Teaching at the ICA

This week I had the absolute pleasure of walking through the doors of the Institute of contemporary art in London, to teach a one day soldering and solenoid workshop to students from a local school.

As part of the week long residency that speakers corner quartet are currently on at the ICA, part of the program was to reach out to the next generation of designers, makers and musicians to engage them in experiences of learning new skills and collaborating with the band to help build their robot buddy ‘Robby’.

Day one of the workshop schedule was focused on electronics - we covered some simple soldering techniques and ended the day building individual solenoid driver circuits.

I designed these simple boards to have a manual trigger push button, as well as a control voltage trigger input, so it can be driven by hardware sequencers and synthesisers. In addition to these options you can also connect these up to the “midi - solenoid brains” that I have designed and made for the band to have 16 channel midi sequencing capabilities. For more info on these check out the last blog post…

The students were on half term so we kept everything really informal and easy going, the ICA ordered in pizza, there was music and chatting, and it didn’t feel too much like a classroom, which was exactly my aim. We achieved what was needed, all robotic elements and circuit boards were assembled and functioning. With minimal debugging needed!

This teaching style obviously also presents some of its own issues - with moments of different songs playing off multiple phones at the same time, which were only about 3 meters from each other , creating an almighty sound clash! This only seemed to bother the adults in the room, it didn’t seem to phase the students at all! 

I think it’s fascinating and very telling of where the students minds and needs are at. When you give them the freedom to create their own learning environments, the situations are quite different to what the adult mindset normally dictates. At the end of the day if everyone is happy, healthy and students have engaged in the learning experience, why do students need to sit still, be quiet, obey… This type of desire for educators to be an authority over students removes the ability for students to regulate their own space for exploration, play and learning. I think the most important lesson we can ever help facilitate for students in learning is how to engage themselves in self led learning - instilling the idea deep in the psyche that anything that they put their mind to can be understood and learned. An essential part of this is to ensure that the learning experience is suited to the student.

It raised the questions in my own mind.

• How do I learn best?
• what is the sort of environment that works best for my learning?
• How do I construct my daily experience to benefit my learning and my capacity for exploration.

They are questions that I’ve been in a long dialogue with myself about. I’ve known from an early age, long before I could put language to the feeling, that towing the normative line doesn’t work for me. Learning from books is definitely not my primary source for knowledge acquisition, far from it. Despite my love for the books as an object and the tempting promise of whole worlds of ideas and understanding locked within, my brain is drained of energy when I attempt any form of deep learning from books.

I often say my intelligence is housed in my hands, thats where knowledge and understanding feels most intuitive and natural. It’s taken a long time for me to understand and embrace the idea that my brain is wired slightly differently from what was expected of me at school and most importantly that my brain isn’t therefore defective in some way, which is what the school system I grew up in would have me believe.

Given the right environment, an engaging process and practical applied experimentation, I have found an incredible focus and desire to explore subject matter that I would have never been open to learning in a school system.

My main goal at the moment is trying to construct a framework in my life that lets my  brain function in its natural way rather than contorting myself to fit into the normative ways that our country’s working culture hold so dear.

I hope the students found a more informal learning space, where they had the power to construct their own environment, illuminating and refreshing if only for a day or two in the middle of half term.

The win of the day was definitely the enthusiasm from the students in relation to the process of soldering! It’s sometimes easy to forget how magical a process it is when you first get started, melting metal on demand turning it into a manipulatable liquid.

We had some free play time with the soldering irons so they could just see what the process could do without the pressure of needing an electronic circuit to function.

Massive thanks again to the ICA and Speakers Corner Quartet for the opportunity to teach some of these skills and pass on some knowledge. And huge shout out to the students who came and played and hopefully had a fun experience.