Provisionality, Uncertainty, Failure: Working the "Less Good Idea" in an Era of Educational Accountability

• In Event: Pleasure Is Political: Implications of Embodied Making and Teaching for Arts-Based Research

Abstract

Since No Child Left Behind took hold in 2002, a series of federal and state government policies including the Elementary & Secondary Education Act (ESEA), and the recently passed Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), have enacted an ethos and set of school policies focused on high-stakes testing and punitive accountability measures. As a former classroom teacher and a teacher educator who has worked with student teachers in Early Childhood Education programs in 3 universities, I have seen the pressure for preschool teachers to prepare their 4 year olds to be “school-ready”, for kindergarten teachers to ask their children to write persuasive essays (!), and the general trickle down of academic teaching for younger & younger grades in preparation for the onslaught of high stakes testing to come.

The certainty from the top (federal level) to the bottom (local level) that academically rigorous, seated with pencil & paper work, is what’s needed for all children to compete in a global market creates a narrow channel to squeeze children towards uniformity.  There is scant acceptance of uncertainty or failure for teachers, or for children in their assigned seats at tables, in a day divided by subject areas, rung in by a bell that announces the end of literacy and the beginning of math, in curricula often prescribed, and in varying degrees of scriptedness, that recognize one, correct answer, coughed up in a timely manner at planned for intervals.

In this theoretical paper & presentation I draw from artist William Kentridge’s Centre for the Less Good Idea for artists – a “safe space for uncertainty, doubt, stupidity and, at times, failure” (Kentridge, cited in Ruiz, 2017) - to make a case for the value of failure, and to provide an affective model for “uncertain and stupid” researching, learning, making, and being – not just in school but in the world. What might happen with teachers and children if we welcomed the possibility for failure, for experimentation, for play with materials, with the vibrant matter (Bennett, 2010) of a more diverse array of sensory objects and tools? What might happen when there does NOT need to be a correct answer – when instead of competition and tests there is time and space for experimentation, for an  “unfolding” (Stewart, 2007, Kentridge, 2014), for “embodied ideas, of very abstract things worked out in the material world” (Galison with Kentridge in Koerner, 2012)? In this paper, I will share examples from my work as an early-childhood educator, teacher-educator, researcher and artist—holding up my own failures and uncertainties as vital spaces for teaching, learning, making, and action.

Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Koerner, M. (2012, June 30). Death, time, soup: A conversation with William Kentridge and Peter Galison. The New York Review of Books.

Ruiz, C. (2017, April 13). Kentridge opens Johannesburg space for artists to learn by failing. The Art Newspaper.

Stewart, K. (2007). Ordinary affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Author

• Katherine Gordon, City University of New York, Kingsborough Community College