Esther Sayers

A chance meeting at the Pushing Boarders conference in Malmo 2019 brought Dr Esther Sayers into dialogue with Editor of Free Skateboard Magazine, Arthur Derrien. This article is the documentation of a conversation between the two about Esther's experience of skateboarding, motherhood and learning to skate. It was distributed by Free Skateboard Magazine online on 2 September 201

As a 52-year-old academic and mother of three, this research explores the ethics of the question ‘do I have time to go skate- boarding?’ Using the themes of time, injury, ageing and learning, it explores the question in relation to Simone de Beauvoir’s ethics of ambiguity. The approach employs autoethnographic and sensory methods to document the authors own experience of learning to skateboard in her late forties and uses learning to skateboard as a vehicle from which to consider time and productivity. Embracing Beauvoir’s ethics of transcendence in navigating the psychological burden of ageing and informing the ongoing methodological approach required for making time to play, the author subverts ideas of progression and knowledge acquisition from childhood to adulthood and explores instead the converse transition from adult to child. The article draws conclusions about the value of lifelong learning and what expanded ideas about productivity mean for our ethical positioning in the world. How being in the skatepark together requires an ethical contract between skateboarders, an unambiguous ethics of being together where adhering to a system of unwritten rules means that everyone has enough space to stay safe. Risk and the time implications of injury are explored through- out in terms of the choices we make at different stages of our lives as we navigate a balance between personal desire and social good.

In this experimental film, series of overlaid clips explore the material process of learning to control the motion between board and ground: from a shaky, tentative start to a more confident sense of ability. Through this documentation I navigate body, skateboard and the undulations of skatable surfaces. The intra action of filming and using the clips both pedagogically and as the practice is important in exploring the entanglement of bodies and matter. Focussing on the force of matter in an expanded way I consider the agential contributions of surface, wheels, muscle memory and psychological processes with Barad’s (2012) conception of human and non-human agents. This enables me to reflect on skating as a method for qualitative enquiry into strategies for learning.

This book tells the story of ArtScapers, an Art-in-Education programme as part of the University of Cambridge's North West Cambridge Development. Written as a collaboration between the projects art education consultant Esther Sayers, project manager Ruth Sapsed, Head teacher Paul Ayliffe and Academic David Whitley with Susanne Jasilek, Filipa Pereira-Stubbs, Caroline Wendling and the children and community of Mayfield Primary School, Cambridge; this publication is an account of the impact of the ArtScapers programme on the community linked to Mayfield Primary School. "An inspiring story, beautifully told –– of how children are wondernauts; of how art and making can change minds and lift hearts; of how using the outdoors as a classroom can transform learning, and bring joy and hope. It's a chronicle of the ongoing, unfurling adventures of the imagination in one place, with one group, which ripples outwards in powerful ways." Rob Macfarlane, writer and CCI Patro

City Mill Skate is a proposal to develop and construct embedded skateable architecture within UCL East, a new campus development in East London due to open in 2022. Envisaged as ‘skate dots’ these interventions aim to form a series of interlinked architectural punctuations akin to a sculpture trail. A participatory design process is central to this approach, a local project in which skaters’ active participation is sought alongside professional fabricators of skateable structures. This process is supported in different ways with events such as co-design sessions, DIY build events, design workshops in schools and youth centres. A comms channel appropriate to our audience (Instagram) is essential to publicise the project, amplify the reach of the conversations and to encourage dialogue with the wider skate community. The instagram page is a repository for information sharing, community building and archiving the project’s engagement activities. An online presence is important to build on the findings from the focus group phase and to provide an interactive platform with which to amplify the reach of the project.

As a 52-year-old academic and mother of three, this research explores the ethics of the question ‘do I have time to go skate- boarding?’ Using the themes of time, injury, ageing and learning, it explores the question in relation to Simone de Beauvoir’s ethics of ambiguity. The approach employs autoethnographic and sensory methods to document the authors own experience of learning to skateboard in her late forties and uses learning to skateboard as a vehicle from which to consider time and productivity. Embracing Beauvoir’s ethics of transcendence in navigating the psychological burden of ageing and informing the ongoing methodological approach required for making time to play, the author subverts ideas of progression and knowledge acquisition from childhood to adulthood and explores instead the converse transition from adult to child. The article draws conclusions about the value of lifelong learning and what expanded ideas about productivity mean for our ethical positioning in the world. How being in the skatepark together requires an ethical contract between skateboarders, an unambiguous ethics of being together where adhering to a system of unwritten rules means that everyone has enough space to stay safe. Risk and the time implications of injury are explored through- out in terms of the choices we make at different stages of our lives as we navigate a balance between personal desire and social good.

This thesis focuses on the Raw Canvas youth programme at Tate Modern (1999-2011). Data is drawn from peer-led workshops and interviews with gallery education professionals. The material has been sifted to extract understanding of the ways in which pedagogies imagine and construct learners in voluntary and unaccredited educational environments. The particular educational context of the art gallery, in comparison to learning in formal educational environments, is central to the research. The title refers to Peterson’s (1992) conception of the ‘cultural omnivore’ as an individual whose tastes span popular and high cultures. This term describes the work of youth programmes at Tate Modern whilst simultaneously revealing the underlying problem: that such cultural infidelity is primarily a middle class characteristic. Was the aim of this youth programme to make all young people middle-class? The thesis begins by exploring the historical context for gallery education before a detailed study...

This article argues that university curriculum needs to be opened up to transformative possibilities created through practice based learning. Drawing on the design and delivery of a practice-based creative arts subject at Goldsmiths college we argue that embodied creative processes employed in pedagogical contexts can liberate those who learn from reproducing, or being reproduced, as the reductive, historically determined and governed images, figures or metaphors assigned to them. Building on this feminist investment in the agency of materiality we think through the problem of the body as a site of learning in the university. Learning in higher education is popularly thought as pertaining to the transfer of abstract knowledge, and this process typically occurs in ways that largely ignore the physicality of learning. As we suggest above, our inquiry here is partly a response to teaching movement to first year Bachelor of Arts students at Goldsmiths, who are called to rethink, re-feel...

City Mill Skate is a proposal for a set of incidental obstacles, or ‘skate dots’, to sit within the fabric of UCL East, a new campus development in East London due to open in 2022. It will form a series of interlinked architectural punctuations, akin to a sculpture trail. This article describes our thinking about the project in which we contrast the totalised and singular environment typically associated with contemporary skatepark design with archoitecctural interventions that are incidental, we use the term ‘skate dots’. Skate dot is a recently coined term that plays on the established label of skate spot and describes an incidental piece of architecture that lends itself to the act of skateboarding. This article describes our methodology: a hands on, participatory design process. We discuss how this approach is essential as this is a local project in which skaters’ active participation is sought alongside professional fabricators of skateable structures.

This chapter explores the problematic effect on pedagogy when inclusion initiatives are bound up with learning objectives. It explores the generation of critical thinking skills in gallery learning programmes where young people are empowered to take a critical stance. I use hermeneutic theory to explore the position and status given to artworks and to young people’s interpretations of those works. The art discourse that is explored was produced during peer-led workshops which, by design, were aimed at disrupting the dominant discourse of the gallery. With reference to critical pedagogic theory and the emancipatory ideologies of Paolo Freire, I illustrate the ways in which the potential for new critical voices can emerge in this context. I go on to contrast those ideas with potential pedagogic pitfalls in which such approaches become exclusive and ultimately work against their emancipatory aims. The research was conducted over a ten year period at Tate Modern in London. It uses data ...

The data presented in this paper explores the effect on pedagogy when inclusion initiatives are bound up with learning objectives. It explores the generation of critical thinking skills in learning programmes at Tate Modern. Effective art education empowers young people to take a critical stance. In gallery education a decision has to be made: are programmes for young people about encouraging them to think about art or inviting them to think? I explore the position and status given to artworks and to young people╆s interpretations of those works through data gathered during a peer-led workshop. I illustrate the ways in which new critical voices are able to emerge and contrast them with potential pedagogic pitfalls in which such approaches become exclusive and ultimately work against their emancipatory aims. People who work in galleries and museums are ╅cultivated individuals╆┻ They can easily take for granted their judgements about art and consider them to be ╅natural╆┻ Because of t...

City Mill Skate is a proposal to develop and construct embedded skateable architecture within UCL East, a new campus development in East London due to open in 2022. Envisaged as ‘skate dots’ these interventions aim to form a series of interlinked architectural punctuations akin to a sculpture trail. A participatory design process is central to this approach, a local project in which skaters’ active participation is sought alongside professional fabricators of skateable structures. This process is supported in different ways with events such as co-design sessions, DIY build events, design workshops in schools and youth centres. A comms channel appropriate to our audience (Instagram) is essential to publicise the project, amplify the reach of the conversations and to encourage dialogue with the wider skate community. The instagram page is a repository for information sharing, community building and archiving the project’s engagement activities. An online presence is important to build...

In this experimental film, series of overlaid clips explore the material process of learning to control the motion between board and ground: from a shaky, tentative start to a more confident sense of ability. Through this documentation I navigate body, skateboard and the undulations of skatable surfaces. The intra action of filming and using the clips both pedagogically and as the practice is important in exploring the entanglement of bodies and matter. Focussing on the force of matter in an expanded way I consider the agential contributions of surface, wheels, muscle memory and psychological processes with Barad’s (2012) conception of human and non-human agents. This enables me to reflect on skating as a method for qualitative enquiry into strategies for learning.

This article draws on an art-in-education project in the UK to explore the value of creative pedagogy in the process of urban renewal. I explore the idea that community engagement is not simply about learning as an instrument to produce a person who is ready for active citizenship within a democracy, but rather to enable newly configured communities where an individual’s uniqueness is savoured. Biesta (2006) refers to this as the other community, which contrasts with the idea of a social group in which existing structures are rationalised according to pre-existing rules or values; the other community does not attempt to replicate same-ness. I focus on ArtScapers, an art-in-education project that uses practice research to explore the implications of creative pedagogy on community formation. The exploration of this art project with three UK Primary Schools employs cultural theory to investigate strategies for arts engagement with a particular interest on inclusion. Community consultat...

In contemporary society, a museum without a public is not a museum at all, but that has not always been the case. Museums only began to open their doors to non-specialist audiences 150 years ago. Prior to that, and predating the modern museum, ‘cabinets of curiosities’ would be assembled by collectors. In this piece, I explore the ways in which the museum architecture provides an opportunity for the public to make meaning or construct personal interpretations. I discuss the ways in which philosophical notions of shared ownership have been an important factor in collection care where self-regulation is vital to ensure that nothing is damaged or stolen. Changes in the ways in which policing and prisons were designed affected the new museums that were built for the rapidly changing society of the 20th century. Gallery interiors were designed with clear sight lines to enable members of the public to monitor each other as well as the objects on display. I discuss the idea of self-surveil...

ArtScapers online is a resource for creative practitioners interested in exploring change alongside children. It displays the key principles that have informed the ArtScapers work. There are five core values that define our approach to art in education, these are: slowing down, imagining, co-creating, not knowing, and looking differently. This resource shows how those were explored through creative arts workshops on site. Online resource also includes information about the programme, how to join in and research links to key documents that describe ArtScapers, evaluation reports and research. ArtScapers takes an approach to arts engagement that has creativity at its core. The North West Cambridge Development Art Programme involves research into the work of contemporary artists who have been commissioned to research the site itself, the local landscape and the context and location of Cambridge. It provides a valuable opportunity to address some of the socio-cultural tensions between U...

Creative activism is an approach to education that asks: ‘What can happen when we take learning outside the classroom and think of it happening everywhere?’ Two charities – House of Imagination and Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination – have been asking this question in their creative place-making programmes working with socially engaged artists and communities linked to primary schools in Bath and Cambridge. Young children and adults co-create and speculate about the future of their communities and environments in these different geographical locations. This article draws together the authors’ shared understanding of creative pedagogies and the value to everyone of working in this way.

In this experimental film, series of overlaid clips explore the material process of learning to control the motion between board and ground: from a shaky, tentative start to a more confident sense of ability. Through this documentation I navigate body, skateboard and the undulations of skatable surfaces. The intra action of filming and using the clips both pedagogically and as the practice is important in exploring the entanglement of bodies and matter. Focussing on the force of matter in an expanded way I consider the agential contributions of surface, wheels, muscle memory and psychological processes with Barad’s (2012) conception of human and non-human agents. This enables me to reflect on skating as a method for qualitative enquiry into strategies for learning.

Artists who teach or teachers who make art? To explore the identity of Artist Teacher in contemporary educational contexts the ethical differences between the two fields of art and learning need to be considered. Equity is sought between the needs of the learner and the demands of an artist’s practice, a tension exists here because the nurture of the learner and the challenge of art can be in conflict. The dual role of artist and of teacher have to be continually navigated in order to maintain the composite and ever changing identity of Artist-Teacher. The answer to the question: how to teach art? Comes through investigating attitudes to knowledge in terms of the hermeneutical discourses of ‘reproduction’ and ‘production’ as a means to understand developments in pedagogy for art education since the Renaissance. An understanding of the specific epistemological discourses that must be navigated by Artist Teachers when they develop strategies for learning serves to explicate the role of art practices in considering the question: what to teach? The answer to which lies in debates around technical skills and the capacity for critical thought.

This article draws on an art-in-education project in the UK to explore the value of creative pedagogy in the process of urban renewal. I explore the idea that community engagement is not simply about learning as an instrument to produce a person who is ready for active citizenship within a democracy, but rather to enable newly configured communities where an individual's uniqueness is savoured. Biesta (2006) refers to this as the other community, which contrasts with the idea of a social group in which existing structures are rationalised according to pre-existing rules or values; the other community does not attempt to replicate same-ness. I focus on ArtScapers, an art-in-education project that uses practice research to explore the implications of creative pedagogy on community formation. The exploration of this art project with three UK Primary Schools employs cultural theory to investigate strategies for arts engagement with a particular interest on inclusion. Community consultation is commonplace in urban centres undergoing regeneration, and the potency of public voice can be variable. This article explores ArtScapers as a consultation model in which there has been a process of genuine engagement. Using cultural theory to analyse pedagogy, I assert that creative practices can purposefully draw communities together into mini democracies. It is important to " explore the notion of 'community' in order to understand in more detail what it means to come into a world populated by others who are not like us " (Biesta, 2006, p. 69).

A one-day Arts & Humanities conference at Kings College London, Friday 4th December 2015, hosted by the Department of Culture, Media & Creative Industries’ (CMCI) Research Network for Arts Based Learning & Education (nABLE), in partnership with King’s Learning Institute (KLI) and the Faculty of Arts & Humanities.

9.00-3.45pm, Friday 4th December, 2015, River Room, Strand Campus, King’s College London

Esther Sayers' presentation will explore the pros and cons of peer-led practices and challenge how such learning communities are constituted. Esther will consider the potential for artists and young people in collaborative practices that are interdisciplinary and pedagogically multi-modal as a means to engage with and give voice to a multiplicity of learner subjectivities. In a political and economic climate in which the arts are increasingly marginalised, are peer-led practices the most efficient way to encourage participation from all young people including the increasing majority who have gained little experience of the arts through school?

This forms part of a speaker panel at A Different Game: young people working with art and artists, engage International Conference 2015, Glasgow. Panel chair Stephen Palmer, Visual Arts Officer, Creative Scotland, other panelists are Mark Miller, Annette Krauss and Robin Baillie.

The Goldsmiths University of London Centre for the Arts and Learning (CAL) is a practice-led research centre where knowledge is conceived as something that is co-constructed through action- praxis, practice with theory and theory with practice.  The aims of CAL are to enable, explore and curate critical processes of socially engaged praxis that effect social change through a variety of ways and means.

This is achieved through our teaching programmes including undergraduate, initial teacher education, MA, practice-based PhD, and also our public research seminars, conferences, publications, funded research projects and the curation of our an exhibition/event space. Anna Hickey-Moody is the Director of CAL, Tara Page is CAL’s Curator of Social Practice and Esther Sayers, with John Johnston, is the designer of CAL’s Public Research Seminars.

The intention of this session, through three presentations and then a panel-audience discussion, are to share ways of responsive, located research that draws on arts practice, pedagogy, modes of community engagement and collaboration. These all may be a little different in content, process and delivery; we like to think of ourselves as different chapters but all in the same book.

Anna Hickey-Moody: New Materialisms and Inventive Methods
There has been increased attention to matter in social sciences and humanities research, often referred to as ‘new materialism’ (Van Turin, 2011) or Deleuzian informed methodologies (Coleman & Ringrose, 2013). These research practices posit affective, machinic, enfleshed, vital approaches to research in ways that that embody ideas developed in Continental philosophy and specifically in the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1985, 1987). New materialism calls for a new emphasis on materiality in research – for an embodied, affective, relational understanding of the research process. Inventive methods (Lury & Wakeford 2012), including arts based and visual methods, are increasingly being mobilized to explore the agency of matter and advance vitalist frameworks. This presentation works the intersection of theory and method to develop new approaches to materialist research. While Lury and Wakeford are interested in inventive methods that respond to problems, we suggest that by taking a more ontologically focused approach we might shift what it means to ‘do’ research, or construct a research assemblage and sensibility. The presentation offers an ethico-aesthetics of praxis designed as a materialist research methodology.

Tara Page: The writing is on the walls.
This presentation will be a sharing of the initial threads of an on-going praxic collaboration where we are attempting to explore, understand, question and map the entangled ways and places of artist teacher and it is the mapping of these intra-actions, the action between, that matters. This praxis is conceived as poietic in that it is flexible, dynamic and open, continually becoming and not a thing, object or outcome but spaces of possibilities and potential and is underpinned by new materialist scholarship after Barad (2007) Braidotti (2000) and Barrett and Bolt (2012). The materiality in this praxic-based research is emphasised and also an embodied, affective, relational understanding of the praxic-research process. Through embodied methodologies, with current and alumni MA students and colleagues we are exploring, questioning and attempting to map the practices of bodies with matter and learn who we are, where we are and also how we are as artist teachers. The focus is not on individuals’ practices but the relationalities of learning, bodies- sensation and memory; to become conscious of our ways, materials and spaces- to make the time and the place for a deeper critical collaborative potentially artistic and pedagogic engagement.

Esther Sayers: Pedagogical Arts Praxis on the Inside. 
This presentation explores arts pedagogical praxis, practice with theory that are bound up with higher education learning objectives. Exploring the generation of critical thinking skills with practice in arts higher education learning programmes where young people are empowered to take a critical stance and actively, bodily engage. The embodied discourse that is explored was produced during student-led movement/exploration of space workshops which, by design, were aimed at disrupting the dominant discourse of the university. With reference to critical pedagogic theory and the emancipatory ideologies of Paolo Freire, these new ways of knowing and understanding embodied arts praxis have potential for the emergence of new critical voices.

There is a shared ideology in cultural organisations that is concerned with inclusive and egalitarian practices. The two disciplines of ‘audience development’ and ‘pedagogy’ merge in this context and affect the way in which learner identities are conceived by educators. Those who participate in learning programmes are often unknown to the educator; consequently, an educator must anticipate the learner in order to accommodate their needs and make learning meaningful for them. If the learner is a preconceived entity then they are perhaps limited by the educators’ preconception. This paper explores a number of pedagogic strategies that are designed to listen to the learner and prepare approaches that operate with rather than doing it to the learner. I use socio cultural tools provided by Bourdieu; the critical pedagogic theory of hooks and Freire and combined with Rancière’s ideas about the equality of intelligences to create a framework through which existing ideologies can be called into question.

This thesis focuses on the Raw Canvas youth programme at Tate Modern (1999-2011). Data is drawn from peer-led workshops and interviews with gallery education professionals. The material has been sifted to extract understanding of the ways in which pedagogies imagine and construct learners in voluntary and unaccredited educational environments. The particular educational context of the art gallery, in comparison to learning in formal educational environments, is central to the research. The title refers to Peterson’s (1992) conception of the ‘cultural omnivore’ as an individual whose tastes span popular and high cultures. This term describes the work of youth programmes at Tate Modern whilst simultaneously revealing the underlying problem: that such cultural infidelity is primarily a middle class characteristic. Was the aim of this youth programme to make all young people middle-class? The thesis begins by exploring the historical context for gallery education before a detailed study of theoretical frameworks for the interpretation of art: hermeneutics. Specific interrogation of critical, constructivist and emancipatory pedagogies create a backdrop to the analysis. Audience development and inclusion initiatives are key themes that run throughout the study and are explored in relation to the political landscape, personal ideologies and the academic imperatives of learning in this context. The outcomes point to the fact that inclusion initiatives fail to be inclusive when they employ pedagogies that are not suited to individual learners and rely too heavily on the specific ideology of the learning institution itself. Ideologies define what we do and as such they must be made visible to young people and be open for discussion so that we avoid merely teaching acceptance of the dominant ideology of the time. I conclude that art educators must consider what we are doing for learning and the arts and whom we are doing it for?

Presented as part of the new 2021 Cambridge Festival, Children are Place-makers is a discussion about the work of ArtScapers, a children-centric programme exploring the North West Cambridge Development through the lens of the arts programme curated by CAS Consultancy. The panel includes colleagues from programmes in Bath and Berlin with similar values and practices.
ArtScapers takes an open-ended approach in which creative activity provides new modes of relating to Cambridge as a developing city. It invites children and their communities to join in creatively with the process of change.
This online discussion was chaired by Dr Esther Sayers with opening remarks from Daniel Zeichner, MP for Cambridge. Then with contributions from:
Paula Ayliffe, Co-Headteacher, Mayfield Primary School
Discussing the Artscapers project in Cambridge
Dr Penny Hay, Reader and Research Fellow, Bath Spa University
Talking about Forest of the Imagination in Bath

Andrew Amondson, Artist and Film Maker
Talking about working with children and nature alongside his work with Studio Olafur Eliasson in Berlin.

The session coincided with the launch of Artscapers: Being and Becoming Creative publication.