Quarterly Meeting

Friday, 25 January 2019, 18:30-20:30
LARC, 62 Fieldgate Street, London E1 1ES
Closest stations: Whitechapel / Aldgate East
All welcome. Buzzer left of the entrance, office on the top floor

Main items on the agenda this time include planning the first meeting of the Radical Pedagogy Research & Reading Group, discussing our participation in the Alt Art School Weekender and a new expanded format for the studio crit series, reconfigured as a group feedback or peer review session.

If you’d like to add a topic to the agenda please send us the details. Otherwise, please come along with your ideas and proposals.

Meeting Agenda

• Planning the first meeting of the Radical Pedagogy Reading & Research Group
• Our contributions to the Alt Art School Weekender (meeting Sunday 13 Jan 2019, 5pm)
• New expanded format for the Studio Crit, reconfigured as a group feedback or peer review session
• Volunteers for transfer of some a&c duties and appropriate training
• Donations/ Voluntary contributions to bridge A&C dues shortfall
• Privacy policy
• Constitution

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Quarterly Meeting

Friday, 26 October 2018, 18:30-20:30
LARC, 62 Fieldgate Street, London E1 1ES
Closest stations: Whitechapel / Aldgate East
All welcome. Buzzer left of the entrance, office on the top floor

Come along to our next meeting if you’d like to help run the book club, decide how it works and keep it going. We will appoint a new book club coordinator and discuss scheduling, decision-making and coordination of the book club.

We will also discuss proposals for a new research and reading group on radical pedagogy, alternative art education and self-organisation, a written constitution and a new series of peer review and feedback sessions.

The aim is to bring together a community and build a collective body of knowledge and inquiry that will help us create a self-organised studio programme/course for launch in 2019.

Please come along with your ideas and proposals.

Meeting Agenda

• Appoint new coordinator for the Book Club
• Ways to discuss proposals for the Book Club in a group setting
• Radical Pedagogy Reading & Research Group
• Discussion of a written constitution
• Feedback/Peer Review Series

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General Meeting

13 July 2018, 18:30-20:30
LARC, 62 Fieldgate Street, London E1 1ES
Closest stations: Whitechapel / Aldgate East
All welcome

General meeting to discuss scheduling, decision-making and coordination of the book club. If you’d like to get involved and help run the book club please come along.

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General Meeting

Friday, 8 September 2017, 7-9pm
LARC, 62 Fieldgate Street, London E1 1ES
Closest stations: Whitechapel / Aldgate East
All welcome

MEETING AGENDA

Self-Organisation Research Share our thoughts on what was discussed at the Larc usergroup meeting:

• What did we learn?
• How has this changed our perception, ideas and expectation of the research project?
• How has it informed our ideas around the way we are organised and constituted at A&C?
• How do we want to proceed with the research project?

Some of the directions we could take as discussed at the meeting:

• Do we want to carry out the research formally or informally (and what is the difference)?
• Do we want to start by addressing our own experiences with self-organsation?
• Do we want to have a workshop on data protection with Radical Librarians Collective?
• Do we want to have a workshop on interviewing techniques and to draw up the questions that we want to ask?
• How do we prioritise these?

Symposium Discussion List / Loomio The symposium discussion list, as its name suggests, was originally intended for discussions and coordination of the symposium book club but we started using it to coordinate the other events and A&C as whole. It’s time to have a discussion about sorting this out because the list has grown mainly from people coming to the book club and it would be good to restore it to its original function. We’ve been abusing the list for a while and we need to address this by shifting the coordination of A&C to a different channel. Shall we create a new mailing list? Or should we shift coordination to Loomio? Loomio functions like an email list anyway if people turn on notifications, and everyone can post a comment simply by responding to an email. An additional list will be a nuisance because we’re all struggling with too many emails and we often have to notify people that there are open threads or votes on Loomio via email, when Loomio has the built-in function anyway. It’s important to be open and transparent in our communications and practices, but perhaps we need to create a separate list for regular contributors or those who will participate in the research project so that we can share sensitive information and coordinate the project? Or could we just use Loomio and create another list for this purpose?

MayDay Rooms Research Discuss how we will plan our archival research on self-organisation, alternative art education and radical pedagogy at MDR.

Alt Art School Research Discuss how we will carry out our research on alternative art schools.

Studio Programme Start drawing up some outlines for this and to locate which areas we need to look into and this will further inform our research.

Openki Workshop Are we interested in taking this forward?

Skill-Sharing Workshop We decided to have a skill-sharing workshop, the relevant Loomio thread has not generated a discussion so it would be great to discuss this in the meeting.

Membership At the last meeting we discussed the idea that people do not appreciate or value what is free and we reconsidered membership. This is something we should discuss in tandem with our collective model. Would everyone pay membership fees? Or just those who do not undertake any jobs? What happens if someone take a break for a few months? How much would we charge? How would we collect the fees? How would we distribute the income among those who carry out the labour?

Decision-Making We need to review our decision-making policy and update it.

Event Structure, Preparation and Communication Perhaps we need to think about the way we prepare and follow up the events, some areas that might need attention include the following:

• Update the event infosheets to stress the collaborative preparation process. Perhaps the coordinator of each event should be responsible for updating the infosheet as they deem necessary through experience?
• Establish a postmortem between each event coordinator and the chairperson/curator/artist from the previous event to discuss what went well and what did not and update our procedures accordingly.
• Add a section to the website about our collaborative learning methods and our approach more broadly. The research that we’ve started is intended as preliminary work for this (both in terms of sharing ideas and in terms of learning new ideas). Perhaps we need to approach the research and devise our research questions with this practical goal in mind, at least in the short term?

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Self-organisation

14 July 2017, 18:30-20:30
LARC, 62 Fieldgate Street, London E1 1ES
Closest stations: Whitechapel / Aldgate East
All welcome, no need to book
Buzzer located to the left of the entrance, we’re meeting in the office on the top floor

There are two main agenda items for this meeting, both will focus on self-organsiation and our intention to develop collaborative, cooperative and collective practices as part of our pedagogical remit.

In the first part of the meeting we will discuss our proposed research at LARC with a view to submit a proposal in early August 2017. The research is intended to help us learn from the organisational practices of the usergroups at LARC as well as the organisation as whole. This is also an opportunity to discuss our broader research project on alternative art education, radical pedagogy and self-organisation. For an overview of this project please see our recent unsuccessful research proposal for a residency at MayDay Rooms. We will outline our research objectives, identify actions, distribute roles and compile a schedule.

In the second part of the meeting we will discuss our ongoing plan to distribute and rotate the work that sustains [ART&CRITIQUE]. We will discuss the jobs, guides and handover procedures. After a one-month handover process and one month to practice our jobs do we feel that have learned anything? Have we had enough experience to handover the job to someone else? Have we identified problems or ways of making improvements? Should we extend the rota period to 4 months with 1-month handover at either end? Do we need more training? What skills do we need training in? Should we organise a skill-sharing workshop?

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Alternative Art Education & Co-operation

Friday, 12 May 2017, 18:30 – 20:30
Kupfer, Arch 213, Ponsford Street, London E9 6JU
Overground: Hackney Central, Homerton
Free, booking not required

On Friday, 12 May 2017 we’re having an open meeting to lay the foundations of a new alternative art school, co-ordinate future projects and institute co-operative ways of working. If you’d like to get involved please join us! See below for the meeting agenda and if you’d like to add agenda items to the list please send them by 10 May 2017.

MEETING AGENDA

1. Report on [ART&CRITIQUE] participation, accounts and current productive tasks.

2. Distribution of tasks that keep [ART&CRITIQUE] running as a collective project. Co-ordination of roles and hand-overs. If there are not enough people to undertake the tasks we will consider adopting a different structure (e.g. yearly membership) so that we can pay people to undertake the tasks.

3. Future [ART&CRITIQUE] projects: book club, art crawl, studio crit and new projects or one-off events and workshops.

4. Discuss plans for an alternative art school running a yearly programme beginning in September 2018. How would this work and how would the participants be recruited? Should we have an application form/procedure or should participants be invited? An open call is more transparent but then we have the problem of selection criteria and having to turn people down. If we invite people we can all invite one person, which is more egalitarian, but then the project risks becoming a clique. In terms of structure, the programme would be a peer support group, meeting 1-2 times per week. To begin, we could incorporate the three irregular [ART&CRITIQUE] events (exactly as they currently run, open to the public etc.) and add seminars, lectures and/or workshops with guest tutors/practitioners, organised by and for participants on the programme, who will be responsible for developing the format of the programme and running it over time. We need to discuss funding (to pay guest tutors and cover  expenses) and find a regular reliable and free venue if The Field doesn’t open again. Come with ideas for a name!

5. Plan to secure an empty building by negotiating a lease with the owners in exchange for maintaining the building. This would offer us a space from which to run all these projects, have exhibitions, run a cafe, workshops, courses, screenings and all manner of events for all ages to make an income to pay people and cover our expenses.

6. Start a workers’ co-op and create a transparent co-operative structure for all the above and any other projects that may develop over time, including an alternative art education network website to host organisations that offer alternative art education in the UK.