Co-Prosperity School

The Co-Prosperity School is an Artist-Run School for and about the advancement and understanding of contemporary Chicago Art. Through guest speakers and class member presentations we will shine a light on the contemporary art scene of Chicago.

One of our goals is to break down the panel discussion dialogue of Chicago’s art and bring it to a more informal group discussion format in which shapers of Chicago’s Art World themselves tell of the contemporary scene. Members can discuss their own work, or the work of others.

Summer School begins June 28 and ends August 2, 2010. We meet on Mondays at the Co-Prosperity School from 6:30pm to 8:30pm. Class sizes are limited. Registration ends June 21, 2010

Upcoming Guests include Daniel Tucker, Tom Burtonwood, Paul Klein, Duncan MacKenzie, and Cody Hudson.

Tuition is $150 for 6 classes. Email coprosperityschool@gmail.comcoprosperityschool@gmail.com if you are interested in joining us or have any questions.

The School is co-produced by Aaron Delehanty and The Public Media Institute

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Freie Klasse Weimar

Are you searching for : new or continuous learning processes, a safe environment to experiment ideas, exchange/validation/professionalization of your everyday knowledge, creative tools for collaborative practices, tangible/face-face encounters.

Freie Klasse Weimar is an offline-on-the-streets open source academy. its highest values are the sharing of skills, ideas, experiences and creative exploration. Here knowledge is driven and redefined in relation to life and passions – not careers.

Freie Klasse Weimar is a self-organized platform composed of people on the common quest to exchange, experiment, learn, share, experience and question together. The primary infrastructures are respect and curiosity. It is open to anyone and everyone. It is built on the belief that every person has valuable knowledge and questions and that we can all benefit from sharing them publicly.

There are no hierarchies. There are no mistakes.

Teach what you’ve got / share what you want to learn:

>>>how to fix a bike, where to hide in Weimar, how to cure back pain, how to roast a pig or write love letters…

>>>experiments in overcoming stage-fright, rediscovering your neighborhood, baking bread, talking to strangers… what have you never tried before?

>>>lectures on accounting, reading from your favorite book, a five minute talk on silence…

LOCATION: Freie Klasse Weimar‘s head quarters for the week will be Baustelle M10, Marienstraße 10, also known as Hotel Miranda. Participants have the possibility to use two rooms of the main floor, kitchen, yard. We encourage creative use of public space and are open to connect to other spaces.

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Tinkering School

3587161754_8756bd6091.jpgThe Tinkering School offers an exploratory curriculum designed to help kids – ages 8 to 17 – learn how to build things. By providing a collaborative environment in which to explore basic and advanced building techniques and principles, we strive to create a school where we all learn by fooling around. All activities are hands-on, supervised, and at least partly improvisational.

Grand schemes, wild ideas, crazy notions, and intuitive leaps of imagination are, of course, encouraged and fertilized.

Little New School

Very amazing film on a off beat School near Copenhagen. John Holt the great pedagogue called it his dream school. You will love seeing the passion of the teachers and the children.

Got this via Brooklyn Unschool

John Holt:

The true test of intelligence is not how much we know how to do, but how we behave when we don’t know what to do
How Children Fail (1964)
The idea of painless, non-threatening coercion is an illusion. Fear is the inseparable companion of coercion, and its inescapable consequence.
How Children Fail (1964)
All I am saying in this book can be summed up in two words: Trust Children. Nothing could be more simple, or more difficult. Difficult because to trust children we must first learn to trust ourselves, and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted.
How Children Learn (1967)
The anxiety children feel at constantly being tested, their fear of failure, punishment, and disgrace, severely reduces their ability both to perceive and to remember, and drives them away from the material being studied into strategies for fooling teachers into thinking they know what they really don’t know.
How Children Learn (1967)
No one is more truly helpless, more completely a victim, than he who can neither choose nor change nor escape his protectors.
Escape from Childhood (1974)
The most important thing any teacher has to learn, not to be learned in any school of education I ever heard of, can be expressed in seven words: Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners.
Growing Without Schooling magazine, no. 40 (1984)

The Mid-Coast Free School

The Mid-Coast Free School is founded on the belief that no one knows everything there is to know, and everyone deserves the opportunity to share the valuable knowledge that she or he does possess. Our aim is to foster a democratic and non-hierarchical environment of mutual education, based in an economy of gift rather than one of profit. Anyone can attend a class; anyone can teach a class; anyone can start a free school of their own.

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school for non-productive learning

school for non-productive learning is a 3-day school project in rum46. We have lectures, workshops, and dinners in the program. The school hours are from 3 – 10 pm with critical and artistic exchange between academics, artists and the audience.

By this project rum46 hope to discuss what it means to be an educated citizen in today’s society. The organization of schools and educational institutions has during the years been associated with the idea of productivity and curriculum. The project examines new ways of educational practices.

The school will be followed by an exhibition presenting works by the participants. The Canadian collective Instant Coffee will alter the premesis of rum46 for school for non-productive learning.

Instant Coffee

rum46

MALMÖ FREE UNIVERSITY For WOMEN

Malmoe Free University for Women, MFK, is an ongoing participatory art project and a feminist organization for knowledge production. We aim to raise and discuss contemporary political issues by bringing together experience and knowledge from various fields. Through experimental, radical pedagogical methods we hope to bridge theory and practice and challenge dominating norms and power structures. Our work has taken the form of readinggoups, workshops, lectures and screenings. MFK was started in 2006 with Malmoe but is now mobile. It’s run by artists Lisa Nyberg, Johanna Gustavsson and more or less temporary collaborators from various backgrounds.

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Alpha One Labs

Alpha One Labs hackerspace was founded in the summer of July 2009. Boasting radical inclusivity, Alpha One Labs superb design aims to provide a safe, clean space for users of all ages and interests to work on projects together.

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NYC Resistor

NYC Resistor is a hacker collective with a shared space located in downtown Brooklyn. We meet regularly to share knowledge, hack on projects together, and build community.

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Mike Kelley “Educational Complex”

“To be a teacher is my greatest work of art.”
Joseph Beuys

Anthony Vidler on Mike Kelley’s Educational Complex
(Mike Kelley, Phaidon Press, 1999)

On the surface, Mike Kelley’s recent ‘architectural models’ evoking his memory of the spaces in which he lived and worked since childhood in the project Educational Complex (1995), signal a natural extension of this long tradition of mutual spatial influence between art and architecture. As artworks they seem to comment on the realm of architecture, even taking on the shape of architectural projects, produced and presented in the form of meticulously drawn and measured models. They might even be seen as dealing directly with architectural issues, seemingly concerned, for example, with the nature of housing or of institutions. This is, of course, hardly a new phenomenon in the contemporary art world; Minimalism, installation art, performance art, Land Art, have all engaged spatial concerns both metaphorically and literally. Kelley’s recent work might then be construed as a simple continuation and elaboration of these preoccupations, expecially as Kelley himself, from the 1980s on, was an active performance artist, and distributed many of his installations within highly elaborated spatial settings.

But the peculiar quality that marks these new works as different, both in characteristic and kind from earlier ’sculptural’ projects is that, in a self-conscious way, they claim, and take on the status of architecture. Which is not to say that they have fully realized themselves as works of architecture; indeed, they stop short precisely in that momentary ambiguity between the possible and the impossible, retain their critical status and their place in art…keep reading