ALTERNATIVE (ART) EDUCATION RESOURCES

A list of resources, information, tools and projects on alternative (art) education. See also the list of resources for co-operative art education.

Alternative Art Education Facebook Group
A place to share news, information and events on alternative art education, alternative art schools and radical pedagogy. Created in September 2017 by Sophia Kosmaoglou and run by admins from alternative art schools in the UK.

Alternative Education Counter-Cartography
Gary Saunders, Social Science Centre
A public counter-cartography of mainstream higher education, compiled by Gary Saunders, member of the Social Science Centre. Part of a research project that links groups that think critically about higher education provision and are attempting to offer alternative models. This is intended as a living counter-cartography so you are invited to share, expand and amend as necessary; you will need to sign in to Google Maps to do this.

Antihistory
Jakob Jakobsen
Research blog by Jakob Jakobsen with material from the Antiuniversity of London and related initiatives.

Antiuni Reader on Facebook
Antiuniversity Now
Collaborative a public reading list on radical education and anarchist pedagogy by Antiuniversity Now, where you can add your own suggestion.

Blueprint for Counter Education
Graham Foundation
Website to accompany the 2016 expanded reprint of Blueprint for Counter Education, a work of radical pedagogy from the Vietnam War era. Originally published in 1970 by Doubleday and integrated into the design of the Critical Studies curriculum at CalArts, the book was a pedagogical experiment and an attempt to enact a visual turn in the organization of knowledge. The cover proclaimed: “This counter-university makes obsolete the traditional university process … There is no text book, no final exam; and the ‘faculty’ includes Marcuse, McLuhan, Eldridge Cleaver, and Jean-Luc Godard… The Revolution Starts Here”. The book was accompanied by large graphic posters designed by Marshall Henrichs that served as a portable learning environment for a new process-based model of education. The posters mapped shifting patterns of relations between bodies of radical thought and artistic practice from the avant-gardes to postmodernism. The website includes a landing page that allows the visitor to navigate the charts from their preparatory notecards and sketches to the finalized posters, documentation, archival materials,  and all the necessary files to make your own reprint of Blueprint for Counter Education, including the three posters, the Shooting Script, and the box design.

Creating Worlds
European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies (eipcp)
Research project developed between 2009-2012 that investigated the relationship between art production and knowledge production in the context of the transformations and crises of contemporary capitalism. The project included research, publication and art projects.

Encyclopaedia of Informal Education
Developing Learning
An open, independent, non-profit resource on education, learning and change, particularly the theory and practice of informal education, community learning and development, specialist education, social pedagogy and lifelong learning. Infed was established in 1995 by a group of educators, it is supported by Developing Learning, Practice Development Research Unit, YMCA George Williams College and others.

Evening Class channel on Are.na
Evening Class
Categorised resource sharing and bookmarking channel by Evening Class on are.na.

Feminist Finance Syllabus
Amateur Cities and Institute of Network Cultures
Intro to the field of feminist finance, features scholarly concepts, grassroots projects, artistic thought-experiments, fictional responses, and questions without answers. Informed by the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic and its socio-economic consequences. This collection of Twitter conversations took place during the launch events of the zine Radical Care: Embracing Feminist Finance in 2020. They are organised under six headings: fundamental critiques, radical care, interdependence, units of account, alternative money design, forms of organizing.

Liberate my Degree campaign
Goldsmiths Students’ Union
Goldsmiths Students’ Union campaign to make the student experience at Goldsmiths more inclusive, from curriculum design to creating alternative learning spaces. Liberate Our Degrees is included as the first of five strategic priorities in the Learning, Teaching, and Assessment Strategy (LTAS) 2017-21, making departments responsible for upholding this strategy, which includes the commitment to ensure student involvement in decision-making (from curriculum and programme design, to pedagogy and interviewing new academic staff members), committing to centering marginalised voices, developing collaborative and critical pedagogical approaches and assessments, delivering learning and development to support a diverse student and staff body.

Making and Being
BFAMFAPhD
An interactive website, a workbook, a series of videos and a deck of cards by Susan Jahoda and Caroline Woolard, visual arts educators and members of the collective BFAMFAPhD. Making and Being is a framework for teaching art that emphasizes contemplation, collaboration, and political economy. The authors share ideas and teaching strategies that they have adapted to spaces of learning which range from self-organized workshops for artists to Foundation, BFA and MFA thesis classes. The website and workbook include activities, worksheets, and assignments and is a critical resource for artists and art educators today.

New Alphabet
Haus der Kulturen der Welt
The New Alphabet is a cluster of projects on knowledge production based at Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Diagnosing that vernacular, opaque, or marginalized ways of knowing are increasingly subsumed into abstract universalizing structures, the project asks: What strategies of resistance against such processes of forced alphabetization exist or could be developed? And which role do artistic methods of appropriation and creolization play in this context? Is it possible to imagine an overabundance of multifarious fields of languages, knowledge production, and learning practices beyond one universal matrix? Can common reference points and collective action be enabled without monopolistic force? How can knowledge be both situated and globally relevant? Projects include the exhibition Education Shock: Learning, Politics and Architecture in the 1960s and 1970s and The New Alphabet School.

Open Library on Issu
School of the Damned
Selection of online texts by School of the Damned. Copyrighted texts are made available under the fair use doctrine, for personal, educational and scholarly use.

Study Center for Group Work
Caroline Woolard, Stamatina Gregory, Cooper Union, Spaceworks
An online resource and an network of artists who meet to share methods of collaboration with one another. The center hosts an online library of collaborative methods with lesson plans, readings and objects that have been recommended by artists. It also organises gatherings for artists to share resources and accessible public training in methods of listening, attention and collaboration. The Center aims to cultivate a network of visual artists who are committed to group work through daily practice. It was founded by Caroline Woolard in 2013 in New York.

the TEACHABLE FILE (tTF)
Mountain School of Arts (Los Angeles)
Catalog of alternative art schools and a reference on education-as-art. The file delivers and demonstrates its subject by acting as both a resource for teaching and a student of its users. It forms and reforms itself through communicative action and engaged research.

Undercommoning
Undercommoning Project
Network of radical organizers within, against, and beyond the neoliberal, (neo)colonial university in North America. The network provides common resources on alternatives to gentrification, commercialization, rising student debt and tuition, low wages for university staff and contract labor, and the academy’s attempts to hold a monopoly on the production of knowledge. They work in the tradition of militant inquiry: bottom-up collective learning dedicated to building community capacities for radical social change. They support alternative projects, host encounters and disseminate information to help build solidarity around radical and marginalized forms of knowledge and to sustain and amplify the undercommons; networks of struggle, study and creativity that exist within, outside and in spite of the university. Toykit is a c collection of resources, techniques, technologies, inspirations, tools, theories, interventions, blueprints, hustles, tricks, scams and tonics for the weary heart and soul.