Workshop 2 – Aims of Art Education – Group work
Ontology, Epistemology and Practice
It was interesting to be able to collectively organise these concepts/values (given to us in Workshop 2 – Aims of Art Education) in a triangle-cycle diagram. The idea to assess the concepts/values against a pre-established criterion: Knowledge (Epistemology), Society (Ontology) and Skills (Practice). And to arrange the three categories in relation to each other, came from the book A Will to Learn: Being a Student in an Age of Uncertainty (Barnett 2007).
In the book, Barnett argues that, historically, higher education has been founded mainly on epistemological and practical pillars, but that a third ontological pillar must be recognised and considered, the pillar related to being and becoming, embodied in education as the will-to-learn. Without will, he argues, nothing is possible, “there is no energy neither the right conditions for one to embark on and commit with a long personal project such as higher education” (Barnett 2007).
While one might argue that Art Education is and has been based and sustained by these 3 pillars (and here it is interesting to verify how balanced those 3 sides of the triangle turned out to be in our diagram), most of its mechanisms, such assessment and learning outcomes, which are structural to higher education, do not contemplate the ontological pillar.
As a group, we decided to place ‘human flourishing’ at the centre of out triangle-cycle diagram. However, until we can grasp the significance of the Ontological pillar in higher education, the idea of a holistic assessment, for example, is hollow and not possible, let alone the idea of ‘human flourishing’.
References:
Barnett, R. (2007) A will to learn: Being a Student in an Age of Uncertainty. Maidenhead: Open University Press.