Call for Participation

We are pleased to invite you to take part in the reading group Co-respond: Bodies, Voices, Spaces in Art Education (March – June 2022), which is set up as part of an ongoing collaboration between the MA Education in Arts / PZI and the MA Art Education at Zurich University of the Arts.

The reading group, hosted by Irina Shapiro (PZI) and Jules Sturm (ZdHK), will comprise a regular series of hybrid physical and screen-based encounters in which participants discuss themes like embodied learning, material sense-making, hybrid corporeal-digital practices, educative gardening and transformative pedagogies. Within these gatherings, correspondence is both a theme and an approach. It is a concept embraced for its summoning of the relational, in the sense of how one thing connects or corresponds to another, or how one group of people connects to another. It is also used quite simply as a form, where conversations slowly unfold through the act of letter writing or other communicative exchanges. Reading in this context is understood as an act of engaging with texts and sites through observations and listening practices, bodily driven cartographies, and more.

The reading group serves as a testing place for emerging art educators’ pedagogical ideas and gestures affiliated with the proposed theme, and intends to share and rehearse practices in co-engaged art education. The reading group is the starting point of a larger series of events organized by the MA Education in Arts at Piet Zwart Institute under the same title.

For Whom? Students (Master level), alumni*ae, teachers and others who are professionally interested and/or affiliated with the community and network of this collaborative initiative.

How to participate? The sessions are scheduled on Thursday evenings from 18:00 until 20:00 on the following dates: March 17, March 31, April 28, May 19, June 23. Participation is free of charge. There are two possible ways of participating: 1) as a contributor 2) as an attendee. Contributors can propose and organize guest presenters, put forward their own ideas, and/or develop a specific format for one of the sessions. A budget will be available for invited guests and production costs.

Please send a short motivational letter to Sun Chang, correspondingarteducation@gmail.com, in which you briefly introduce yourself and tell us about your reasons for participating in the reading group. Deadline for submission is March 11.