Skip to main content Skip to navigation

Staying Above the Water: Distributed Learning and Interdisciplinary Practice in Venice

Introduction

Dragan was inspired by reading The Ignorant School Master: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation by Jaques Rancière, a book that describes how a French teacher in Belgium was able to teach without speaking the same language as his students. Dragan wanted to create an experience based on this idea of intellectual emancipation explored in Rancière’s piece, where learning is something “that is shared within the group” and “something that would be very democratic” where “knowledge is not sitting with one particular person such as teacher.” From there, the idea of a summer school in Venice developed. Importantly, because the module was open to students from across the School of Creative Arts, Performance and Visual Cultures, Dragan shares how “we ended up with a wonderful mixture of students who were on MA and postgraduate research studies. People who were studying film and television, creative writing, theatre performance.”

Dr Dragan Todorovic

Principles of Practice

Distributed Learning

Drawing from Rancière’s concept of distributed learning in education, Dragan notes that: “When you treat everybody equally and you collect the knowledge that everybody brings, and put it into a common pile of knowledge on the desk, something magical begins to happen.” Students were encouraged to walk around the city and to “record everything and to take as many pictures, videos, sound files as possible, and also to write” The accumulation of podcasts, video and pictures “is one fantastic body of work that's reflecting the democratic approach that we had there.” In addition to writing workshops and group podcasts, students and teachers had group dinners every night at a restaurant by the hotel, which also converted into another form of democratic learning where “we were sitting there discussing the issues of the day, discussing the discoveries, discussing plans for the next day." Although not intended to be so, the organic development of these discussions at dinner reflected “the concept of ancient Greek academia.” 

Developing the Liminal Space

Dragan highlights the concept of liminal space and how it relates to interdisciplinary teaching and learning. Dragan is interested in exploring the liminal space in writing, expanding “because that interaction between areas is that liminal area. Which is interesting in itself and is something where I want to go most often.... where disciplines are colliding and supporting each other.” In the real world, Dragan asserts “there will be no isolation of topics. There will be no isolation of disciplines anywhere they find any kind of job. It will be in one of those liminal spaces.” The summer school offers a glimpse into how thinking and working in the liminal area can be fostered through distributed educational processes where students bring their knowledge and background to foreground collective learning experiences.

Co-Producers

A central component to the summer school’s development were the two postgraduate student co-producers. Dragan offers that the students provided invaluable input on the design and implementation of Venice: Staying Above Water. The co-producers were brought on board in April 2023 and collaborated until the summer school in September. Dragan observes that “we were in constant communication.” Their process of working together to answer and fine tune questions around elements of the experience again reflects “Rancière's take on education” as Dragan says “it was distributed learning for all of us...this is about everybody being a teacher. Everybody being a student. As soon as you do that, you are bringing a multitude of personal experiences into the room. And when you bring that multitude of personal experiences into the circle, you are actually bringing in interdisciplinarity by definition”

Moving Forward

Writing as Healing

A central theme that evolved from the summer school was the notion of writing as a healing process. Dragan hopes to continue developing this theme as the summer school and module development continues, mentioning that “we who are practising creative writing know that writing, magically almost magically contains that healing side.

But I think we need to talk about it and deal with it more often.”

Learning in the Face of AI

Dragan argues that with the developments of Artificial Intelligence, educators in higher education need to start thinking about how to work with rather than against AI. In order to move forward, Dragan asserts that “it would be a really a big mistake to just continue with the old fashioned ways with ‘write me an essay of 5000 words on this topic.’” Instead, Dragan offers that power and knowledge as centralized in the hands of the teacher needs to be challenged: “keeping and retaining power is the old concept of teaching. And that is not what this world today is about. This world is much more a distributed place.” Dragan concludes: “We need ....to start working together because education should be about democracy and not about the position of power and especially not ivory towers.”