Putting it into practice: Bridging the gap between learning and doing

Abstract

This paper sets out to explore thinking-through-making as a complex dynamic of learnt skills and intuitive thought and to examine how these may be taught in what will be termed in this pedagogical context ‘learning and doing’. The paper will propose that whilst there are established strategies relating to the acquisition of craft skills there are fewer that deal with their autonomous practice, provoking a gap or discontinuity in studio teaching. It will consider the value of rejecting the duality implied by thinking-through-making, taking the practice of drawing as its exemplar in this exploration of intuition and its value in creative, entrepreneurial and sustainable practice.

In drawing, the artist uses intuition to inscribe the mercurial drawn line: as a means to judge when to yield to whim and when to reassert control, when to be attentive to variables and when to be prepared for the unexpected. Intuition, speculation, courting failure: these are all cornerstones of a studio practice and yet are difficult to articulate or orchestrate meaningfully in a teaching situation. The paper sets out to unpack what we might mean by ‘intuition’ in arts practice by examining the Aristotlean concepts of techné, mêtis and kairos, an expression of creative thinking that:

‘implies a complex but very coherent body of mental attitudes and intellectual behaviour which combine flair, wisdom, forethought, subtlety of mind, resourcefulness…applied to situations which are transient, shifting, disconcerting and ambiguous, situations which do not lend themselves to precise measurement, exact calculation or rigorous logic’ [1]

This mode of thinking is seen as the desired result in creative practice: the paper will argue that it is expressed most cogently in the teaching of drawing and by extension in the teaching of entrepreneurial practice, where it will explicitly link drawing as a process in creative development to the wider teaching of entrepreneurial skills and the ability to notice opportunities[2]. For Bourdieu, the ‘pedagogical problem’ of how to put into practice a range of learnt skills, or what Bourdieu would call the ‘embodiment’ of an art, is the difficulty of imparting the ability to ‘appreciate the meaning of the situation instantly, at a glance, in the heat of the action, and to produce at once the opportune response’[3]. The ability to embody, or to learn through habituation, is seen as key in a learning process that leads to intuitive thinking-through-making and to the entrepreneurism essential in negotiating an uncertain future of discontinuity and accelerating change.

The paper will conclude that the gap between the learning of a set of skills and their subsequent autonomous practice represents a problem that is often solved tacitly or by implication in studio teaching, and that a greater understanding of the mechanisms of creative thought is essential to informing those studio pedagogies that will engender the “understanding of uncertainty, ambiguity and the limits of knowledge“[4] in the makers and thinkers of the future.

[1] Detienne, M. and Vernant, J. (1991) Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society trans, Lloyd, J. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, pp3-4

[2] Kirzner, I. (1979). Perception,Opportunity and Profit. Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press p.48

[3] Bourdieu, P. (1990) The Logic of Practice London: Polity Press p.104

[4] QAA Art and Design Benchmark Statement Section 1.4 p.10