Lea Wiednig

6.32 Aesthetic Education in Community on Phygital Fields (Paper)

Lea Wiednig – Mozarteum University Salzburg, Austria

Eva-Maria Schitter – Mozarteum University Salzburg, Austria

Abstract:

(Aesthetic) teaching and learning situations in Western-influenced discourses are still characterized by a focus on the individual and a subject-centred framing and handling of material. Efforts to shift toward a focus on communal processes have yet to reach a widespread impact or often fall short as does the implementation and establishment of sustainable, transdisciplinary spaces for thinking and acting. Schools and universities are therefore called upon to initiate lasting structural changes that expand the established emphasis on solitary and subject-centred work towards collaboration and transdisciplinarity. In our research, we set the focus on the group of individuals tasked with the future responsibility of educating young people into community-minded citizens. Specifically, we address future teachers of artistic subjects and disciplines. The arts, with their inherent openness regarding both content and form-related points of contact, seem to us a suitable foundation for fostering collaborative artistic co-productions that bring about the co-construction of human and non-human (in our case, digital or technoid) actors. We are considering how working within and on community and relational work, as well as focusing on emotions in collective aesthetic learning groups, can support and strengthen educational processes when exploring unfamiliar territories. In a second step, we illustrate how this emotional and affective network of relationships, along with shared “flânerie” (lingering), can foster a caring, empathic and (self-)reflective critical stance. We argue that collaboration and a focus on relationship-building and a strong sense of community form a productive foundation for learning opportunities in unfamiliar territories and phygital (physical-digital) fields of action.