make online: spaces for teaching / spaces for learning

An online gathering for artist-teachers to share skills, resources and practical knowledge, held every half-term.

What comes to mind when you think of a learning environment? Do you picture a classroom with students in neat rows of desks facing a teacher? How does this change when you think of a learning space for art?

This session of make online investigates various experimental approaches to artistic teaching and learning environments. In 10-minute presentations, five artist-educators will share their interventions into the spaces where learning takes place.

Ranging from the role of the teacher as curator and models for disrupting traditional classroom dynamics, to taking learning outside of the classroom entirely, this session invites educators and artists to explore how shifting the spatial dynamics of a learning space can radically rewrite its potential.

Each speaker will give a short presentation of their work back-to-back, after which there will be time for audience questions.

Presentations

Sue Gibbons

Sue's presentation will introduce research on the transformative power of the workshop model and explore how a little entrepreneurial disobedience in the classroom is essential. This joyful space of resistance is playfully unpredictable. Without the need for assessment on academic performance, workshops build a form of collaborative creativity, connecting school and community through radical collective success.

Louise Fraser

What if we thought of teaching artists as curators of conditions, attention, permission, access and material encounter? Is this curatorial labour recognised as ‘art’ or valued in the same way as institutional curation? Louise's presentation explores teaching-artist practice with a provocation to participants to make space for reflection and response to this idea.

Jasmin Bhanji & Joeanna Omotesho

Jasmin and Joeanna will present their ongoing ‘threshold practice’. Each week at their school, the entrances to the art classrooms are subtly transformed through material or sensory intervention. Their idea is that drawing attention to the threshold—the moment at which you cross into the art room—might signal that something different happens here.

Katarina Ranković

Katarina will present on Channelling Kelvingrove, an artist-led educational film project that took place at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow. For the project participants selected and responded to objects within the museum. By leaving themselves (and the classroom) and entering the world of the object—by empathising with it, learning about its history, listening to its voice and then creating an artistic response to it—the students came closer to finding themselves and their own voices.

Access information

All online events are screen-recorded. The video file is stored in the Foundation’s digital archive and shared directly with event attendees.

About the presenters

Sue Gibbons is the Curriculum Leader for art at Malmesbury School, a vibrant, outstanding and fully comprehensive secondary school in Wiltshire. As well as teaching and leading art departments, her ongoing work as an artist and an active researcher drives new educational approaches in the classroom.

Louise K. Fraser (Lou.kin) is an Edinburgh-based artist and teaching artist. Neurodiverse and research-led, she creates accessible, multi-sensory art experiences that connect art, education and social justice, working with participants from primary age through to older adults. She is a lead artist on Fruitmarket Gallery’s schools programme and has been recognised with the Marsh Award for Excellence in Visual Arts Education. She was also selected for Spectra, a paid year-long leadership and creative development programme for neurodivergent artists and creatives.

Jasmin Bhanji is a freelance artist educator whose practice moves across schools, galleries, higher education, adult learning, heritage and community settings. A distinctive aspect of her work is its movement between these different formal and informal spaces, carrying ideas, methods and questions from one context into another.

Joeanna Omotesho is an Art Teacher based in London who has worked in the state Secondary sector for over 20 years. Their approach to teaching Art & Design in schools was transformed after completing an Artists/Teachers and Contemporary Practice MA at Goldsmiths, and they have continued to pursue ways to make the classroom space one of authentic art practice for young people.

Katarina Ranković is a contemporary artist working with ideas of voicing, inhabitation and empathy through performance, drawing and writing. She completed a PhD by practice in Art at Goldsmiths in 2023, and is now a Lecturer in Fine Art at the Glasgow School of Art.

About make online

make online is an international online forum for artist-teachers to share tools, skills and ideas.

Every half-term, contributors showcase to their peers an innovative idea or approach from their practice; from resources that have sparked new responses in the classroom, to practical demonstrations of exercises and techniques, to snapshots of works-in-progress.

Intended as a practical exchange of skills and knowledge, make online encourages playfulness and experimentation and prioritises process over outcome.

The series extends the work of the make residencies held in 2021 and 2022, which brought together artist-teachers working in different contexts across the UK to exchange ideas and practices through a series of process-driven workshops.

Image: Jasmin Bhanji & Joeanna Omotesho.