An Improvised Pedagogy - what is that ?

A pedagogy of improvisation becomes the theme in Chapter Six of Art, Artists and Pedagogy where David Lines writes on jazz improvisation. Citing his own experience in playing jazz, Lines, with reference to A Thousand Plateaus (1987) by Deleuze and Guattari, discusses the act of improvisation and the sense of not knowing where the improvisation will go.

Affirming a form of making that can be seen as an apprenticeship, each player Lines sees as unsettling the taken for granted as they respond to each other in the music. Seeing free jazz as a way of life, an embodiment, Lines refers to this as ‘cultural work’. Alluding to Gert Biesta, Lines sees players lose their sense of direct control, or as Lyotard described it a ‘synchronic’ relation connecting to the music requiring an openness in their approach.

As in Biesta’s writing in Art, Artists and Pedagogy, Lines suggests that we be alert to the ‘middle ground’, where resistance is actioned between others. With reference to the origins of jazz, Lines sees the politics in the movement away from capitalist enslavement, transforming the educational process. It is through art that we may challenge educational theory, Lines exemplifying this through his illustration of musical elements.

This chapter calls for a re- appraisal of relations in education, an alertness to the political and cultural educational space and the unforeseen, so that a new image of thought may arise to capture transformation as it occurs.

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