[October 1st 2008]
Preliminary Remark
I have been teaching regularly for the past six years at the University of Osnabruck, Germany, where I qualified as full professor for Art History with a postdoctoral thesis on the History and Theory of Media Art.
Rather than formulating (or even quoting) more theoretical and general conceptualisations of learning, teaching, goals and elucidating their implementation within my own perspectives of personal growth, I have chosen to describe my own vision of teaching as a substantial integration of teaching, research and public service by using of some examples, even anecdotes, from my recent teaching experience.
I did it that way not least because it is part of my teaching philosophy to process the everyday-observations of my immediate environment in order to include them in the future curricula, projects, plans and programs.
I.
I regard the integration of teaching, research, and public service as inseparable missions within my teaching philosophy, to be carried on by each and every link in a chain of responsibilities. In order to carry out an educational process along these lines, I have always tried to adapt my own research subject matter to the needs of my factual environment including the students with their previous knowledge and interests, and the faculty situation and programs. At the same time I attempted to convince my students of the needs for an open-minded approach to the emerging subject matters, techniques, and other challenges that I would discuss with my colleagues, faculty members and within diverse boards and panels. These have included international committees like LEF, the Leonardo Education Forum with its Expert Meetings on Media Art Education.
II.
According to these comprehensive goals, I strive to communicate my own expertise – not only in the field of Media Art History in its widest sense, but also generally in the history and theory of Art, Media and Culture– in ways best suited to each of these and to augment that expertise within the concrete teaching-learning process.
III.
Not only in affirmation of the truism that a healthy relationship between teacher and students is essential to successful teaching, but also out of my personal needs and experiences as the son of a successful and very committed educator, I laid great store, as I continue to do, in establishing and maintaining a relationship with the students that motivates us for joint work on projects that – as a best-case condition – extend our curricular tasks into pragmatic and into finding solutions whose achievements, conversely, usually exceed our expectations.
For example, as an initiator, co-editor and publisher of Kunststoff, the Online-Magazine for Art and Science(2004 – 2006; ISSN 1613-9607), I was able not only to involve a considerable number of students at the University of Osnabruck in the multifaceted editorial tasks and processes of communication, interviewing and (!) writing of their first own art critiques and reviews, but also to motivate them to commit themselves early on to the discussions and to addressing the co-working problems between the fields of study of art history, art education, the media and literature. The students learned from their own experience, including their editorial co-working on a par with their teacher, how some categorisations of (media-) art subordinate the (Media-) art fields of inquiry almost exclusively to the research institutions and to academic curricula. They learned how the contemporary praxis of appraisal, curating, archiving and dissemination of (media-) art, if only it will take on board the discursive history of (media-) art, will therefore be as aware of the complexity of this field as are researchers and educators in other historical contexts of the complexity of theirs.
IV.
In conjunction with the established relationships with students and faculty, I strive to sustain a supportive learning environment that helps students to achieve the best results out of their efforts and abilities. The profession fields linked to the History of Art and to Film, Gender, Culture, or Literature Studies like research, teaching, art criticism and curating, culture management, media critique, adult education, monument preservation, galleries and the art trade, museum work and tourism (among many others)- all these interconnected and overlapping professional fields correspond to the trans-disciplinary nature of the mentioned curricula and are therefore ideally taught within the appropriate environment and with the cooperation of the ‘field-workers’ in situ.
One example of such inclusion of relevant contexts connected to the coordinated self-critical evaluation of the teaching and learning of the same subject as seen from two very different cultural perspectives can be seen in the 9-days-excursion “Charlemagne and Croatia” (14th to 23rd May 2005) under the collaborative auspices of the Institute for Art History at the University of Zagreb and the Department of Art History at the University of Osnabruck. The excursion gave students at both universities a first opportunity to experience and process in vivo and in situ the cultural links between the medieval territories of modern-day Germany and Croatia – ties that art history has only scantily taken into account for all their long tradition.
The first, site-specific aim of our eponymous trip to Croatia was to familiarise the students with both the formal vocabulary of Early Medieval, ‘Adriobyzantine’ art at the interface of Europe’s Southeast and West, and the historical background of this geographical area. The arising problems of method regarding the attribution, dating and iconography of the monuments was debated with particular regard to the problem of so-called mixed styles. The advantages and disadvantages of pursuing analysis of such interdisciplinary width - comparative art-historical and stylistic, archaeological and historical – soon became apparent. The excursion also provided the students and teachers with the opportunity of direct and critical comparison of two quite different art-historical procedures, methods and mentalities, with the effect of sensitising awareness for the local, regional and international differences in theory and research.
The different convictions in the conservation and tending of monuments made for particularly invigorating study in working directly with the monuments in ground plan and elevation as well as in working with the fragments of architectural sculpture and sculpture in its own right. In spite of the fact that the seminars and local visits/tours were held, sometimes simultaneously, in English, German and Croatian, and that the twelve German and twenty-four Croatian students found themselves challenged almost daily to the limits of their abilities both in concentration and physically, they still remained motivated, as a small funny (but not random) example shows: they were able (and willing, without any pushing from myself) to reproduce the plans of important Roman ruins of Salona ‘by heart’ even at the evening table, using peanuts as ‘building material’!
V.
As seen in the mentioned example, my personal teaching perspective concerning methods, strategies and innovation relates to the changing dynamics of the teaching process independently of the subject matter.
The density of knowledge acquired generates a need to answer questions which it would not have been possible to resolve entirely by discussions and in the seminars. In this context, students’ compiling of records that may be available to all participants and interested parties generates stimuli for further study in different fascinating and often insufficiently researched domains: the students assume tasks, for instance, of systematising the available pictorial data and of elaborating individual themes in writing. Some of the by-products of this process, whichmay sometimes become the major projects, are the websites, blogs or other sorts of publications including individual reports by the students, that sometimes may even be seen as critical reviews of the teachers’ syllabi– the best possible feedback I personally can imagine.
To accord with my teaching philosophy my past and present teaching practice therefore includes and requires special, flexible teaching techniques :
From 1988 – 1991, during my studies, I served as an technical-academic assistant at the Dept. of the Art History of the University of Zagreb (Prof. Dr. Radovan Ivancevic, President of the Art Historian Society of former Yugoslavia, later of Croatia)- then still with old-fashioned slide projectors and 8/16mm-films. Since that time, I have come to appreciate the usage of innovative teaching-learning techniques and started to include them since my first teaching appointment at the University of Frankfurt a.M., Germany, in 1999, where I have taught at the Department for Comparative Literature, English, and Film Studies. The usage of the digital as well as analogue reproduction- and notation-techniques of the time-based art forms including film, video, and performance were and are still self-evident, because from my point of view the multimedia contents can only be communicated by multimedia means. Similar communication rules apply to other educational contents.
In order to communicate the complex issues of art in public space, for instance - to take an another example from my teaching praxis – I chose the group work method for acquiring information and material, because it was clear that records of the production and reception of the less known artworks from less known regional artists could not be picked up in the available textbooks. The problems of acquiring the material were therefore in that case an accompanying topic in their own right, explored by means of both internal and external communication and other teamwork strategies.
My teaching philosophy in general is pretty much focused on permanent re-evaluation and discussion of my own learning skills and options. The courses have ideally been adapted to the possibilities of working in situ or to the connecting of the class to relevant subjects available only by the means of telecommunication.
The seminars on Performance Art accordingly include live performance in the classroom, whereas the seminars about Internet performance usually also require the organisation of an Internet Performance, and so on; to understand the aspects of international major exhibitions it is required not only to review – for instance – the ‘documenta’ in Kassel from 1955 to today in the literature but also to visit the event and to talk to the curator, to the artists and other relevant people on site. The same applies to our needs to investigate the nature of interactions within Media Installations by visiting the ZKM in Karlsruhe or by holding the early Daguerreotypes in our hands when learning about the relationships between early photography and painting in the 19th century. We also as a rule do not miss the opportunity to ask Bill Viola about his work when he is in the neighbourhood and are especially glad to be able to invite colleagues or artists to discuss their own working, learning and teaching methods as well.
When I talk or think about innovation in my teaching praxis, I not only test the computer programs and other techniques in order to optimize the educational process, but I also strive to find out how to involve technologies like Web 2.0 in developing the special tagging, appraisal and archiving tools in order to learn how to use and to keep an immense human and time resource for our educational needs. According to my experience, the essential challenge of maintaining motivation in this case can be faced only by enlarging the scope of transparency –extending the Web 2.0 tools into the educational and curatorial processes within the traditionally hierarchic business-models of museums, archives, and educational institutions.
VI.
To illustrate how my previous efforts have produced some of the anticipated outcomes, I may mention the involvement of my students in the various learning, teaching and knowledge-acquiring processes also on higher and/or real-life levels:
In organising and realising the first Media Art Conference held at the University of Osnabruck in 2005, my students were given the difficult assignment of coordinating an international conference of sixteen distinguished experts on media, performance, and visual studies from several countries, under my first assumption that they would be able to organize many of the preparatory details - as a first step. As it was, they even made virtually all the arrangements in a matter of weeks, including direct contact with all the speakers, correspondence with institutions and other affiliates, development of a complete checklist, and siting of the actual contributions to be presented during the conference.
I believe that the only way to meet the theoretical and historical requirements that I perceive, is to take on the practical challenges that keep both the students and myself as motivated as we could be. It is a way of acquiring an in-depth knowledge of art theory and practices past and present. As an example from our conference has shown, the students were able to work very quickly and efficiently with a minimum of explicit supervision, which is, I think, an obvious outcome of our balanced approach within the ‘normal’ courses and classes.
I actually have no doubt that the majority of the students I got to know would prove an asset to any museum, gallery or scientific institution who would hire them. The proof for that belief is the intense involvement of some of my students in the current research project M.A.D. Media Art Database – a project that permanently extends our shared experiences in organizing, learning and the research possibilities for the virtual communities in the field of Media Art Sciences in general.
