Multi-Sensory learning and teaching: 'Making Sense: Agency Reduction in Teaching & Learning' (2 of 2 linked papers)

Abstract

When Bas Jan Ader “accidentally” fell from a tree in his 1971 filmed performance, 'Broken Fall (Organic)', his failure to hang on was leveraged on a larger metaphysical proposal about human agency and existence. This discussion starts with the observation that a key trope within contemporary art and performance has centred on the practices of agency reduction, failure and falling, using gravity as an immaterial readymade and mysterious source of vanishing mediation.

Falling radically disrupts the body’s integrity as subjectively willed action and so helps us to rethink the role of non-human forces and substances. Staging empirical encounters with objects and materials, artists and performers have investigated the vibrant possibilities of precarious practices, prizing the incomplete, the nearly nothing or the almost something. The goal has apparently been to downgrade their own agency, embracing failure and doubt, rather than resorting to reflex defences of control and order.

How are these ideas therefore compatible with teaching and learning in an arts educational context and within students’ preparation for employment in the cultural and creative industries, where personal agency and subjective control seem fundamental to success? Could the curriculum be reanimated through ethical and creative attitudes to what the precarious really means? Furthermore, how could teachers model productive ways of reducing their own agency and control within teaching and learning practices?