‘Chair-Drawing’: Connecting Scholarship and Practice
ISSOTL, Edmonton, Canada. October 2008
This workshop aimed to explore connecting different practices, participants were non-arts practitioners and the workshop piloted the technique, but did not derive material about the teacher-practitioner. The workshop focused on working with chairs and spatial relations and small group collaboration to engage participants with exploring the questions; ‘what is your field of practice? and ‘what are the connections between different fields of practice’?
Reflection on the workshop processes, outputs and outcomes:
This was an ambitious workshop, not just because the facilitators had not worked with the technique of ‘chair-drawing’ before, but also the complexity of the issues of describing practice, identifying sharing elements of practice and also working in a conceptual way to explore these issues. The actual process of physically working with chairs proved to be surprisingly effective as participants readily engaged with the ‘chair is not just a chair’ approach [although in some cases perhaps held back from the full extent as they described that their chairs would be stacked up to the ceiling, rather than actually stacking them]. Participants also enthusiastically considered which elements/chairs could be connected with reams of string, although this stage perhaps may have benefited from more critical consideration of the types of relationships.
The workshop outputs are difficult to interpret if you were not part of the workshop [chairs connected with string] but part of the facilitator’s role during the workshop was to map the process as the participants worked, which is effective, but means that the facilitators have to produce outputs along-side the participants. This would not be an issue if the workshop is purely designed as an experience for the participants and there was not an additional concern with producing outputs as part of a research process. Given that none of the participants were creative practitioners this indicates that the facilitated process was engaging, although the content tended towards teaching and away from disciplinary practice, it being the dominant shared discourse.
Lead Facilitator Comments:
The workshop processes are complex and cover a lot of ground. However the two teams of 3 participants worked within the time constraints. The facilitators’ fears that using techniques that may be familiar to arts/spatial design/performance practitioners would prove difficult for other non-arts teachers was unfounded; all the participants appeared enthusiastic and more than one stated that working with unfamiliar and challenging processes helped them think innovatively and creatively.
The outputs using chairs and string to construct real-time models of relationships in practice-teaching worked well. However in this exercise and in the preceding exercises there was a tendency for participants to think in only general terms and some of the work lacked criticality. This revealed itself in the final exercise in the way teams kept adding elements and relationships without questioning the quality of the relationships. The danger was that everything became connected to everything else.
Suggested improvements or adjustments to the technique/approach adopted in the workshop:
Some of the participants found it difficult to define the constituents of their practice and although the facilitators provided guidelines I think more specific ‘instruction’ was needed and rather than leave all aspect of practice as constituents to be open, a focus on skills, knowledge and process may help to make it more closely related to the distinctive nature of practice. The majority of the participants in this workshop, although labelling their field of practice as a discipline, were actually describing the process of teaching that discipline. Given that this group are not creative practitioners we would not expect this to be such an issue. There still remain the issues of how participants identify shared elements of practice within their group, which did seem to cause one of the groups problems. This is possibly because they were not making tangential connections. The process of making connections across elements or chairs could also have represented more complex relationships based on defining more precisely the nature of the relationships - again the facilitators may need to be more specific in offering parameters or constraints to the creative process.
Lead Facilitator Comments:
The main improvement needs to be in the area of encouraging the participants to explore critical relationships. Perhaps more time and discussion needs to be given to the earlier exercise where participants locate elements of their practice on a spatial diagram (the target diagram). Perhaps there is a preceding exercise or this one is discussed and then repeated to refine thinking about practice
Field of Practice diagrams
Comments on the effectiveness of the workshop in engaging teacher-practitioners with exploring the issues:
The process of working with chairs had an interesting impact in that the chairs became the problem rather than the complex thing they represented. In way the process did enable participants to work with some complex issues that might have become too bound in an academic process. Working spatially with physical objects resulted in creating an outcome that had a meaning created through group negotiation. There was however a lack of critical engagement in thinking through the process of making connections.
Lead Facilitator Comments:
There is no question that in this instance the participants were engaged, the extent to which they were engaged in exploring issues is more problematic. Some attention needs to be given to how participants can be encouraged to avoid generalised statements about practice and to think more specifically and critically about their practice.
How the workshop process is recorded is critical if the material is to be treated as research material. The aspect with real potential is the visual/interpretive mapping of the chair models. In this workshop the ‘map’ was built as the workshop progressed and although this can be refined to engage the participants more effectively at the moment it is highly mediated and the lack of a set of conventions, if you like, map symbols and ‘cartographic’ convention, means that a consistent set of maps (or an atlas) across several workshops will be difficult to achieve.
Recommendations on how the workshop, or aspects of it, might be used to support the relationship between teaching and creative practice:
Conceivably the difficult with this technique is precisely it’s value. For the process of working conceptually with objects in space to work, critical thought needs to have been established on defining the field of practice first. Refining a field of practice necessarily engages the practitioner with the tacit nature of their knowledge and processes - this was noticeably missing from this workshop participants reflections. To make meaningful connections between different field of practice whilst being playful, entails being critical whilst in a creative process. This duality may emphasise some of the tensions inherent within the teacher-practitioner role.
10/08
Lead Facilitator comments: David Clews, ADM HEA
