The material on this website represents elements of individual research by students from the Master of Education in Arts, class of 2021.
The class of 2021 spent a significant part of their two-year study for the Master course during the COVID-crisis, which included several nationwide lockdowns. This unique situation not only impacted our individual practices, but education in general. The isolation stemming from the lockdown made us increasingly aware of physical presence as a meaningful aspect of education, as well as of an urgency to devote ourselves to a collective decision-making process in preparing our research and presentation. Could we maybe collaborate and make the radical proposal to graduate as a group? We searched for common ground, because we felt the need to have some kind of foothold. In our search to stay connected to the Masters and to each other as a group, we experienced the complexities of participating in a collective educational practice for an unknown period of time, while at the same time going through our individual research processes.
What some outsiders to our group perceived as kindness and respect towards one another, eventually turned out to be an inability to come to decisions and an occasional unwillingness to take individual responsibility for the collective process, and we had to abandon the idea of a collective graduation. Whether these characteristics stemmed from the situation in which we were placed, our specific group dynamic, or a combination of both, is up for debate (but really, it was our dynamic exacerbated by the situation). We do believe that this process has influenced our sense of collectivty, and has spurred us to stay in constant preparation for being together.
We tried to make sense of sharing a digital space, and throughout our sessions questions emerged: How could we help construct a better working environment in digital space? What would we all need in order to do/present our work in a better fashion? How would we each like to be present? In what ways are we each able to be present? In one way or another, the individual researches on the following pages were all influenced by this context, either deliberately or because it was impossible to avoid. We hope you will enjoy wandering through this binder and time capsule of a specific historical moment.
This website also links to the overall MEiA Graduation Archive, where you can download a complete version of our graduation research.
If you have any questions or comments, please do not hesitate to reach out to us.
