Thinking out loud v.01

I have a feeling there will be several of these…

This fall term I will be on a research leave. I am temporarily (and voluntarily!) relieved of all my regular duties in order to spend time doing research — the research I would normally do in my free time, in the moments between meetings, on the weekends… Suddenly that is my main job; I’m not quite sure how I’ll respond once the term starts again, but I’ll do my best to manage.

And what will I be researching? A couple of things:

1. For the past 15+ years, I’ve been looking at fine arts pedagogy, specifically fine arts pedagogy in film schools. It’s a field where very little research has been done, and while more people have started writing the past 5 or so years, much of what there is is from a an outside and theoretical perspective and not do much from the practitioner perspective. My primary aim is to give practicing filmmakers and film artists a vocabulary to use when discussing what it is they do in the classroom.
2. The other thing is AI and filmmaking education. I have long been fascinated by they way filmmakers — and all artists — use new technologies in their practice; often in ways that are innovative and surprising. While AI is completely different, in some ways it is no different: filmmakers will use AI, and they will use it in ways that the creators of the tools perhaps did not intend or foresee…

For the pedagogical research: I’ve been reading and thinking a lot over the past few years. Dewey is, of course, a major influence. The statement, «One does not learn from experience. One learns from reflecting on experience.» sums up the ethos I have been trying to enact at the Norwegian Film School ever since I started. It is a practically-oriented school, where the students learn to make film through the practice of making film — but constant reflection on the relationship between process and outcome is an essential part for both individual and collective development.

Vygotsky is another major influence. Filmmaking is a social and collaborative art form, and students (and professionals!) become each other’s most important teachers over time. At the same time, the key challenge for the teaching staff is to create an appropriate Zone of Proximal Learning, where students who come to the school with different backgrounds and experiences can be given challenges that enable their development.

More recently, I’ve been investigating 4E cognition. I firmly subscribe to the idea that cognition is not something limited to the brain, but that our bodies and senses, the tools and technologies we use, and the environments in which we are embedded are part of our cognitive processes. We are not brains in a vat processing input, but are living, breathing bodies in a physical world — and this informs how we interpret our surroundings and how we learn to live in and with the world around us.

I’ve also been reading phenomenology and related philosophy, not to mention perceptual learning. Our bodies, our senses, are our «interface» with the world and each other, and in order to understand how we learn, we need to understand how we sense and how we live. And further from that, how our senses develop and change over time.

Anyway, this is a first brain dump; I intend — or, should I say, hope — to blog regularly about this. I plan to share what I have learned, what I am thinking and see how it changes over time. It’s still July now, so there’s still summer holidays to be had — but by mid-August I should be starting to work at this more dilligently.