Contingency is an essential element in the production and reception of art and educational processes, and is therefore didactically relevant to the subjects of “Drama” and “Fine Arts”. In their classes and in theatre projects, fine arts and drama teachers explore approaches to situations in which the unexpected happens.
‚Between Calculation and Contingency‘ is a team-based research project on the potentials of arts and theatre education in schools. It draws on preliminary work of the long-term project "The Laboratory for the Arts in Schools" (FLAKS) at the Institute for Art Education (IAE) of Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). The work of the laboratory showed that arts and theatre educators have an implicit knowledge of dealing with contingency in an ‘artistic-pedagogical’ way (Eva Sturm) – for instance, knowledge about explorative, undetermined ways of working or dealing with the uncertain and incidental in artistic processes. The team-based research aims to turn this implicit understanding into explicit and conscious knowledge, because – following a basic assumption of this project – contingency is a constitutive part of both the production and the reception of art, as well as of learning processes, and therefore is at the core of the subjects ‘theatre’ as well as ‘visual arts’ in school.
Collaborating with practitioners in arts and theatre education, this research aims to understand how situations of the un-expected, in regular classes and in theatre projects in schools, can be dealt with in a productive way:
How is it possible to disband the validity of orders and allocations on a temporary basis through one certain impulse? If the unexpected is something that affects one – how can it be provoked intentionally? How can encounters with the arts succeed to unsettle concepts of the self, the other and the world, and which role do educators have in these processes?
The focus is on ‘figures of the Third‘, who are able to open up such a scenario or keep it going: the trickster, dilettantes and translators. These well elaborated figures from different fields of theory will be emphasised as matrix for artistic-educational action. The researchers and involved practitioners will employ and analyse these figures for the potential to put the given and apparently solid temporarily at risk, look for and bear contradictions and uncertainties.
The research team are research assistants of the Institute for Art Education/FLAKS as well as fourteen practitioners and students of theatre and art education. It approach the following transdisciplinary questions:
a) How can contemporary art (production) be made productive for the context of schools by art and theatre educators? Which role do experiences of contingency and potentially contingent processes therefore play?
b) Which didactic positions regarding the allowance and search for undetermined situations can be localised?
c) How can dealing with contingency for art and theatre education in schools be described methodically?
In addition to analysing this didactic dimension, the researchers of FLAKS will evaluate the process in terms of research methodologies, asking to what extent the framework of team-based action research supports the examination of the set research questions, and how team-based educational research can be broadened through arts-based methods (Arts-based research in education).
The research project "Between Calculation and Contingency" is the conceptual basis and the field of experimentation for developing methodical guidelines for arts and theatre education as well as a workshop format, two formats that will allow to transfer the knowledge gained back into educational practice.