Turning

Curating the Educational Turn
Turning

Irit Rogoff

Rogoff, Irit. "Turning." Curating and the Educational Turn. Ed. Paul O'Neill and Mick Wilson. London: Open Editions, 2010. 23-31. Print.
   
Found online here: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/turning/

Date: 11/11/2012

Primary claims made in this reading:

This is a powerful article about education. I wish I could add the entire text as a giant quote. Basically, Rogoff is evaluating effective education on two primary principles: potentiality (the possibility to act) and actualisation (understanding that the possibility to act and organise exists everywhere). 

Key Figures: 

A.C.A.D.E.M.Y project (2006) - "a series of exhibitions that took place at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindohoven as a collaboration between 22 participants and museum staff. The project as a whole posed the question: 'What can we learn from the museum?' and referred to learning that operated beyond what the museums sets our to show or teach us." (Pg. 35)

Th Bologna Declaration - the reform of European education that focuses on standardizing education by standardizing evaluation and outcomes.

Key Quotes: 

"By potentiality, we meant the possibility to act which is not limited to the ability to act. Acting, therefore, can never be understood as something simply enabled by a set of skills or opportunities; it is also dependent on a will and a drive. Even more importantly, it must also include within it an element of fallibility - the possibility that acting will entail failure." (Pg. 36)

"...actualisation, by which we mean understanding that there are meanings and possibilities embedded within objects, situations, actors, and spaces and that it is our task to liberate them, as it were." (Pg. 36)

"These other approaches place education as forever reactively addressing the woes of the world while we hoped to posit education 'in' and 'of' the world, not a s a response to crisis but part of its ongoing complexities, producing realities, not reacting to them, and many of these are low key and un-categorisable and non heroic and certainly not uplifting but nevertheless immensely creative." (Pg. 39) 

"Propelled from within, rather than boxed in from the outside, education becomes the site of odd and unexpected coming together - shared curiosities, shared subjectivities, shared sufferings, shared passions congregate around the promise of a subject, of an insight, of a creative possibility." (Pg. 39)

"At its best, education forms collectivities, many fleeting collectivities which ebb and flow, converge and fall apart. Small ontological communities are propelled by desire and curiosity, cemented together by the kind of empowerment that comes from intellectual challenge." (Pg. 39)

"The point about coming together in curiosity is that we don't then have to come together in identity..."(Pg. 40)

"So, at this moment in which we are so preoccupied with how to participate, how to take part in the limited ground that remains open, education signals rich possibilities of coming together and participating in an arena that is not yet signaled." (Pg. 40)

"Perhaps there is a n excitement in shifting out perception of a training ground to one which is not pure preparation, pure resolution.  Instead, it might encompass fallibility, understand it as a from of knowledge production rather than of disappointment." (Pg. 40) 

"...I want to think of education as all of the places to which we have access. And access, as I understand it, is the ability to formulate one's own questions, as opposed to those that are posed to you in the name of an open and participatory democratic process, for it is clear that those who formulate the questions produce the playing field." (Pg. 41)

"...in education, when we challenge, we are saying there is room for imagining another way of thinking..." (Pg. 41)