TEACHABLE MOMENT

DECEMBER 18TH, 2020 - FEBRUARY 7TH

CURATORIAL STATEMENT:

Teachable moments aren’t real. Although, for professional pedagogical purposes they are real enough; to formulate methodologies, to establish fixed instances of productive interruption, to name and consecrate improvisation as an ethic. That doesn’t sound all that bad. Does it? 

Then what isn’t real about Teachable Moments? 

Is it the temporal specificity that seemingly undergirds t-m’s? Because out there in the idiosyncratic world they don’t have time: teachable moments are moving targets. They materialize, transform, and ricochet; their provisionality promoting novel experimentation, their mutability a cornerstone in the perpetually withdrawing horizon of inquiry.

Teachable moments create space for rethinking, for cross-examination, and to draw on abstract concepts deploying them not only as method but also as authentic behavior in the heat of the moment. It is the generative collision of authentic world experience and the practice-realm of thoughts.

Some occur in classrooms, when the classrooms look like actual classrooms but also when they don’t. Also, teachers and pupils take many forms and titles can be misleading. Scripts are tossed, roles reverse, mutate, and can fan out across multitudes but also coalesce under one roof, or tree, or scalp.

Teachable-moments, the real kind, have their backs against the wall, forced there by the unrelenting streamlining of educational brandification, standardization, buzzwords as schools-of-thought that flatten curiosity, fantasy, and wandering imaginations. What is the exchange rate of a thing that attempts an alternative lifestyle amidst Education’s neoliberal motor?  As bad as it sounds, and it is, those same toxicities luckily inspire resistance and expose the flimsy push toward creative problem solving, its monetized origins and destinations.  

But teachable-moments aren’t going away. Thus, complimentary tools are needed to make contact with complexity, and to broaden the scope and potential of humyns’ learning-landscapes. Possibly the only feasible compromise is in adopting teachable-moments as inextricable from their temporal, spatial, and cultural surroundings. They become real as real moves through and with the contexts and contingencies of other forms of living and learning. So what are these other forms? How are they different, better, or worse?

Might, in addition to Teachable-Moments, some options be:

Learnable Lifetimes
Listenable Loving
Collective Quietude 
Endless Unfoldings
Trustworthy Touching

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:

Alejandro Acierto, Kris Bespalec, Marc Boyson, Jason Brown, Mo Costello, Seth Daughton and Daniel Ogletree, Meredith Drum, Jessi Faircloth, Carrie Fonder, Lindsay Garcia, Jim Graham, Kayla Green, Jodi Hays, Sara Hess and Jon Swindler, Epiphany Knedler, Karen Krolak, Kesha Lagniappe, Taylor Manigoult and Cath Daly, Bradley Marshall, Joshua Miller, Elizabeth Moran, Paula Nishijima, Greg Pond and Daniel Reidy, Tom Scicluna, Stephen Sewell, Katlin Shae, Art Sokoloff, Max Spitzer, Rotem Tamir, Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovslky, Ruiqui Zang