In Media, Architecture, and the Moving Subject of

Pedagogy, (2005), Elizabeth Ellsworth says…The design of

public places of learning matters

The most important skills we can teach each other and ourselves are how to map,

navigate, and design relationally for the continuously changing future

The social project of democracy is located

in places where we have opportunity to

experience the greatest degree of

difference - not just between people, but

between who we thought we were and

who we might be becoming.

Intervening means providing people opportunity to take responsibility for the meanings they make

Grid of Cultural Codings

•Each body corresponds to predetermined pegs

•Movement is subjected to the positions it connects

Pedagogy

•Addresses the HOW questions of teaching and learning by drawing attention to the process

•Gives substance to the nature of the relations in these models

•“What pedagogy addresses is the process of production and exchange in this cycle, the transformation of consciousness that takes

place in the interaction of three agencies - the teacher, the learner and the knowledge they

together produce”. David Lusted, 1986

Critical Pedagogy

•Interrupting the status quo

•Deconstructing structures of dominance

•Interrogating how one might limit or be limited

Critique of Critical Pedagogy

•Only acknowledges one political sphere

•Assumes a commitment to end oppression by helping students find their authentic voice

•Bound to reason instead of discourse

Design

•Transitional objects•Determined by use

•Focused on sensation

•Physical changes

•Open-ended•Not as a pretext to getting somewhere already determined

•Indirect•Interactions between reality and imagination

•Play•Allowed in the aesthetic/cultural realm

William Wegman

Wegman: Museum question:

“I like things that look

ordinary but have something

a little bit wrong with them – or a

little right with them, or a little

unusual – to make you

rethink what you see”

“Bill made lots of short videos in the 1970s.

Sometimes Bill acted out particular

stories and situations. How

are these videos different from what you

see on TV?”

Play is the experience of the learning self in its incompleteness

Vir Heroicus Sublimis

Peter de Bolla

New PragmatismLearning as thinking and acting experimentally with great attention paid to what and how those actions add to the

world and to the potential for joy.

Aesthetic experience is a key part of learning and the quality of aesthetic experience indicates the value of

what is being learned.

Uses the language of augmentation, elaboration, invention rather than analysis and critique

About ways of being in the world that leave it augmented, rethought, reinvented instead of just criticized.

Critiques of Ellsworth

•Seizes a moral high ground

•Lacks a general critical theory or a philosophical framework

•Points to the limits of communicative dialogue but doesn’t interrogate the crisis

of representation

Object RelationsCritical pedagogy: the object of thought is a

problem

Latour - the problem is an object…one of many

Bryson & Ellsworth - use of the object to get to the limits of what we already know…or where

we don’t know

Organization of public spaceHabermas - men

Fraser -

Warner - discourse

Hayles - text

Foster -

Willinsky - access

Latour - objects

Bryson - private/the everyday

Ellsworth - design

Discussion•Power in oppositional grid-related terms or as indirectly constraining and directing qualitative growth and variation.

•Transitional objects vs ‘real’ experience?

•A future for critical pedagogy.

Wodiczko’s Communicative Instruments

Bravehearts: Men in Skirts

Bolton & Koda