo: Yeah, yeah, and so the stuff in the box is stuff I can’t do a great deal about… yeah. Then, everything after that is up for grabs.

Tony: The further questions… [reads] ‘In what way can the role and behaviour of [mumble] oh my God [laughs].

Inigo: Those are questions that came out of observing Kumiko…

Tony: OK. What’s the… [pause] right, I’m kind of I suppose what I’m saying is that, um, are you interested in, when you’re working in the partnership with somebody, looking at how this collaborative relationship opens up the kind of students’ thinking?

Inigo: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, the idea that, er, something would happen in our collaborative planning that wouldn’t normally be done yeah of course it’s very important actually, and um that could be, er, developed yeah, a sort of way of looking at that could be developed. So it could be yes, ‘How can collaborative

activity enhance the planning for a sort of lesson about a design process?’. That could be another way of putting it.

Tony: But there’s a broader thing here which is the business about the students, I mean the design process, i.e. the students’ learning…

Inigo: Yeah.

Tony: …their kind of understanding of what they’re doing…

Inigo: Yeah.

Tony: … and therefore, of what they’re doing within a design, er, process erm, ‘cos I think, as I’m kind of thinking of when you’re beginning to write this or record. What, in a way, what are you looking at very specifically? Was it the fact that somebody else in the room enabled you to do something that changed the relationship with your students? Is it something to do with the fact that the person working in the room enabled you to provoke them into thinking in a different kind of way? Are you thinking of somebody in the room working with you enabling you to do something that… made them work and produce stuff in a different way. That enhanced their understanding … of the space they’re in? Of the kind of territory they’re in?

LATER

Tony: Are they on a, sorry can I just check, are they on a course?

Inigo: They are. it’s, yeah, it’s called a portfolio course, it’s an arts & design sort of… programme, and… it’s non-accredited, and they’re developing work for a portfolio, there’s no particular level to it, but it’s notionally between level two and three. And it’s adults, probably most of them will be working, some of them might be um returning to education having sort of lost their way completely, others might be in a job and want to change.

Tony: So it’s the portfolio is with a view to being able to move on to something else, either being able to progress to another or even one might dare say it, kind of shift themselves in a job.

Inigo: Yeah, yeah.

Tony: Alright. So so so, they come motivated to be there?

Inigo: Some of them might have ambitions, you know to do quite well, and some of them might expect that. Others I think might be quite sort of, um… under confident, and will need a lot of support… um…

Tony: What I’m thinking is that… probably what they’ve had in the evening class will have been resourced in a relatively straightforward way, one teacher setting

tasks, and I think it could be very exciting for this group to have this very intensively resourced and really sort of – open up a kind of… um, you know a sort of license to go for it kind of thing. Yeah, ‘cos it seems to me that the question, that this collaborative thing and this kind of design process is really at the heart of this because you don’t know a lot about the students, you can pick up a bit but you’re not working with them in a [unclear]…

Inigo: No, no.

Tony: And also that business about how can the success of that kind of an activity be evaluated with the group concerned because they wanna know.

LATER

Tony: The story… so to speak, you’ve got to tell people when they go away oh well we did this thing, somebody came to work with our tutor who did this thing about chairs, and this is what we were doing, this is the bigger picture, and this is what I did in the whole thing

Inigo: Yeah

Tony: In it, is is the kind of the information that they’ll need for them to take away, and for them to be able to talk… intelligently about it

Inigo: Yeah, I think that’s very important, and um because it might be that… yeah, we’re on a bit of a sort of wing and a prayer in terms of outcomes, we’ve only got, we’re short on time, but the stimulus… I would hope might set in motion something that is kind of intelligent, yeah. You’re right there though, the evaluation might be very interesting.

Tony: I think the kind of evaluation stroke kind of assessment of how everybody’s done because you don’t, there isn’t an assessment criteria attached to this portfolio, is there?

Inigo: No, not strictly speaking, no.

Tony: it’s only you with your kind of experience, a skill, I think this looks good, I wouldn’t put that in your portfolio, I think you should organize it in this kind of way, these are portfolios I’ve seen before’. And then there is the member of staff who is sort of got the preceding and the following lessons, and there could be some comparison with that, but that’s not strictly speaking. So, it’s not a free for all kind of thing.

LATER

Tony: What kind of person? What would be the, erm, what do you think is going to animate those students in a way that you can’t?

Inigo: Someone who’s quite confident with performance could be very helpful, because I think that… this idea of developing character and then using that as a model for giving kind of design objects character might be interesting… a photographer could be very interesting, but I’m not imagining that the photography would be of a high technical order.

Tony: I think really someone who is prepared to work in role, could be very interesting. um, whether they’re going to be someone who role-plays a designer, or whether they’re going to be someone who will set up scenarios and encourage the students, so as I was mentioning, they could give 10 second sort of character studies and with photographs sort of thing, maybe with some props or something.

Inigo: Sure, sure.

Tony: Then, so we could build up lots of ideas about, and the idea being that the um… the design activity’s going to be based on who might this be for, so we can have narratives, and I put ideas there that might be fun but may not work.

Inigo: Yeah, yeah, sure, sure, sure.

Tony: Um… so that there’s a sort of storytelling process going on, and then they’re using that to inform what they’re doing, and we probably could make chairs out of cardboard in the second session. Or what you could do is to take ordinary chairs, and using cardboard, do a cutting and kind of gluing and kind of sticking to kind of construct. Just thinking about, in a way what you’re going for, is for people to kind of think very… imaginatively and very visually.

Inigo: Yes.

LATER

Tony: I mean, the interesting thing was if you if you printed the photographs out, their kinda home work then could be take that photograph as the central thing, create a kind of mood board that’s around it and kind of populate…

Inigo Yeah.

Tony: kind of populate the world in which these chairs are. I mean I think it’s I think it’s interesting, you know, I’m sure some of them might already be playing around something like Second Life

Inigo: What’s that?

Tony: On the internet, where you – haven’t you heard of Second Life on the internet?

Inigo: No.

Tony: well it’s worth going onto, Inigo, basically it’s a parallel kind of universe, where you buy an avatar…

Inigo: Oh yeah?

Tony: … to represent yourself, and you can buy houses, and you can buy in shops and everything.

Inigo: Really?

Tony: Oh yeah yeah yeah, it’s completely obsessional.

Inigo: Oh crikey!

Tony: Completely obsessional. So I mean I don’t know, it might be interesting to see how many of them know about it… go and have a look at it, because it could be something about the creative, the games world, the kind of internet, the design because I mean that’s a huge growth area, and some of them may very well end up in this world

LATER

Tony: Do you enhance that work or do you put a spanner in the works? Or do you bring a kind of different wild perspective into it which is very valuable for them? Do you see what I mean?

COMMENT

So what can be said about this exchange? Firstly, that following some routine ‘housekeeping’ it involves a certain amount of ‘steer’ on Tony’s part, but is driven by two potentially competing agendas, the first towards clarifying the research question and the second towards developing and extending the original idea as a curriculum experiment. These exchanges are interspersed with a discussion of what qualities Inigo might look for in a ‘collaborative relationship’ and shot through with a recognizable TAPP lexis.

With regard to clarifying the research question, Tony pushes Inigo into thinking further about what in his project he is ‘in the business of’ (a curious recurring

refrain in the TAPP lexis), but also seeking to shape the response by asking leading questions. Was it about the artist as a catalyst with the power to ‘change relationships’ in the setting? Or perhaps it could be approached through notions like ‘space’ or ‘territory’. Tony encourages Inigo to think about the research as a ‘story’ built around a fantasy theme which offers the participants a meta-narrative in which they become part of a ‘bigger picture’, thanks to their ‘license’ to be ‘wild’ and ‘different’ (‘the spanner in the works’) There is an implicit push towards the subversive potential of the planned creative intervention as opposed to the routine it replaces.

There is very little discussion at this stage of research method per se beyond the suggestion of contrasting the exotic input of the project with the surrounding (boring?) lessons, and Inigo is in any case ambivalent about objectives (‘on a wing and a prayer’, but in effect intent on subverting them). The conversation increasingly slides towards Tony offering imaginative ideas to stretch the license of the experiment even further (‘ideas which are fun but may not work’). Why not an army of cardboard chairs to be ‘peopled’ by performers in role? Why not shift aspects of the project into the ‘alternative reality’ of cyberspace, by taking the project into Second Life? Never having heard of Second Life, Inigo can do little more than gape in wonder.

Tony has always been a rich source of imaginative off-the-wall ideas but one questions whether the research tutorial is the place to press them. Certainly in TAPP the tutorial experience was to an extent a lottery that depended on the tutor allocated. Theoretically, of course, we can interpret this as two parties to a conversation negotiating the other’s perceptions of their self concepts and professional identities, but the conversation does at least ‘connect’, which was not always the case.

Julie: What is it? Why do schools want somebody from the outside to come in? [Is it] because they are supposed to be offering…

Ken: [interrupts] I have a different theory.

Julie: What [pause] go on then, what’s yours?

Ken: OK. I think you’ve got to complement what goes on…

Julie: Umm.

Ken: So that there’s a legacy left behind so that it can be extended.

Julie: Umm.

Ken: You complement the teaching by initiating either energy…

Julie: Yeah.

Ken: Inspiration, motivation’

Julie: Yeah.

Ken: Or new ideas.

Rebecca: You’re a catalyst.

Ken: You’re a catalyst exactly.

Julie: Yes, yes.

Ken: I see the teachers saying ‘OK now that was brilliant, we can now take this somewhere else maybe more academically’.

Julie: Yes, yes

Ken: And this as an item, as a project, doesn’t need to be seen as teaching it can be seen as um…

Rebecca: So it’s a jumping of point

Ken: Yeah. That’s either a starting point or a middle point it doesn’t matter which point it is.

Rebecca: But it relies on the teacher applying some degree of creativity to whatever it is that you’ve done. Which is what I was saying before.

Julie: Yes, yes.

Ken: Or analysis of it and…

Rebecca: making it appropriate.

Ken: And appreciation of it. If its being brought in as oh right this is really groovy this will keep me entertained for an hour.

Rebecca: yeah; what’s the…

Ken: Well what’s the point actually, because you might as well just get a clown with a red nose. We can all get an entertainer.

Rebecca: Yes.

Julie: Yes it is got to have a long lasting effect.

Rebecca: I think that by saying, by implying that teachers aren’t creative or that artists aren’t teachers…

Ken: Ahh.

Rebecca: … [It] is a divisive thing.

Ken: I don’t say they’re not creative.

Julie: Yes no I don’t say that.

Ken: I think that [the teachers’] creativity is different I think.

Julie: Yes I think it is different.

Ken: in fact they’re more creative because they have got to take that start or conclusion or whatever.

Julie: Yes and use it.

Ken: And then run with it.

Julie: Yeah.

Ken: And that’s all it is. It is that their job is completely different.

COMMENT

This seems to us a particularly telling piece of dialogue since it reflects one of the fault lines that might inhibit authentic partnerships between artists and teachers. The issue lies at the root of the subjectively constructed identities of artists and teachers, and what is at stake is the often no more than implied viewpoint that artists in schools can be perceived in relation to a deficit model, that they compensate for an innate lack of verve and excitement in the teaching profession. The conversation appears to some extent gendered with Ken making the running with a series of provocative pronouncements and receiving, at least initially, some encouraging ‘tag’ responses from the women.

Ken develops what is in effect a romantic view of the artist –- and presumably by extension himself –- as an energetic motivator, ‘groovy’ and ‘entertaining’ but not just a clown because of a concern for a ‘legacy’ that goes beyond entertainment. The teacher’s role is in part that of the artist’s appreciative spectator, but also to exercise an analytical role in the wake of this ideas invasion, mindful of the collective need to secure impact beyond the occasion. This seems to involve what is clearly a less imaginative role for the teacher, although one admitting ‘some degree of’ creativity. The jury is out on whether Ken was winding the women up or not, but in either case Rebecca rose to the bait. Surely this view was ‘divisive’? Artists can be welcomed as ‘catalysts’ but teachers are creative too. But Dr. Farquar is having none of it; according to him, the job of the teacher is completely different.

This exchange raises questions concerning our hypothesis of symbolic convergence, given that it implies such a lowly base, but these were early days

and the reader will already have been given a sense of how the Ken/Rebecca partnership panned out from an earlier chapter. It is also interesting from the standpoint of occupational myths and their pervasiveness in the construction of personal and professional identities.

Sue: [reads] ‘The museum is culturally defined as a place for viewing and responding not making and doing. We should not compromise the integrity of the artist or studio practitioner or the teacher in the classroom by confusing boundaries…’

Phil: What’s that mean?

Sue: That means…

Phil: Confusing roles

Sue: Not compromising artist or teacher

Phil: Stick them in the box and leave them there, is that what it says?

Sue: I think it does

Phil: I think it does, that’s a load of…

Sue: That’s not we’re doing is it?

Phil: No, we’re doing the opposite

Sue: We are learning to both work together

Phil: We’re not compromising but…

Phil: Yeah I’m wondering about boundaries and stickers. Boundaries for me are shifted around at the call of whoever has got the power to shift that and I get that here.

Sue: Really, in your own spaces?

Phil: Allegedly yeah not actual spaces but boundaries that people have in terms of…

Sue: What of themselves?

Phil: Yeah and within their work.

Sue: personal space.

Phil: Yeah well my personal space does all sorts of weird and wonderful things

Sue: boundaries yes I’m just thinking in terms of at school boundaries in terms of behaviour and expectations, respect for other people.

Phil: If they have respect then they don’t need the boundaries.

Sue: exactly once hey have the boundaries, that’s what I meant earlier…I suppose I should have been clearer- about school rules and things that I expect in my classroom. Once they’re set up then I can have fun with them.

Phil: Yes.

Sue: They know the consequence if they go too far.

Phil: What if they do step over a boundary?

Sue: Well I say things like, well I’m happy to make a mistake.

Phil: Is that a boundary?

Sue: well no, maybe my boundaries.

Phil: One that you would step over yourself.

Sue: Yeah, maybe, maybe be like OK maybe my expected boundary is being the teacher, generally, from the general public you are the teacher and you are here to teach.

COMMENT

In our view this is a very impressive exchange indicating both that Phil and Sue have fully entered the discourse of the Eastfeast PPD programme and have both assimilated it into considered reflective viewpoints. It also clearly demonstrates ‘symbolic convergence’ at work, with a strong and playful dialogic component as they work out a mutual intellectual and practical set of ideas to underpin their partnership practice. The register and tone of voice vary smoothly between the academic (many important themes are considered including artists’ and teachers’ role ambiguity, the role of the artist in society and the limitations of double blind research designs in classroom research) and the colloquial (with words like ‘crap’ replacing words like ‘obsolete’). Both partners offer some nice verbal puns (‘unconscious/unconfucious’ etc.) and overall achieve a neat balance between enthusiasm for their task and a dry amused scepticism about current trends and rhetorics in education in which spirits get ‘shackled’ and would-be innovators ‘stuck in boxes’.

NETWORK VIEW ONE

NETWORK VIEW THREE

Collocations

At the level of lexis many of the TAPP and Eastfeast transcripts display (conventional within the group) a series of collocations (‘creative risk taking’, ‘participant centred’, ‘brokered partnership’, shared learning’, ‘personal journey’, ‘comfort zone’ etc., -- even our title ‘mediated conversations’ began life as a TAPP collocation). Collocations are ‘marriages between words’ which play a fundamental part in the study of vocabulary and unpacking them can be a source of sharp insight. Semantic fields contain concepts, lexical fields contain real words. Language divides up semantic space into proximate and distant, the lexical equivalent of which is ‘this’ and ‘that’.

These collocations operate as reference points on the semantic map and are the subject of constant exegesis. Anna Ledgard, the lead tutor for TAPP, defines ‘shared learning’ as follows:

“Shared learning involves communities which are actively involved in processes of learning by doing.  Learning comes as much from the process of interaction with each other as from external stimuli.  Learning tends to involve 'facilitation' rather than 'instruction' and learners are interdependent and accountable to each other and the common task they are engaged in.” (email communication, Nov 2007)

The complexity of the language in this statement merits further analysis. Emotive concepts such as ‘learning community’, ‘doing’, ‘facilitation’, ‘common task’ and ‘interdependence’ are strongly appealing on ethical grounds as well as carrying the cumulative effect of a carefully constructed lexical chain. This vocabulary contrasts with the more individualistic narrative of ‘enhancing professional skills and competences’ which characterises much CPD, although the notion of professional learning community has gained considerable ground in recent years.

Genre borrowing

There are ways in which one genre of discourse can borrow from another, which is perhaps just a specific kind of intertextuality. One interesting feature of the discourse of the TAPP and Eastfeast PPD programmes was the extent that they both went in for genre borrowing. Some of this was associated with the strategic moves in the presentation of the projects to outside and inside audiences, linked to the adoption of a language ‘designed to persuade’. A certain amount of

tacking in the wind to accommodate some of the less congenial government policy interests or funding ‘priorities’ would fall under this heading.

But any practitioner discourse will in part be developed and get its particular timbre by defining itself against rejected alternative discourses, and both TAPP and Eastfeast in setting themselves in opposition to the ‘audit culture’ in contemporary education borrowed extensively from genres celebrating judgement over measurement (historical studies, literary criticism, story telling, gardening, therapy, performance etc, some of which are natural candidates since they belong to the world of the arts.) This borrowing was expressed in the willingness to treat the curriculum itself, both in the PPD programmes and in the schools, as a ‘text’, a therapeutic encounter, or an aesthetic object rather that ‘provision’ subject to means-to-ends ‘rationality’.

The most interesting genre borrowing was Eastfeast’s almost negligent rather than deliberate embracing of a persistent therapeutic discourse, as referred to above. This is pertinent in terms of what Deborah Cameron (2001) has called ‘the incorporation of therapeutic discourse into genres which have no therapeutic function’. This is a line of argument, possibly a disputed one, which might easily be taken to TAPP as well and Eastfeast, but in the latter it was quite pronounced. The point will be picked up in a subsequent section where we deal with it as a one of what Ernst Bormann identified as ‘fantasy themes’.

Metaphors of space and time

In both TAPP and Eastfeast the two most dominant metaphors were metaphors of space and time, with far-reaching implications. With regard to time, both discourses were deeply infiltrated by the lexis of intellectual and emotional positioning. Students and tutors were encouraged to think of themselves as undertaking a ‘journey’ in order to arrive at ‘another space’. The journey is by implication part adventure, part quest, and part pilgrimage, but this is never spelled out, although there is some suggestion that it could be a microcosm of life itself. Disapproved paths carried enigmatic warning road signs in the same indirect language (as in ‘I would not want to go there’).

Spatial metaphors have even entered the TAPP discussion of research methods. In responding to the question of whether a research project could abandon its registered research question and ‘take off in a new direction’ tutor Tony Fegan chipped in enigmatically with a typical Fegan conundrum: ‘Post hoc rationality’, he explained, ‘is a bad idea, but it is none-the-less permissible to spin off into other places and articulate the opening up of a new space’. That’s all right then.

This curiously indirect way of talking was picked up by a fair proportion of both TAPP cohorts to the extent that it prospered way beyond a verbal tick or a casual metaphor and became a persistent trope.

Bumble bee

TAPP is a surely a bumble-bee; bright, colourful, incandescent. A weighty institution carried by wings that seem too small to hold its size, it only stays aloft through thankless determination and a belief in the task it has set itself.

Sidewinder  

The Sidewinder is said to travel quickly over desert surfaces using its unique ‘side winding’ locomotion to prey on pocket mice, kangaroo rats, lizards and sometimes birds. Rodents are bitten, released and tracked down; while lizards are held until the venom takes effect (www.desertusa.com). Lizards suffer the most from a sidewinder bite, as the sidewinder venom soaks through to the tissue of their brains becoming paralysed and then of course, eaten for breakfast. I hope that I can find a way in TAPP to not become so stifled with the brain work that my expression as a dance artist consists of sitting at a computer keyboard.

Organ Club

TAPP is like a The Organ Club – its bimonthly periodical The Organ regularly features an organ of the month, listing it’s vital statistics – compass, number of manuals, type and number of stops, details of operating action, dimensions (size of casing, length of pipes), materials used – types of wood for casings, metals and alloys for pipes – full history (including any restoration or rebuilding), biographies of present and previous organists, origins of the ebony and ivory for the keys, acoustical properties of the building in which it is housed, amusing anecdotes from the local clergy, etc. It is a club for the serious and discerning organ enthusiast.  Numerous other organizations could replace this one in the comparison: Campaign for Real Ale, Society for the Promotion of New Music, Train Spotters, etc.

The Flesh made Word

TAPP is like an evangelical revivalist movement. We all work from a priori assumptions. The god Creativity is good and we are going out there to share the gospel with our fellow man but this time we're going to stuff all those Darwinists by making it scientific!  We preach and sing songs and

bang tambourines but, get this, we're going to back it up with hard research to prove that happy-clappy WORKS! Hallelujah. For it is written.

TAPP as a traveling circus 

TAPP is a traveling circus People from all over the land come to be trained as novices and learn from the company. There is a shared wisdom amongst the 'elders' in the troupe, who have endured previous tours and witnessed strange and wonderful things. Sometimes there is sadness as a broken bone or heart is recalled, but spirits are kept up. When the lights go down, and the dapper RINGMASTER takes up his cane the crowd marvels at the different acts before them. There is THE MAN WITH ENCYCLOPAEDIC KNOWLEDGE , as well as the THE HUMAN CAMERA,  the TWINS who share a pair of ears and can talk with their hands, the HYPNOTIST who sends the audience into a trance with his seductive voice and gets them to move in strange ways around the tent, forgetting all when they are awoken with a sign, the GYPSY FORTUNE TELLER with lips of red and silver bangles, the VELOCITY MAN who is shot from a gun around the world and back in the blink of an eye. Tickets are only available from the TICKET LADY who has a magic pencil which can change times and places. The novices look on in wonder but gradually they begin to try out the wire, the trapeze, the knife throwing, and the human pyramid.  LET THE SHOW GO ON! 

The velvety dark

‘Where do we want to go?’ asked the driver. Nobody answered, too caught up in the excitement of the journey, the feel of the road under the wheels of the cart, the smells, the sounds that came through the dark night sky, the many beams of light from the torches criss-crossing in the velvety dark, revealing a fox, an owl, moths, cows in the field, rabbits, buttercups, a brook, a bridge, a barge, cargo, two men trading, a woman arguing with man, a child looking out of a window. We all felt the wind… and the cold sting of the cold on our face as we pushed on forward. ‘So where shall we go?’ somebody called out. And the cart moved on.

The Eastfeast ship lost at sea.

The programme is some sort of unknown treasure hunt, the crew scrabbling around to get somewhere, the captain overboard, the officers using different charts and the ship floundering in high, murky and unruly seas. The question [seems to be whether] the officers and men [can] work together as a strong crew to steer the ship to crystal clear waters of the shallows. Ships are safe in harbour, but that's not what ships are for.  

Fantasy theme criticism

We now turn to Ernst Bormann’s theoretical and methodological contribution to rhetorical criticism known as ‘fantasy theme’ criticism. This style of analysis, building on the work of Robert Bales, involves looking for closely shared

imaginative narratives as a way of explaining what goes on in groups, particularly those with specialised purposes like educational or arts groups, religious groups, political cliques, cabals or cults, these almost invariably being those in which attitudes and emotions are wrapped up with cognition. Fantasy theme criticism is essentially a method of examining the rhetorical artefacts of groups as they move towards a shared world view. Symbolic convergence theory is the theoretical underpinning, the deconstruction of fantasy themes the method.

The unit of analysis is the ‘fantasy theme’ itself, an imagined meta-narrative that allows actors to place themselves in a constructed drama of events, made possible by the mechanisms described in ‘symbolic convergence theory’; symbolic convergence is the litmus test for the presence of a fantasy theme.

As students on the [TAPP/Eastfeast] programme, we have been given privileged access to an incredibly significant close knit fellowship with the ability to refashion our identities and give us a sense of personal worth and professional belonging. Following our rites of initiation into the values and mores of the community, we now have a safe professional space from which to take artistic and pedagogical risks. We enjoy the fellowship of similar communities in a large supportive network. Such an important fraternity ought not to disband at the end of the programme and will surely find some way of continuing. The sense of sharing and belonging has been profound and life changing. We have been chosen and validated.

Those of us have paid proper attention to TAPP’s veiled but emphatic critique of contemporary educational policy can have no doubt as to its true political and ideological agenda; TAPP is training a radical cadre of artists and teachers either to operate incognito in the school system, nurturing progressive and liberal values as a latent tradition whilst awaiting better times, or else to purse a policy of ‘entryism’ in order to commandeer more influential posts. The core task force comprises those who have declared their radical credentials and we now go forth into schools and other educational settings in order to support and showcase how creative teaching in the arts can support creative learning, but without challenging the definitions and destabilising the assumptions of the present audit culture in education, and the institutions that host us, we can expect little progress. It is going to be a long haul, but our loins are girded for the political struggle.

When we signed up for Eastfeast we did not really know what we were letting ourselves in for, and to be truthful at first the tutors did not seem to know either. But over time the true value of Eastfeast emerged -- as a serendipitous therapeutic community that not even a couple of boisterous male egos among our number had the power to threaten. We were valued as individuals, listened to, and offered a safe psychological space to explore our experiences as artists and teachers from the wider standpoint of our life histories as human beings. We are not claiming that to us Eastfeast was just a therapeutic community; we also experienced it as an imaginative and absorbing arts project. But its emotional impact is what we will always remember and treasure, which is why for many of us the need for academic accreditation faded from the picture. Self-knowledge is a wonderful thing, as is self confidence and self appreciation; how paradoxical that they can be nurtured only in a very special kind of group.