We have come to understand both art education and creativity as forms of industry; as the means by which to generate trained individuals and monetisable artefacts. It is a technocratic approach that understands value in narrow measurable terms that are ranked by metrics employed to determine relative success or failure. But people are diverse and, in contrast to the sleek machinery of industry, they are messy beings many of whose abiding qualities lie beyond the scope of mathematic measurement or monetisation. In times of rapidly accelerating change, these are qualities that become not simply desirable, but essential for survival. The industrial metaphor is increasingly out of step with the urgent needs of the times in which we find ourselves.
How then can we develop ways in which students may flourish within an art school, an art school within a university and that university find its place within the urban ecology as a whole? How do we value learning that helps each citizen grow and mature beyond the mechanisms of qualification through examination? What value do we place upon educating people to become amateurs, to use their skills and knowledge outside of the marketplace? How do we come to understand education, and indeed the wider world, as a process and not just the accretion of knowledge and things?
These are just some of the questions that will be explored during this one-day conference. Divided into three panel discussions, speakers and audience will explore some of the approaches to, practices of, and outcomes arising from ways of learning and creating that encourage the flourishing of the individual and the institution within the wider ecology of the city.
