KFI Project curriculum workshop at Comrie Croft, Perthshire
KFI Kitchen Curriculum Workshop
Comrie Croft Activity Centre
Comrie
Perthshire
30th May to 3rd June 2016
KFI Project are hosting a collaborative workshop working with all KFI Project memebers, affiliate research students,invited guests and speakers.
There will be a week of activities, drawing/making workshops and curriculum discussion.
Proposal: An Epistemology of Attention – exploring curriculum through knowing from inside, a curriculum without curriculum
Workshop aim:
- to explore attention from these three perspectives: introverted, extroverted and social, drawing out the connections between attention and the development of an alternative curriculum
- to prepare thoughts on the book publication proposal on curriculum development resulting from kfi research.
Introverted attention focuses inwards, understandings through memory. It is encountered in forms of meditation and related practices and activities such as Feldenkreis, forms of drawing that do not necessarily depend upon an external point of reference, certain walking practices focused on an inner experience of and individual commitment to moving through a land/city scape e.g. Hamish Fulton, walking artist.
Extroverted attention focuses outwards through practices such as observational drawing, forms of making such as rope making and basket weaving, film making. These work through a relationship between the individual and materials, the observable world, a kind of sense making through lively engagement and interaction with an emergent world.
Social attention depends on greater levels of sharing, co-creating an experience such as in performing a piece of music that requires multiple players, or creating a building, or sharing a research project.
As soon as these are mapped, it becomes evident that they do not function as categories but always exist in some sense in relation to each other. Just as every drawing, every performance of music, dance, poetry, song is an interaction with the material world, so too meditation practices depend upon a relation between a guiding force, a teacher and a practitioner, a situation. Meditation is often practiced in groups to ensure a quality experience. All three forms of attention are simultaneously introverted, extroverted and social but with different weightings.
Challenge: We cannot not think about the issue of what kind of curriculum emerges out of kfi. However there is a paradox implied in the project – curriculum may be exactly what the epistemology of kfi is trying to escape from. There is a similar paradox associated with programming the four days. We need to programme in order to escape programming i.e. establish some kinds of constraints in order to be free to explore, to construct a form in order to dissolve it by being inside experience.
How might we do this?