Beyond the Lesson: Experimental Pedagogies Today

A conference-festival exploring the diversity of pedagogical practices and methodologies.

Education constantly reinvents itself, adapting to an ever-changing reality. Although institutions such as schools and universities tend to be conservative, the twentieth century saw the work of educators, theorists, and experimental artists—from the founders of avant-garde workshops and pioneers of institutional psychotherapy to advocates of horizontal schooling and practitioners of the Theatre of the Oppressed—profoundly reshape public understanding of what it means to teach and to learn. We look to this legacy as a living resource, bringing together the best of what pedagogy has discovered and an analysis of the possibilities that the present moment offers: artistic, technological, and organisational.

The conference will bring together artists, educators, researchers, and curators. The four-day programme is structured as a kind of looped narrative. The first day revisits the legacy of twentieth-century pedagogical experiments. The second explores schools and the spaces beyond them: summer camps, cultural institutions, streets, shopping centres, online platforms, and even psychiatric hospitals. The third features a critical discussion on the role of neural networks in learning and cognition. The fourth day returns us to play and practices of collectivity as the original foundation of a living pedagogy.

Curators
Lera Kononchuk, Anna Ushakova

Co-curators
Sergey Kochkurov, Stepan Ovchinnikov, Natalia Smolianskia, Vera Zamyslova

Consultants
Sasha Anikushin, Yulia Evstratova, Sasha Puchkova

Producers
Olga Koroleva, Daria Shadrina

Graphic design
Maria Vinogradova, Olesya Voronina

Editor
Anastasia Rondareva