Learning & Teaching

learning though curiosity, practice and critical reflection…

Reflexive

“I am not a teacher!” - Tassy is an artist and design educator, a curious seeker of both challenges and solutions. Tassy’s experience with ‘teaching’ began with training to be a qualified swimming teacher prior to pursuit of an arts career. More accurately though, she first became a student of swimming ‘learning’ through the teaching imparted by a young 11yr old girl, who wanted to learn to swim but had all the challenges of severe physical disabilities, poverty and trauma. Working collaboratively and experimentally the youngster and Tassy tried and tested many techniques to enable swimming for this determined youngster whose conditions included cerebral palsy, deafness and an inability to form speech. From this reflexive learning and teaching experience Tassy learnt to love the experience of education as a dynamic, relational, reciprocal and performative act. This led to a lifelong commitment to education in all its contexts and methods.

Reciprocal

“I learn as much as I teach” As an artist-educator, Tassy has worked in diverse educational contexts since 1988 from early years settings to further education to continued professional development. This educational practice encompasses a range of roles including workshop leader, residential activity leader, creative project facilitator, school art project leader, artist in school, artist in residence, community arts programme founder, education workshop coordinator, university lecturer and art school tutor. Tassy has contributed to number of university and national government education and research projects (including University of Glasgow’s SNAP, Scottish Government FLAT (2004-6, Strathclyde Summer Academy 2006-8, University of Gloucester’s Wild and Away 2009 and Design for Play, Design Skole Kolding 2018) and is now part of the Learning and Teaching for Sustainability Research Group at the University of South East Norway

Relational

“Learning and teaching is a dynamic, context specific act based on multi layered relationships, risk and curious reflexivity or playfulness” - Tassy is now undertaking doctoral research investigating the affordances of performative activities in expanded (both physical and conceptual) landscapes in relation to learning and teaching in their cultural contexts. A primary focus in this arts based research is the role of landscape as both place and occasion in how we relate to each other and the more than human - nature, matter, materials. How do our values, our identity, our ways of knowing and being in place relate to how we structure knowledge creation and dissemination?