#Letter 1
Dear class.
My name is Taeyoon, I will be teaching "Teaching as Art" in Spring 2017 at NYU ITP.
I hope you are enjoying the winter holidays. I'd like to share some thoughts and reading materials. These readings are not mandatory. I'm sharing them as an opportunity for those who want to observe and participate in my preparation for the class.
This class will be about the art of teaching.
"Art work deals with the problem of a piece of art, but more, it teaches the process of all creating, the shaping out of the shapeless. We learn from it that no picture exists before it is done, no form before it is shaped. The conception of a work gives only its temper, not its consistency. Things take shape in material and in the process of working it, and no imagination is great enough to know before the works are done what they will be l ike."
From "We Need the Crafts for their Contact with Materials" Design, 46:4. December 12, 1944 by Anni Albers. Link
This class will be a space for dialogue.
"Because love is an act of courage, not of fear, love is commitment to others. No matter where the oppressed are found, the act of love is commitment to their cause—the cause of liberation. And this commitment, because it is loving, is dialogical. As an act of bravery, love cannot be sentimental; as an act of freedom, it must not serve as a pretext for manipulation. It must generate other acts of freedom; otherwise, it is not love. Only by abolishing the situation of oppression is it possible to restore the love which that situation made impossible. If I do not love the world—if I do not love life—if I do not love people—I cannot enter into dialogue."
From page 89~90 of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1970 by Paulo Freire Link
This class will an attempt to create a community of future teachers.
"The class, in each new iteration, has created a temporary community, a way of being together where dissent, difference, and respect co-exist, although sometimes painfully. At its most successful, we all risk a kind of vulnerability in relation to knowledge, each other, and our work, and a thoughtful slowing-down that goes against the kind of hyper-rational certainty and mastery that has been so disastrous and duplicitous in the hands of power. In some ways our cultural “rationality” is a lifeboat, the medium through which we become habituated to the endless state of emergency as described by Walter Benjamin, where the task is to “manage” unimaginable crises, from an oceanic oil gush to endless war. The way we look, sense, and feel are all components of our thinking, all crucial to resisting the mechanisms of the “societies of control.” The question remains for all artists, thinkers, writers, and teachers who try to do the work we do mindfully, and politically: does slowing down mitigate against urgency, against agency, when so much needs to be both done and undone? The question can only be answered in a spirit of optimism, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. We must continually reinvent the tools we use to unpack, unlearn, learn and rebuild, to create the kind of change we want to make—in the present tense, mindful of the past, and “for the future” too.
From What Is To Be (Un)Done: Notes on Teaching Art and Terrorism, 2010 by Mary Patten Link
I may send a few more emails before the Spring term begins. Feel free to email me if you have a question. Otherwise, I'll see you in January 23rd.
Taeyoon