Paragogy

Abstract

While the experimentation of artists and curators has been pivotal in remodelling art education’s ethics of identification, its largely transient and centripetal nature has prevented it from codifying and sharing its insights through an accompanying andragogics. In this wake, paragogy forms an adaptive set of learning principles that might be adopted more widely in art education. Developed by Joseph Corneli and Charles Danoff in 2010, paragogy forms a crucial suture between D-I-T art schooling and para-academia. This chapter begins by considering some of the educational influences that intermingle in Corneli and Danoff’s ‘Five Principles’ for structuring peer-learning environments. This leads to a consideration of if, and how, the foundational theories of knowledge that inform paragogy’s principles—ba/sho—might be of particular significance to artistic learning. Since there are, as yet, few examples of artistic learning self-consciously inspired by paragogy, the concluding part of this chapter illustrates a few examples of art education that (unwittingly) align with Corneli and Danoff’s five principles. This demonstrates that while paragogy is a relatively new tool for understanding peer learning, it can be said to focus our attention on peer-learning practices that already exist and might assist in nurturing them. If today’s art academies aspire to be as educationally influential as their modernist forebears and their D-I-T contemporaries then, like constructivism before it, paragogics has the capacity to become one of the transformative educational developments of the twenty-first century.