Eduardo Mendes | The Origins and Impact of Art-Embedded Learning
Written by Eduardo Mendes
The construction of the BSc Honours specialization “Awareness & Culture”, based on what I call “art-embedded learning”, is in fact a consequence of my own trajectory and personal gain of awareness on how we learn, how we all emotionally learn, and the need to incorporate such “art-embedded learning” experiences into engineering education.
It has always felt intensely rewarding to me, as a physicist, to have been able to work in the areas of my own choice, in places and countries I selected myself. As well as teaching topics that I love, mainly because of their intrinsic beauty or due to the challenge they provide when sharing “that re-discovery” in every single class with students. But that was never enough. I always felt the need to know more about the world and on a deeper level, in order to understand different societies and mankind in general. In parallel to my career as a physicist, I continued to pursue my personal cultural interests which became naturally connected to, or expressed through the contemporary art scene; most likely because ‘art contains everything that interests you’, and is able to reach you beyond your rational side where you “realise” things rather than simply learn about things.
During my sabbatical in Cornell in 2014, where my host, a chemist colleague, Uli Wiesner, was working with a resident artist invited by the Cornell Council for the Arts at the occasion of the Cornell Biennial for the Arts, the spark finally ignited. When I first met their artist in residence, Kimsooja, we had an immediate connection and understood each other astonishingly well from the very start. Through her artistic works and performances, she was able to engage, or rather embed the viewer into a higher degree of awareness by connecting nature, cultures and technologies. Since then, we interacted extensively and that sparkle turned into a necessity: I have to find a way to bring such experiences to students who are working in the fields of science and technology, and help them to better understand the complexity of the world we live in, the potential impact of their work on the citizens all around the world, and most importantly, to help them become aware of their own choices as human beings and professionals.
Eduardo Mendes is responsible for art-embedded learning in the honours programme and recently received the Henk Dekker Award for innovatively using art to educate and better prepare engineers.
I came up with a formula or system after only a few years and started applying this formula with a first trial, a MSc pilot course named ‘Art, Empathy & Ethics’, which was made possible with the valuable help of Marlijn Helder and Raymond Browne (X, TU Delft). In this course, the students went through a process based on weekly cycles of producing their own pieces of contemporary art. The course, or rather the process, was guided by professional artists. The way the students would create their art was comparable to the way it is done in a school of arts. They debate their art assignments with teachers as well as in groups, and through these specially designed assignments they learn how to frame the concepts of their artistic experience into an essential question related to the impact of new technologies. By going through this process, they learn how to develop and define a particular moral-emotional ethical question and turn it into an ethics essay. At the end of the course, they deliver a final Art Assignment, an Artist Statement and an Ethics assignment that has its origin in the personal artistic trajectory they went through. The students discover and learn how to incorporate their own internal feelings and thoughts to formulate concrete, relevant questions that have a personal, emotional origin and turn it into a societal ethical question.
We are far beyond this point since we use art to promote a cognitive connection to unconscious processes relating to creativity, divergent thinking, changing mindsets, mind openness, identification of biases and with that creating an empathic connection to citizens.
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Eduardo Mendes
My approach to education was, although intuitive at that time, very close to that of Gert Biesta in his work ‘The Beautiful Risk of Education’: “The purpose of education is not only to acquire knowledge, but to ‘come into the world’ as a responsible adult. Being an adult subject is therefore being in the world without placing oneself in the centre of the world or imagining oneself to be there.” Biesta relates this to the concept of freedom -or more precisely, adult freedom- which is the constant weighing of the question whether what we want to do, what we desire, or what we desire to do, is going to help us live well and live well together. That is the reason I chose “Empathy” to explicitly be part of the course content and title.
The most innovative aspect of my approach is ‘how’ we use the process of making art as the way an artist does. Usually, art is used in education in order to simply develop a skill, such as learning how to draw in order to make better graphics or to better communicate an idea, orally or written, how to better organize visual information on a slide show, and so on. We are far beyond this point since we use art to promote a cognitive connection to unconscious processes relating to creativity, divergent thinking, changing mindsets, mind openness, identification of biases and with that creating an empathic connection to citizens. Such an approach matches the most powerful aspect of transformative learning methodologies which implies that the ‘individual transformation’ translates to engagement and action in the outside world. I believe this course achieves exactly that and a seed is planted within students that will last forever.
The formula I found translates an intellectual debate around technology and society into ‘a living experience of a societal, technological, ethical question through making contemporary art’. This formula allowed me to propose other art-embedded learning courses that are grouped in the 20 ECTS pilot BSc Honours specialization ‘Awareness and Culture’. In total, four courses based on art-embedded learning are offered. PhD students can participate as well and can follow the courses as part of their Graduate School courses. The construction of the ‘Awareness and Culture’ program, that I hope will continue as an Honours Program and will also be used as a seed for similar elective courses at MSc level, could only be realised with support from the Study Climate program and the personal engagement and efforts of Young Mi Poppema, a former interfaculty honours coordinator who helped me to put together all the program in a record time.
Brain in a box - By Maureen Boers
We all started realizing that most scientists and engineers who create the foundations of technology, are not aware enough and connected to the social debate about the use or implementation of technologies and their consequences for the world around us and for mankind in general. Within the broad debate, we find three interconnected moments: Science & Technology, Avant-garde Contemporary Art, and Human Sciences & Ethics. In this debate, scholars are inspired by artists who raise relevant questions about the use of technologies and, vice versa, many artists are inspired by questions raised by scholars and produce art works that reach a much larger audience than those of technical publications. The method we use translates such a cycle into a ‘meaningful transformative experience in class’ for those who should be more aware and engaged in questions raised by creating new technologies. Discovering the power of this formula, where a space is created in which the students experience a strong increase in (self-)awareness and consciousness of their potential impact on society, was sincerely overwhelming to me.
