How we work, how we communicate and what we value is reflected in how we want to study. Teaching in higher education is determined, on the one side, by the expectations of each new generation, who explicitly value more and more cooperation, flexibility, transparency, freedom of choice and exciting challenges. On the other hand, higher education has for some time been in the grip of neoliberal tendencies that bring with them the expectation of an educational system that is, above all else, cost- and time-effective, standardised and measurable. In this current climate, what could the role of institutes of higher arts education (IHAE) be – how could they function as a safe and stimulating place for students and teachers alike? The following essay maps out the terrain and looks for possible answers. Some of the keywords are slow education, praise for mistakes and experimental methods.

Photo by Jaan Heinmaa

Written by Maarin Ektermann,
Estonian Academy of Arts,
December 2021 – March 2022

Photo by Evert Palmets

The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically, as Martin Luther King Jr said (King 1948). Education means expanding one’s horizons with new knowledge, skills and connections, and the possibilities of that seem nowadays to be abundantly out there. Various e-courses to take, online and offline lectures to attend, seminars to participate in, podcasts to listen to, articles and books to read – the amount of high-quality sources, often freely available, can make one’s head spin. Of course, this seemingly endless variety might actually not be so easy to access, as corporate-designed algorithms more often than not funnel information-hungry searchers into echo chambers.

In the arts there is an old debate around teaching – can art actually be taught? Or are some people just born with “it”? As art historian James Elkins points out, this goes back at least to Plato’s concept of inspiration – mania – and Aristotle’s concepts of genius and poetic rapture (the ecstaticos) (Elkins “Why Art Cannot…”).

Luckily, the modernist idea of the lone (suffering) genius is vanishing, and the veil of silence is dropping away, shedding more light on the hard work, luck and social norms that allow some artists to flourish, to become “geniuses”, while precluding others. With this paradigm change, some examples from the history of art schools are resurfacing: educational experiments like those of the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau, Germany (1919–1933) and Black Mountain College in North Carolina, US (1933–1957) are role models for flexible, communal and more horizontal art schools (Richter 2019).

Art does not belong solely to those who have a divine gift (which appears often to be constructed by context-specific privileges in any case, when looked at more closely).
Art can be taught, but perhaps not as a “banking model” – which, according to educator and philosopher Paulo Freire, is the situation where a teacher has all the power and “learning” means submitting to a teacher’s absolute authority (Rose 2017) – but rather through a co-creational or constructivist approach, that is by creating a joint learning environment where learning happens between student and teacher in both directions.

Also, institutes of higher arts education have to look critically at their ranks – Who has the power to shape the future of education? Whose voice is heard in academia?

Those in power in IHAE Must Set an Example. Art education has developed out of strong hierarchies set in place in the 17th century Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in France, hierarchies that encompassed both artists themselves and genres of paintings.

As art historian Daniella Berman writes, “each professor selected students to be part of his studio and this is where artists actually learned to paint or sculpt by emulating their teacher, often contributing to his large-scale commissions” (Berman).

This, what might now be referred to as “guru-like teaching”, sets in place its own subjective, unwritten rules, selecting favourites and leaving no room for students’ own personalities, rhythms and wishes. This kind of authoritative teaching might well be accompanied by abuse of power.

The classroom becomes an encounter with different generations, with those with different life and work experiences, and in order to accommodate those expectations much greater flexibility is needed. Borders between creative fields, departments and curricula are starting to feel like obstacles.

Although art schools have always championed a personal approach, and working in small groups, there is growing demand to move even further in this direction, especially as we can now see the new shape that work-life is taking – working remotely, freelance-based etc.

This correlates very much with the operational logic of the contemporary art field, which is heavily project-based, since artists are commissioned to contribute to different exhibitions and festivals all over the globe. So there are expectations that education must develop according to the same logic.

But, taking all those potential traps into account, the changed profile of art school students does mean that more flexibility to combine their studies with work/family obligations is in order.

Photo by Evert Palmets

Flexibility. Diversity. Co-creation.

Those are the keywords when talking about the hopes and wishes related to higher arts education.
But in order to understand the possibilities for their greater realisation within the contemporary art school we have to look at the processes that are currently shaping higher education in general.

Looked at more widely, it’s evident that recent decades have seen a neoliberal influence on education, according to which it should operate by the logic of efficiency. The rationalisation of the work of universities, questioning the “usefulness” of higher education, especially arts and humanities, the constant reduction in state subsidies, the application of the vocabulary and criteria of business and industry – all this affects the autonomous position of universities and the opportunity to focus on research/teaching practices that cannot demonstrate results in the short-term.

Pascal Gielen and Paul De Bruyne, editors for the Valiz Antennae series that identifies new lines of thought in the arts, argue that academies and universities are expected to deliver knowledge that is made-to-measure, saying ironically that: “Education has indeed become a form of catering, and just like in catering, the client is well aware in advance of what to expect, which is never the sublime cuisine of a top-notch restaurant, but a well-calculated mediocrity” (Gielen, De Bruyne 2012:3).

Although this neoliberal climate is present within higher education at an almost global level, there are different focal points in critical discussions in Europe and in North America:

In the US raised tuition fees, the decrease of federal subsidies and the rise of for-profit colleges push students towards loan-dependent educational paths. This has a strong influence on the choice of what to study, and on mental health while studying. This situation has been declared a student loan crisis and means that after graduating people are burdened with dreadful levels of debt that go on to mark their options for years, as they delay traditional markers of adulthood such as having kids or buying a home (Hess 2020).

In the European Union the Bologna Agreement is usually the focus when debating the changed ethos of higher education. This treaty, signed by the ministers of education of all the European member states in 1999, can be regarded as the official starting point of the neoliberalisation of education (Gielen and De Bruyne 2012, 7). The Bologna directives standardised higher education into a formula of three-year bachelor and two-year master degrees, followed by what seems like compulsory doctoral studies. There are definitely upsides to the Bologna Agreement, such as the possibility of continuing study anywhere in Europe due to the unified ECTS system, travel funds provided for students and teachers through programmes like Erasmus and Erasmus+ and so on; but, overall, problematic issues prevail, such as the rise of bureaucracy, the pressure to make the educational system more frugal, and an orientation towards measurable results. All these aspects compromise the feeling of freedom usually associated with studying/teaching in higher education.

For lecturers in institutes of higher arts education (IHAE) working in the current climate of efficiency, this provides several challenges. One of the biggest ones: the “full-time lecturer”, as such, has become a rare species. As in higher education generally, in IHAE there is a tendency to rely increasingly on temporary or non-tenured teachers – low-paying, precarious jobs with no social guarantees. With this kind of structure, significant savings are achieved with regard to teaching, but it means the erosion of the school’s community. Coming in just to teach one course is often not enough to get a sense of the school itself and to develop sustainable relationships with students, especially when the meeting time is precisely scheduled, calculated and contracted.

Numbers – this is the focus of the most heated discussions between colleagues now in academia.

How many meetings?
How many working hours?
How many contact hours?
How many learning outcomes?
How many participants in one course? (Often, so, so many!)
How many are evaluated?
How many As?
How many Ds?
How many graduated?
How many quit?

How long is your to-do list?

High tuition fees and a competitive atmosphere, the constant need to prove yourself worthy, even before stepping into professional life, increasingly shape students into clients and academic personnel into service providers – into “catering service”, as Gielen and De Bruyne (2012) diagnosed. Most of the time, the results of the learning process must be instantly visible, instantly useful, instantly understood. Education is expected to become a concrete toolbox, not a potential toolbox.

Dean Kenning, artist and writer, has pointed out how business/entrepreneurial rhetoric has infiltrated curricula, placing a high value on “positivity”, presenting oneself as cheerful, cooperative and non-antagonistic while discouraging “negative” manifestations like doubt, difficulty, subversion, estrangement, awkwardness, resistance and paradox – traits that many art education courses still hold in high regard in order to connect subjective states to wider social concerns (Kenning 2019).

Universities and academies are in an involuntary competition in which they appear old-fashioned and boring. But the problem is not only about readiness to dig into Fyodor Dostoyevsky for your literature class, but about reading small print in various contexts!

Taking into consideration neoliberal educational policies towards higher education and the influence of the ceaselessly active entertainment industry… How can institutes of higher arts education respond to expectations described in the former?

Photo by Henno Luts

The expectations about teaching in IHAE described above collide with the tendencies within higher education that have been introduced by neoliberal processes – flexibility is compromised by increased bureaucracy, the changing role of the teacher clashes with the pressure of budget cuts and full-time positions are replaced with short-contract ones. Amid this turbulence, art schools seem to have a bit more freedom than universities – so, is there perhaps a chance to take a stand for values that seem to be getting pushed aside within higher education?

“Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable”, a quote from a religious context that has become known in the 20th century through poet and activist Cesar A. Cruz (Cruz 1997) and, most recently, through the works of street artist Banksy, provides one outstanding motto with which to describe an artist’s role in society. Paying acute attention, with their antennas perpetually tuned in, artists, in return, create new perspectives, new experiences through their work.

This role – swimming against the mainstream – could also be celebrated more boldly in IHAE. People who find their way into those institutions, who want to study and teach there, have already recognised in themselves the need to find alternatives, to do something different, to follow their calling rather than a predetermined career path or a life based on rational cost-efficient choices.

Being filled with people who are highly motivated and willing to think outside the box should already give IHAE the courage to experiment more adventurously with its approaches and to stand for certain values.

One thing that seems to be missing in today’s educational ethos is leaving adequate room for mistakes – often, there is not enough time for wrong turns, cul-de-sac, for starting over. Delays in predetermined study plans result in falling behind, which involves a lot of stress in rescheduling the many parties involved and, in some cases, extra cost for ECTS. IHAE has taken over the project-based logic of the contemporary culture industry, which demands new ventures and new outcomes all the time, each one better than the previous. Project-based learning means that the curriculum is divided into beginnings and endings. For example, one of the most popular formats nowadays in IHAE, the workshop, must end with results presented, defended and evaluated. But what if one can’t switch over that quickly from project to project, jumping between workshops? What if carving out the idea takes longer than a predetermined timetable allows?

Photo by Evert Palmets

Could we come across this “old art school idea” more often nowadays? How might one integrate mistakes back into the curricula and create an art school as a safe space in an accelerating world? One important step would be to talk about it more! And to admit openly to students that even seasoned practitioners like professors have made many mistakes throughout their careers, and continue to do so. That behind every vernissage, premiere or project launch are numerous wrong turns, dead ends, failed testings – moments when one is lost and overwhelmed!

Experimenting, making mistakes, and, more importantly, learning from them, digesting them, going back to the research phase takes time – and is hard to understand when looked at from the outside. Pressure on the arts to be more “useful”, specifically measurably useful, is also one of the characteristics of a neoliberal climate.

So – celebrate blunders, missteps, slip-ups, misestimations, errors, flaws, fallacies, confusion, aberrations, lapses, miscalculations, inaccuracies, oversights, faults, muddle, bewilderment, perplexity, haziness, puzzlement, bafflement, and do so more, and more fully, in IHAE and there would be the possibility of creating a healthier, more emancipated and propulsive learning environment.

Making mistakes is just half the story – learning from them is what really matters. One major advantage that attending an art school can offer in comparison with a DIY educational path is in providing a peer group, such as lecturers or visiting experts, but also classmates, students from other departments etc. Art schools have traditionally had smaller groups and a more personalised approach than many other fields in higher education. This is a valuable characteristic for IHAE, enabling a student-centred approach and allowing for the cultivation of more horizontal relationships organically.

Giving feedback on students’ work might be a tricky issue when teaching in IHAE. There are technical and medium-specific competences that can be effectively evaluated, but how does one evaluate that this piece “convinces”, that “it works”? That it has sufficient balance between the conceptual and the way it is executed, between content and form? Isn’t it a very subjective assessment? It definitely needs the expertise of a seasoned practitioner – but doesn’t that already mean deploying an authoritarian voice?

Creative practice pedagogies researcher Susan Orr points out that art and design lecturers often work together to mark students’ work, and that is one key aspect defining the pedagogy in IHAE. Orr says that “the fact that group approaches to marking have remained a central tenet of art and design assessment in the face of massification and the intensification of lecturers’ workloads underlines its importance” (Orr “Making marks…”). Assessments happen then in dialogue and the possibility of different voices enables feedback from multiple angles. Of course, if opinions diverge a great deal, this might be confusing for a student, but it is the responsibility of the evaluators to keep a constructive tone.

Facilitating the learning process does not only require being a great artist, with lots of experience in the field, but necessitates learning new skills as a lecturer too. Traditionally, this pans out over time, as particular personal characteristics that might lead someone to consider teaching converge with methods learned from general, introductory pedagogical courses, but in the main, it tends to happen in a learning-by-doing manner. Given that current neoliberal influences within higher education have reduced in-house academic staff numbers, and that IHAE also relies more on non-permanent lecturers, educating the educators has become an important factor.

Supporting experts who find themselves in pedagogical situations, in front of a classroom or heading a workshop, requires renewed attention from the institution, a toolbox prepared and available for use in a flexible way. In the Estonian Academy of Arts, for example, there are, as well as the annual course “Introduction to teaching”, monthly seminars – open to in-house staff and temporary lecturers alike – that concentrate on different topics (evaluation and feedback practices, how to offer support on mental health issues, solving conflict etc.), a monthly newsletter with articles, interviews and events, online resources of pedagogical methods, and, last but not least, teaching consultations.

This seems to be quite a good mixture of formats in terms of offering support to teaching staff from various backgrounds.

Taking one’s time might be the most radical experiment to take on in higher education. If the principal trend is to accelerate, both in education and in society in general, then slowing down could create powerful disruption. Slow food (with its manifesto in 1989), slow fashion and other similar movements are associated with more sustainable ways of living, and with better mental health, a better quality of life. What could slow education mean?

Education researcher Ieva Margeviča-Grinberga has pointed out that the main elements in slow education are mindfulness, being present, following one’s “natural time”, focusing on process instead of results, and being deeply connected to one’s environment – physical, but also mental, in relation to the immediate learning community as well as to wider society (Margeviča-Grinberga 2021).

One inspiring source on this topic is a book by seasoned academics, professors Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber: “The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy”, which focuses especially on the experiences of the teachers-researchers, something that seems to be left to one side in the course of recognising the stress of students (Berg and Seeber 2017, 6). Their proposal is to dismantle the current attitude in academia that praises working like a machine, vigorous time planning, effectiveness, and quantifiable, profitable goals, and the like. Such values should be replaced (or at least balanced) with those inspired by slow movement: setting healthy boundaries, taking regular sessions of timeless time, promoting the pedagogy of pleasure, taking time to support one’s colleagues, even developing an alternative vocabulary about how to address our experiences in academies (Berg and Seeber 2017). As the authors say: “Slowing down is about asserting the importance of contemplation, connectedness, fruition, and complexity. It gives meaning to letting research take the time it needs to ripen and makes it easier to resist the pressure to be faster. It gives meaning to thinking about scholarship as a community, not a competition. It gives meaning to periods of rest, an understanding that research does not run like a mechanism; there are rhythms, which include pauses and periods that may seem unproductive” (Berg and Seeber 2017, 57). Here the authors use research as an example, but they point out that the same holds for teaching/learning as well.

The revolution envisioned by Berg and Seeber inside academia starts first of all with being more honest with oneself, and then being more honest with colleagues/students, not keeping up appearances all the time, not praising only those moments that are successful, but allowing oneself to be seen as struggling, as needing a break, as taking more time. Constructing a safe environment for students and lecturers alike should be the task of every institute of higher arts education and creating an alternative to the usual way of doing things should be seen as a badge of honour.

One of the ways in which art schools can create a safe space for experimentation is through the mental environment – by honouring values such as slowing down, learning from mistakes, by colleagues and students supporting one another rather than competing, by paying attention to power relations etc. But the physical environment in which education takes place has to support the same ethos.

Every institute of higher arts education negotiates daily, in its physical space, in order to achieve a balance between order, cleanliness and control on the one hand, and, on the other, an environment in which to be loose and messy in the service of the creative process. Administration on the one side, students on the other. Traditionally, art schools (as artists’ studios) have been seen as laboratories, where layers of materials, left-overs, bric-a-brac and ideas grow and procreate, but next to those spaces, art schools have classrooms for history and theory subjects that look more like… well, more like offices.

Photo by Raul Mee

Next to studios and general classrooms are areas where “ideas can have sex”, as author and columnist Matt Ridley said in his famous TED talk (Ridley 2010). To put it in a less giddy way, these are the areas where people meet or bump into one another, and they are as vital in an art school as private and quiet spaces.

Designing a lively meeting spot is as hard as hosting a good party – you can predict and nudge people’s behaviour, but often undetectable “it-factors” determine which cafeterias will be social hotspots and incubators. Nevertheless, keep on trying, institutions of higher art education, you can’t do without it! Art school should be a living organism, a flexible space where it is possible to balance social/individual time for yourself and time spent together.

Nowadays it is easy to think that the best art school is the one that has the greatest number of 3D printers and other cutting-edge equipment for students. But these are just tools that become useful when offered in the right mix with other things of value.

Writer and urban theorist Andy Merrifield points out in his book “The Amateur: The Pleasures of Doing What You Love” that our current age is defined by experts and professionalisation (Merrifield 2017). One thing this has brought with it is a narrowed sense of the possibilities when it comes to participating even in democratic processes – it is getting too hard, without specialist training, to understand what the discussion is about! Also, in the arts and culture sector, professionalisation already happens at a very early stage – pressure to develop your brand, communicating this constantly through different channels, being efficient in self-management, and producing a constant flow of new works. Complying with high standards means retaining an intense focus, with no time to mess around. It also tends to mean working deep in your own trench, something that now starts to develop at a very early stage, even while studying in IHAE.

How to encourage meetings between different disciplines before students dive into their own compartments? Transdisciplinarity has become quite a buzzword, but it needs special attention, a continuous and conscious approach that moves towards mixing and matching.

Delaying specialisation and creating a variety of connection points with people from different walks of life should be enhanced in the course of studying. One superpower the artist could develop is that of the in-between, a kind of “glue” that brings different parties into dialogue (and towards action). Architect, consultant and writer Markus Miessen has called this kind of practitioner “a crossbencher” and explains: “This role entails that in a given context one neither belongs to nor aligns with a specific party or set of stakeholders, but can openly act without having to respond to a pre-supposed set of protocols or consensual arrangements” (Bueti 2013). We need translators between disciplines, and artists, with their capacity for attention and reflection, are perfect for this task. Of course, being in-between is not always an easy position to be in.

Photo by Jaan Heinmaa

Teaching in IHAE is strongly influenced by the neoliberal tendencies that have shaped higher education now for decades. It is easy to see how these tendencies have complicated things, especially for teaching in the arts, and dissatisfaction and criticism have been voiced by both students and lecturers/ researchers. Imagining the future for teaching and learning in IHAE, one would hope that it could stand even more proudly for values such as experimentation, complexity, taking time and re-defining “usefulness” in its words and deeds. Instead of trying to stay on top of your to-do list, maybe you should prioritise your ta-da list?