Organizing a Studious Conference for Public Experimentation

The Educational Logic of Conferencing

Anyone who has attended an academic conference is most likely familiar with its implicit educational logic. One attends sessions and panels in order to learn something about a topic. Panelists summarize research, report findings, or provide helpful suggestions all in the name of improving something. With regard to educational conferences in particular, we might argue that they succeed or fail in relation to how well the selection of participants is able to make an intervention or solve a pressing issue. Thus, the conference is a kind of public pedagogical performance of teaching and learning. We could say similar things about the workshop. A workshop might be more interactive than the traditional conference, but such interactivity is organized in advance to achieve a certain intended set of outcomes (there is a lesson and a plan at work here). For instance, the teacher education workshop presupposes what good teaching should look like and attempts to guide the audience toward improvements in their practices. Or the art education workshop introduces audiences to new techniques that will be useful in their classrooms. In such cases, participants can return home having learned something by doing something, and this something promises a certain level of development.

As such examples demonstrate, learning cannot be equated with education as such; rather, it has its own internal logic. To learn something, a person has to have an intention that is directed at a specific skill/talent, body of knowledge, and so forth. This intention is then actualized through a series of experiences, the successes and failures of which are measured against a certain set standard. In relation to conferences and workshops, there is an intention to be relevant and useful to the audience by providing information or skills that improve learning outcomes for students.

But could we interrupt and suspend this implicit logic of learning that informs the educational structure of the conference? What would be left? We are not suggesting a total deconstruction, negation, or destruction of the conference (or the workshop). Instead, we are more interested in the conference as not a conference, or a conference that both is and is not itself. Such a conference would be simultaneously familiar and yet strange. This gesture of suspending the conference without negating it enables us to re-potentiate the conference from the inside out. Stated differently, there is a potentiality within the conference that exceeds the dominant logic of learning. There is something within the conference that cannot be managed by and through learning. In the Summer of 2017, we undertook the task of exploring what emerges when conferencing for learning is deactivated.

What follows is a memoir of sorts—a philosophical memoir—of a conference titled "Education as Experimentation" (EE for short) hosted by the College of Visual Arts and Design, The Onstead Institute for Education in the Visual Arts & Design, and the Philosophy Department at the University of North Texas (UNT). Occurring over a 2-day period in the Summer of 2017 on the UNT campus, EE brought together an international and interdisciplinary group of experimenters, each interested in challenging dominant educational notions such as outcomes-based learning. Audience participants included a selection of artists, art educators, designers, philosophers, and museum educators from around the Dallas metroplex. The event was explicitly designed to be a conference that challenged the form and content of how conferences look, feel, and operate. The authors of this paper essentially "hacked" into and "tinkered" with (Lewis & Friedrich, 2016) the standard conference, suspending its educational logic (learning), in an attempt to develop a latent potentiality within the conference to be different than the teaching, reporting, and disseminating of research, techniques, and skills. The rest of this article outlines the unique features of EE, the challenges we faced, and the potentialities that EE opened up. In particular, we will argue that EE offered a subtle yet important shift in the educational function of conferences from learning about topics to studying with others.

From Learning to Studying

Our hack of the traditional educational logic of the conference took inspiration from the...