Making the Familiar Strange

… a view of gallery research from the inside

Helen Charman & Michaela Ross

Galleries Creating Learning Nov 04

The Value of Research

• Embeds reflective practice

• Connectivity between range of contexts

• Contribution to professional knowledge

• Makes extrinsic the distinctiveness of our field and make arguments for its status

• Gives us confidence; moves us beyond the case study

Making the familiar strange

Making the strange familiar

Recent and current research projects

Internal• A Turn of Mind: contemporary visual art and interpretation (Helen

Charman & Michaela Ross published Spring 05 www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers)

• Encounters with Artworks in the Schools Programme at Tate Modern (Michèle Fuirer, to be presented as research in progress tomorrow in the Passionate Learning workshop at Tate Modern)

Partnership• Contemporary visual art and approaches to learning. Partnership

with Goldsmiths School of Education. Complementary to en-quire.

Commissioned• School Art: What’s In It? ACE and NFER. Launching today.

Summer InstituteParticipant demographics:• 14 teachers• 6 primary/junior; 8 secondary/college• Included 1 NQT, 1 nearing retirement. Majority mid career.• Majority mainstream; 1 working in SEN • 2 primary Art Co-ordinators, 3 secondary HODs

Structure:• Daily seminar to discuss set texts (The Methodologies of Art, Scheider Adams; The Intelligent Eye,

Perkins; Tate Modern Teachers Kit)• Workshops in the gallery• Programme of visiting speakers (Emma Kay, Kathy Battista, Jane Burton)• Micro teach by all participants at end of the week• Looking Log

Aims:• Developing confidence through building up knowledge and understanding of concepts and ideas in

contemporary art• Finding new ways of engaging pupils with modern and contemporary art• Being part of a network of teachers, and learning from the group interactions• Invigorating a personal relationship with modern and contemporary art• Putting contemporary art in context

Aims of Action Research project

• Explore process of creating interpretations/meaning making with reference to Ways of Looking framework

• Uncover complexities and challenges involved in this process

• Explore the value of using a structured, methodological approach for teaching

Why choose action research as the research mode?

• Principles of collaboration and learning through doing

• Enabled initiating researchers to occupy different roles according to the work we were engaged in:

Planner leader

Catalyser facilitator

Listener observer

Synthesizer reporter• We were not required to remain objective, but

needed open to acknowledge our biases to other participants

A Personal Response by Alison Mawle to Pacific Yukinori Yanagi 2000

Looking at the Object: A response by Sancha Briffa to

Robert Morris Untitled 1965/71

Outcomes

• Interpretation as a dialogical process; art work conceptualised in responses (multi-modal)

• Moments of coherence in what was essentially a destabilising process

• Acceptance of shifting frameworks for interpretation; no final point of stasis

• Understanding that meanings can shift; they have a contingent quality; they are iterative

• Instability can be liberating…

This has allowed me to break out of a trap of limited knowledge and confidence. I’ve gained a tremendous range of strategies and now value a range of responses to what I see and still want to know more.

Sancha Briffa KS 2 teacher

Richardson, in discussing research design in the philosophical context of postmodernism, suggests that “the central image is the crystal, which combines symmetry and substance with an infinite variety of shapes, substances, transformation, multi-dimensionalities, and angles of approach”, which reflects and refracts understandings in the creation of more complex understandings. (New Approaches in Social Research, Carol Grbich)

• Having a research sensibility at the heart of programming means embracing such complexity and acknowledging that it’s an ongoing process (implications for budget and time management) which can take a multitude of forms

• Part of striving for learning programmes to be the crystal – the jewel - in the crown of the art museum, which at present privileges knowledge about art over knowledge about interactions with art

Building on research

... then research is an educator’s best friend.

If diamonds are a girl’s best friend …