The pedagogical style of matters of study: experimenting with artistic-scientific interventions in times of corona lockdown

This paper is based on an online experiment, conducted with bachelor students of educational sciences during the COVID-19 lockdown period in the spring of 2020. The experiment, which took place on a daily basis for a whole workweek, consisted of a series of what we have come to call “artistic-scientific interventions”. These constituted a pedagogical praxis in which over a longer period of time students are challenged to collect and ‘think with’ artistic media as alternative ways of experiencing, studying, and evaluating the corona crisis. Our paper describes the structure and proceedings of this experiment against the background of efforts to develop a new philosophical idea of what it means to do pedagogy. This idea, inspired by philosophers of science like Bruno Latour, contests some of the classical divides that run through the educational sciences, and that we believe pose a great threat to their relevance in current times of crisis: empirical/speculative, quantitative/qualitative, natural/social, facts/meaning, object/subject, etc. What our experiment shows, beyond all obsession with validating hypotheses or consistency of results, is that art, as an education of the senses, can afford science with a much needed platform for (re)creating and/or (re)arranging circumstances in which those problematic divides may be overcome. However, what it also shows is that often this only works when art is approached, not through the lens of predominantly respresentationalist aesthetics, but as a full-fledged part of a scientific (c.q. pedagogical) discipline. Especially in a diffuse digital environment, this entails a need for transindividual, impersonal protocols which allow for both repetition, variation, and feedback, and instil a strong sense of transformative gathering and study.