Month: October 2025

Fumbling my way forward

Progress. I think.

I’ve spent some time processing the feedback and reflections from my visit to the Netherlands Film Academy in September. Aside from the input the participants in my workshop and lecture so generously shared with me, the main outcome from the week is that I was challenged to write a book tying together film school education with contemporary educational theory and philosophy.

This week, I’ve been on a writing retreat, which has given me both the possibility of discussing the contents and structure of such a book as well as lots of time to write.

And so, I’ve developed a first draft outline, which looks like this:

  • Introduction
    • Background for this handbook
      • my pedagogic history
      • the field of film school pedagogy, such as it is
      • the need to expand our understanding of arts pedagogy and understand why we (can) organize teaching the way we do
      • artistic research
    • Content and structure of this handbook
      • from filmmaker to film educator
      • some theoretical pegs:
        • Dewey & Greene
        • Freire & hooks
        • Kolb, Schön, etc. and the transformation of experience to practice through reflection
        • Vygotsky & Bruner
        • Phenomenology; Merleau-Ponty
        • E. Gibson, Connolly & perceptual learning
        • Lave & Wenger; situational learning
        • 4E cognition: Varela, Clark, etc.
        • Contemporary neuroscience & cognitive sciences
  • Teaching / learning
    • Why education? Education as schooling vs. education as life
    • Creating the conditions for learning
    • How do we learn?
    • Lave & Wenger and forms of learning “in situ”
    • Friere, hooks and transformative education
  • The artist as (film school) teacher
    • What makes an artist unlike an academic
      • What art is (cf. Noë), What art does (cf. Eno)
      • Embracing intuition and emotion as integrated parts of a process
      • Both arts and sciences rely on creativity, but when does creativity come in?
      • Truth and lies. Honesty and authenticity. Reality and unreality
    • What makes an artist like an academic
      • Teaching, research (both artistic and academic), and the responsibility to a field
      • Professional ethics
      • Transforming research and experience to teaching and practice
      • curriculum planning
      • the bad things: European (& national) qualifications frameworks (EQF) and how to navigate them
    • From tacit to explicit knowledge, and how to talk about it
      • Moving from “show, don’t tell” to “show, observe, and tell”.
      • A vocabulary toolkit for educators to talk to each other and discuss and share teaching practice
      • theory+practice=❤️
  • Teamwork
    • Learning at different paces and from different starting conditions
      • Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development
      • tutoring and scaffolding. Cf. Wood et.al.
    • Teaching co-creation
    • Collaboration in variable conditions
      • construction of different types of exercises
      • collaboration between artists on a common artistic vision
      • tools for communication
    • Learning together and from each other
      • peer learning
      • the student-teacher and teacher-student (Freire)
  • Creativity as process
    • Moving from intuition to awareness and back again
    • What is creativity?
    • Flow; or, how to create the conditions for creativity
  • The importance of reflection
    • Dewey “One does not learn from experience. One learns from reflecting on experience”
    • Reflecting alone and reflecting together
    • Forms of reflection
    • Reflection on, in, as, and through practice
    • Practice as reflection
  • The nature of practice-based arts education
    • The learning is in the doing. Or…?
    • Learning to fail; or, learning from failure
    • Failing to learn; or, fear of failure
  • Learning as a journey
    • Learning to learn
    • How is it that as I teach, I become a better artist myself?
    • Moving the students from passive to active learning
  • Cognitive processes
    • Against Descartes: 4E cognition — embodied / extended / enactive / embedded
    • Practice is not the result of thinking; practice is thinking
    • The plastic brain, and it’s relationship to the body
  • Perception and senses
    • Perceptual learning and sensory development
    • Phenomenology of senses; how do we know the world
    • Embodied cognition
  • Emotion
    • Seeing the whole person
    • Landing and being in a situation when coming from somewhere else
    • Art and emotion — Art is emotion
  • Constraints
    • Scaffolding — institutional, group, and individual. What is it, and how can it work?
    • Focussing creativity and artistic exploration
    • The zone of proximal development
  • The artist and art in a societal context
    • Why do humans make art?
    • What does art do to us?
    • Situating the artist in the world — do artists have social responsibility?
    • Science / Art. Reality / Non-reality. Explains the world / Expands the world

It’s not finished, but I feel like it’s a good start. I’m sure it’ll change as I move forward and start filling out more text and details under each point. Already I can see some potential for repetition which perhaps is unnecessary — or perhaps may end up being a good way to dig deeper into topics introduced earlier.

I only have 2.5 months left of my research leave, and so I am pretty damn sure I’ll need more time…

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