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Particularly in times of change it is important to be aware of and work on
those conflicts that persist within society, and that often continue throughout
history and across generations. In the field of gallery education several methods
have been developed in order to approach sensitive and contested contents.
Nevertheless, vital exchange on and about these procedures of negotiating
dissent and conflict between educators in non-school contexts and school
teachers is not yet common practice. Coming from the field of critical gallery
education, we will present a workshop on how to deal with images which —
while intending to address sensitive topics – have caused public scandal. The
workshop is based on the thesis that a scandal, to invoke Dario Fo, usually
conceals an underlying conflict, rather than revealing it in a way which leads
to resolution. Consequently, the method to be used during the workshop will
be to virtually break up and reassemble certain images collectively by linking
them to the knowledge and ideas of the participants, and to document material
from the context of the public scandal which was triggered. In this way we
will create “Denkbilder” (“images of thought,” a notion borrowed from Walter
Benjamin) with the purpose of generating new and productive insights on the
hidden skandalon. Our method involves discussion and the creative techniques
of cutting-out and bricolage. It will enable debate on how gallery education and
the classroom, as well as adult and child education overlap, on how educators
in these fields can learn from each other and together create hybrid methods of
learning in times of change.
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