TEACHING MANIFESTO

There is nothing equitable about higher education, nor can there be until it is free, cooperative, and accessible to all. A priority must also be upon those that have been harmed and neglected by institutions of higher education. Higher education must be controlled by unions of students and faculty in a cooperative model, outside of a capitalist ideology and practices. Board of trustees and bloated administrations have turned institutions of learning into debt machines, under for-profit business models. They must be abolished immediately for a productive conversation of equity to begin. 

The current higher education business model is inaccessible and often inconducive to Black, Brown, Immigrant, Indigenous, LGBTQ+ communities as well as many other poor and underserved peoples, because of the following: excessive tuition costs, predatory loans, and archaic learning models. Until tuition and administrations are dissolved, student loan debt forgiven, grades transitioned to reflective evaluation processes, and Christian bible-school testing models of reciting and regurgitating homogenous, prescribed material done away with, nothing will change. Equity in higher education will remain a facade to lure the aforementioned communities into the predatory systems of education, rather than providing them with learning experiences, community engagement and holistic empowerment.. 

The only means of equity in current higher education is to grant the aforementioned communities and populations no questions asked, all access passes to the institutions and programs of their choice. This, while paying reparations to these students for cost of living, employment resources, and healthcare. This money will be acquired from massive military budgets, which already pay for these services to former military persons.

1. Mimicry is a reflective language with vast articulations, personalizing information
in its mirroring abilities. Learning starts with mimicry and evolves to synthesization. Mimicry is a delicate balance on many planes and is used and researched in the classroom in accordance with ethics.

2. Ethics are the core of art and design education, if not of everything we know as humans. Our behaviors, actions, interactions and beliefs are our ethics, and thus inseparable from our education. Our individual ethics and ideological systems inform us how to maneuver other’s ethics and ideological systems including the academy(s). Located in these systems are learning processes and information.

3. Art and design education is thee conduit of progress and transformation, because of the infinite ripples of knowledge produced, while it exists as no one body of knowledge. Students are teachers and teachers are students, all are performers, sharing and evolving. Performance embodies ethics and education as post-disciplinary concepts.

4. Art and Design education is a practice of learning how one learns through the infinite possibilities of creation. Practiced-based-education helps a learner envision themselves in the world. The Instructor and peers are resources and compasses for guidance. With a compass, one learns how to navigate.

5. The classroom exists where information is shared. The art and design classroom is not separate from, nor indifferent to the world. Rather it is a living performance of theory and praxis. Lessons outside of the classroom comprise a large part of learning and the importance of these experiences manifests in collaborative and self-discovered strategies in the classroom. Every individual brings a great deal to the whole of the classroom through these experiences. Knowledge is generated and expressed by all parties beyond the curriculum from the diversity that is a collaborative classroom.

6. Expression and play make space for students to try, discover and to “fail,” while the existing structure and curriculum is finessed in the moment with all parties of the classroom. Self-expression is key to a progressive future. If students are permitted to express freely, it supports them in finding their place in the larger architecture of life
by allowing them to see and interpret themselves, to then visualize and construct their community(s).

7. To conjure self-expression the guide (teacher) must lead by example. Leaders are honest, present and accessible for recognition contextually, with critical holdings from students, peers and self alike. Self-expression and leading creates a vulnerability. Vulnerability, and the labeling therein can both target and protect individuals through concepts of responsibilization and equity. This precarity demonstrates community, allowing manifestation beyond the institution.

8. Equity is enacted as a Gestalt theory. The instructor is a collaborator in the same light as a conductor and an orchestra. Each member of the classroom has their unique place in the composition and together they become the work and the knowledge. In this, students who have not been heard in the orchestra receive a front row seat and solo, so they may be lifted to a level of their counterparts who have had the spotlight and/or have benefitted from its history.

9. Responsibility is assembled organically, illustrated and contagious. Expectations develop from and for thyself with those in the community, together, constructing an aggregate foundation. Comfort-zones must be acknowledged and challenged in work and person as part of the structure.

10. In the classroom students work with prompts. A prompt is a nudge, a spark, a question—and "answers" may not be found. This nurtures growth and inquiry beyond the work done in class.

11. Questions arise out of ambiguity. Ambiguity is an incubator of learning through play, experimentation and speculation. Art and design education are imaginative and fantastical in themselves. Art and design is fertile ground for questioning, exploring and researching the self, externalities and simultaneities. Students have and create their own questions and grow to articulate them through the work and process. Intervention from the instructor and peers in the form of questions and critique build suggestions for further research and production.

12. Finally, the critique is performed empirically as a summary of the classroom as well as work and shared materials of knowledge. A Critique is formed by students proposing questions—literal or figurative. The critique embodies the practice of teaching and learning. This practice enacts a critical dialog as ethics, transformation, collaboration, self-expression and pedagogical lessons form. The critique imbues equality (shared knowledge), responsibility (deadlines), leadership (roles and positions) and vulnerability (bodily performance with or of the work). The critique (and classroom) is adjusted and evolves in the moment for learning and progress of individual and classroom, producing knowledge for all parties and their communities.

*cover image concept, homage to john baldessari, by: Arielle Frazier, Elena Castillo, Cole Drager