This is confusing - Rogoff is calling the 'academy' a 'space' at the start of this sentence, and then a set of 'vital principles'. Which is it? A space or a set of vital principles? They aren't the same thing. So which is it?

The linguistic turn was a reading strategy in most disciplines for sure. In art, however, it was somewhat more literal. Analytical Conceptualism, for example, became focused on the language games of analytical philosophy. Semiotics very directly informed Photoconceptualism. So, while I think this is true of the linguistic turn generally, it's not taking it's impact on art into consideration.

Rogoff is suggesting that a there are desires manifest in art/the artworld that are driving art in a particular direction. Rogoff's not sure if calling it a 'turn' in a broad (umbrella) fashion is very helpful. Perhaps it's missing something? Does it really capture desire?

Turn is in "scare quotes". This places it in parenthesis - Rogoff isn't taking it as read at all. She's wary of identifying a paradigm shift here. Academia and art are full of 'turns'; this term is loaded. The cultural turn, the material turn, the sensual turn, the nonmodern turn, the culinary turn, the linguistic turn, the historical turn.....etc. In some ways, such 'turns' are intellectual fashions that travel between academia and art. In other senses, 'turns' describe cultural phenomena that already exist but that are becoming increasingly visible or influential. Curating in particular tends to cannibalise academia - so there's an affinity here.

Rogoff is careful to qualify this 'percieved'. Rogoff's not jumping to side with this perception, but simply noting that it's a way of seeing.

Yes.

Was there always value in what was being said?

important professionals, like us

i.e. nobody else.

Yes, this was, and remains, a meme.

✔️

A discussion? Not exactly charged with urgency - what about action?

Crisis criticism generates the crisis to then offer a cure. Doctors and Patients.

Yes. It's also the well established routine of disaster capitalism.

Repeating the 'fail again, fail better' mantra. This is already gospel in art academies.

This is likely because education is underfunded!

They could be finite, due to human finitude?

might (more qualification)

might

Education can be the grounds to collectivise, but you can learn well atomised too (desert monks). There's a normative praise for fleeting collectives here (= lasting collective are bad). This was something of an unwritten artworld rule by the 00s.

How was it 'unexpected'? It was, literally, called Summit! 😂

i.e. 'people like me'

I don't think this is a broad definition of education. The list of people here have an active stake in education either as professional teachers (academics) or as consciousness-raisers (citizens, trade unionists, activists). A broad definition would need to include people with no idea of what their stake in education might be.

in practice (since they are unnamed) meaning, no others.

By what definition? Education hasn't been defined in this text. Nor have we been referred to any such definitions.

It's good to share, but the list of things that are shared here is perhaps unrealistic (shared subjectivities)? You can be a paragogue, pool resources and support your peers without having to all do and feel and suffer the same way.

It's interesting that in Europe, Bologna is pitched as the driving force behind the turn - the DIT movement. In the USA the driver of the DIT movement is not Bologna (no political jurisdiction or academic influence there) but the cost of higher education, specifically graduate education. It's just too costly. Viewed from the US, the EU Bologna system - free education and financial support for mobility - is a garden of roses.

These are good words to describe how a lot of educationalists feel - this is clearly based in lived experience, but it needs to be a bit more fleshed out to engage those who haven't known or felt this.

etc. lazy, says it all. None of this is really worked out. It's a 'voice of endless complaint' that isn't backed up with why the complaints are legit. The problem here is that Rogoff is assuming the reader knows and shares this view. While this is likely (e-flux) it still needs to be fleshed out more.

Is education forevcer reacting to the woes of the world? How so?

Repeating the same accusations, again, sans evidence.

False dichotomy. Such initiatives are still forms of institutional practice. See Mary Douglas - How Institutions Think

Does anybody have any questions?

I gotta lotta questions for you people! It's all questions so far. It's easy to ask questions. What about some answers? (see, that was really easy).

Not a very good question (surely)?

So, this is really about allowing the museum to breathe, to pause it's routine of generating a display/spectacle, and dig deeper. This is a valuable exercise for any institution.

Yes, good point. Learning can happen anywhere.

such processes ... suggests that education is a process contined within spaces/activities. This needs to be fleshed out. Is education is a process? How so? (It could be, but this is simply asserted here).

? calling subjectivity 'individual subjectivities' tends to distinguish it from 'social processes'

Why does it have to include this? Rogoff here is, unwittingly, advocating Jean Piaget’s principle of accommodation, one that underpins constructivist educational theory: wherein pre-existing knowledge schema no longer function and have to be reframed to accommodate new learning. (Piaget 1952) Accommodation requires the partial unlearning of schema that have “failed” us. This is a mantra repeated constantly in art education - fail again, fail better. etc. It is possible that Piaget is wrong and that all of the Piaget influence (which Rogoff has absorbed here) is fallacious too.

Bologna? Still hasn't told us what Bologna was, or how it would prevent potentiality and actualization.

Again, where's the evidence that this is the culture? There are two cultures in academies. The quality assurance culture (which is imposed upon academies) and the scholarly culture which tends to shrug its shoulders at at the quality assurance culture and get on with what actually interests it.

Professionalization is what academies have always been concerned with. They codify practices, teach them to students, and accredit students to certify their professional competence. This is why we can trust our dentist to give us a filling.

Now this could have been lifted verbatim from the Bologna Accord (lifelong learning is a key EU educational objective). The idea that learning has to be applied is utilitarianism - something that most educationalists would reject.

Of course it is completely ludicrous to suggest - as this does - that academies haven't thought that what they teaching might relate to what goes on outside of the academy.

What are these 'vital principles' we are hearing about in this essay? All sounds like an empty promise; a tagline.

Really (evidence)? How do academies know what it is that people need to know?

??? tension between what one needs to know...

The various turns in academe and art are often turns against, rather than away from, a dominant paradigm. For example, the material turn is a turn against many of the cherished ideas associated with the social turn.

Differently to what?

Museums - in 2008 - were open places for people to engage ideas (at least those that did not charge entrance fees).

Again, this seems to really misrepresent museums. It's a caricature of the museum. Museums aren't didactic (at least not in 2008), they do not 'set out to teach us'. Museums care for the things that they host; they conserve. Museums also do significant research.

Not really what Bologna was aiming for - it was actually about enabling students and scholars to learn from their Wanderjahre. This really is something deeply routed in European learning, it dates back to the early middle ages, to before the era of nation/states. Bologna was trying to rekindle this.

actualization - vague

Lots of actualization here. Not much actualization of clarity.

Again, it already was politicised and can't really not be.

Very vague. Institutional activities sounds a bit sinister!

What exactly are the principles we cherish in the education process? Doesn't tell us what they are. Assumes that we all cherish the same principles.

This is telling. Since when has the discussion of education been anything other than politicised?! Education is fundamental to the class structure for staters.

This is testimony to a lack of engagement with educational research in Europe. Firstly, the general approach to learning outcomes in Bologna (constructivism) was very very well established in K-12 schooling (pedagogy) and FE/HE (andragogy) globally. The EU was really catching up here. Secondly, the EU was aiming to improve the Erasmus+ exchange programme with the goal of ensuring mobility in each cycle (UG>PGT>PhD). The Erasmus+ exchange programme has been one of the great success stories of the EU and the attempt to create a very basic linga franca to enable it was a highly ambitious grand project that challenged the kind of neorealist educational politics that hindered Europe for so many centuries.

What vital current functions? We need to know what they are before we know if they can surpass them (or if they are worth surpassing, they might be okay as they are.)

This is the pathetic fallacy. Questions don't ask anything, people ask questions.

Apply the vital principles? But the academy is an institution. This is circular.

This is pitching 'speculation, expansion, and reflexivity' against a straw man. The straw man is the idea that academia is constantly demanding proven results. Academia is preoccupied with speculation, expansion, and reflexivity. Proven results = completed research. Academia isn't interested so much in that. The demand for proven results is thus more likely a sideways swipe at educational constructivism, specifically the Bologna Process an oven-ready Bogey Man in discussions about education in Europe. In art/education discourse, the Bologna Process is a bit like neoliberalism; it's blamed for all ills but never defined or elucidated.

This is a bit confused. If an academy is time-based (a moment of learning) why does it have to be in an academic institution? A moment of learning could happen anywhere. It doesn't have to occur in an instition at all, never mind an academy. It's also not the case that academic institutions are safe spaces; the battle to make them safe spaces still rages.

This begs the question... what exactly is it that the museum sets out to show or teach? There are lots of museums doing different things with different things, many modalities. This is quite a vague question that seems to suggest museums are monolithic entities that can only support a limited range of learning styles. Most museum curators (and educational officers) would contest this!

Art criticism, since the end of the '70s at least, is always suspicious of style. Style = bad. Style without substance. It's true that there are lots of examples of artworks that have an edu-style, much as, say, there were lots of art works that had an 'administrative aesthetic' during the heyday of Conceptual Art in the '60s and '70s. But I don't buy the idea that style = bad. It seems to be bias that design theory and cult studs got over long long ago.

Yup. This is the kind of flattening language of management culture that imagines knowledge to be just another a commodity that's produced and 'delivered' (deliver a programme; post content).

Yes, they are different disciplines and have their own practices and ways of seeing.

It didn't really address organised education (K-12, FE, HE) since that wasn't artistic or sexy enough. Nor did it tend to have any enagement with educational research (beyond fairly dated radical pedagogy). It was more concerned with platforming something akin to consciousness raising.

Of course, there has been an active movement to engage with education by activists per se (e.g. Workers' Ed Movement, Consciousness Raising, Ragged Schools, etc.). So it's likely that there is going to be something tangible here.

This would be producing works of art or curating exhibitions that are representations of what 'teaching' looks like/of how it is practised. They remain representations of learning rather than learning practices.

This is an interesting idea - we take a method from one discipline and use it to read, or gain a different insight into, another. This is called 'extradisciplinarity'. Art is notoriously extradisciplinary.