Making the Familiar Strange

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Making the Familiar Strange a view of gallery
research from the inside

• Helen Charman Michaela Ross
• Galleries Creating Learning Nov 04

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The Value of Research

• Embeds reflective practice
• Connectivity between range of contexts
• Contribution to professional knowledge
• Makes extrinsic the distinctiveness of our field
  and make arguments for its status
• Gives us confidence moves us beyond the case
  study

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• Making the familiar strange

Making the strange familiar
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Recent and current research projects

• Internal
• A Turn of Mind contemporary visual art and
  interpretation (Helen Charman Michaela Ross
  published Spring 05 www.tate.org.uk/research/tater
  esearch/tatepapers)
• Encounters with Artworks in the Schools Programme
  at Tate Modern (Michèle Fuirer, to be presented
  as research in progress tomorrow in the
  Passionate Learning workshop at Tate Modern)
• Partnership
• Contemporary visual art and approaches to
  learning. Partnership with Goldsmiths School of
  Education. Complementary to en-quire.
• Commissioned
• School Art Whats In It? ACE and NFER. Launching
  today.

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Summer Institute

• Participant demographics
• 14 teachers
• 6 primary/junior 8 secondary/college
• Included 1 NQT, 1 nearing retirement. Majority
  mid career.
• Majority mainstream 1 working in SEN
• 2 primary Art Co-ordinators, 3 secondary HODs
• Structure
• Daily seminar to discuss set texts (The
  Methodologies of Art, Scheider Adams The
  Intelligent Eye, Perkins Tate Modern Teachers
  Kit)
• Workshops in the gallery
• Programme of visiting speakers (Emma Kay, Kathy
  Battista, Jane Burton)
• Micro teach by all participants at end of the
  week
• Looking Log
• Aims
• Developing confidence through building up
  knowledge and understanding of concepts and ideas
  in contemporary art
• Finding new ways of engaging pupils with modern
  and contemporary art
• Being part of a network of teachers, and learning
  from the group interactions
• Invigorating a personal relationship with modern
  and contemporary art
• Putting contemporary art in context

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Aims of Action Research project

• Explore process of creating interpretations/meanin
  g making with reference to Ways of Looking
  framework
• Uncover complexities and challenges involved in
  this process
• Explore the value of using a structured,
  methodological approach for teaching

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Why choose action research as the research mode?

• Principles of collaboration and learning through
  doing
• Enabled initiating researchers to occupy
  different roles according to the work we were
  engaged in
• Planner leader
• Catalyser facilitator
• Listener observer
• Synthesizer reporter
• We were not required to remain objective, but
  needed open to acknowledge our biases to other
  participants

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A Personal Response by Alison Mawle to Pacific
Yukinori Yanagi 2000
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Looking at the Object A response by Sancha
Briffa to Robert Morris Untitled 1965/71
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Outcomes

• Interpretation as a dialogical process art work
  conceptualised in responses (multi-modal)
• Moments of coherence in what was essentially a
  destabilising process
• Acceptance of shifting frameworks for
  interpretation no final point of stasis
• Understanding that meanings can shift they have
  a contingent quality they are iterative
• Instability can be liberating

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• This has allowed me to break out of a trap of
  limited knowledge and confidence. Ive gained a
  tremendous range of strategies and now value a
  range of responses to what I see and still want
  to know more.
• Sancha Briffa KS 2 teacher

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Building on research

• Richardson, in discussing research design in the
  philosophical context of postmodernism, suggests
  that the central image is the crystal, which
  combines symmetry and substance with an infinite
  variety of shapes, substances, transformation,
  multi-dimensionalities, and angles of approach,
  which reflects and refracts understandings in the
  creation of more complex understandings. (New
  Approaches in Social Research, Carol Grbich)
• Having a research sensibility at the heart of
  programming means embracing such complexity and
  acknowledging that its an ongoing process
  (implications for budget and time management)
  which can take a multitude of forms
• Part of striving for learning programmes to be
  the crystal the jewel - in the crown of the
  art museum, which at present privileges knowledge
  about art over knowledge about interactions with
  art

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If diamonds are a girls best friend
... then research is an educators best friend.