School in Common/curriculu/a school (is a school, is a _)

a school (is a school, is a pamphlet)
October 2018 — ongoing

Ongoing publishing project in collaboration with self organised learning initiatives Rat School of Art (SK) Trojan Horse (FI) Golden Dome School (USA) Parallel School (WW), School of the Damned (UK), The Other MA (UK), Parallel School (Nomadic), and ParasiteSchool (Nomadic)

As a self-organised school, we want to hear the personal and messy stories of determination, joy and frustration behind projects related to schools, learning, study and knowledge with the intention of learning from them, exchanging ideas, references, thoughts and feelings, to build on a collective pool of knowledge for current and future projects.

A school (is a school, is a pamphlet) is a publishing project based on a set of questions sent in a letter form to various self-organised learning initiatives and gathered in a cumulative format. The questions can be answered in any form (a text, a drawing, a photo, a graph, references, a link or a quote etc.) and should be returned to School in Common.

Image/ School Pamphlet

With these answers we want to document and archive the practices in self-organised education and critical and feminist pedagogies, as many of these projects are short-term with websites going offline and material getting lost in social media search histories. We want to bundle these energies and create a toolkit that can be used by future generations of self-organised learners, and can also strengthen the position of past projects by making their traces visible.

We also see this mateial as a starting point for developing our own program, as it allows us to reflect on collectivity, working together and the nature of self- organising through critical pedagogies. As such, some of the answers we received in Spring 2019 were a starting point for the exhibition Dissident Business developed by the artists Davide Christelle Sanvee and Antoine Guay at Candyland in Stockholm.

Our plan is to continue collecting the pamphlets throughout the years 2020- 21 and publish it in an (online) zine or on a web-platform to capture the ongoing developments in learning initiatives worldwide.