Education is increasingly conceived of as an instrumental affair, i.e. a technical, strictly measurable enterprise that focuses on learning outcomes, which is thought to be achieved using the most effective (didactic) tools and instructions. Getting to know the world is understood in terms of acquiring particular competences, and the teacher's position in terms of executor of plans and guidelines.  The world is thus placed in the position 1) of objects to be known and 2) as something we can control and calculate. This phenomenon has been severely criticized in terms of a 'learnification of education' (Biesta 2007). Equating education with learning reduces it to a management strategy concerned with inputs and outputs guided by the law of educational excellence, efficacy and efficiency (Lewis and Heyland 2021). From the assumption that we cannot predict the future, but must ensure that future can be made - we want to explore whether teaching and school making can be meaningful if we explicitly keep students away from learning in terms of acquiring predefined competences (Biesta 2021, p. 47). Biesta indicates that if we can free teaching from its focus on learningoutput, we can create other existential possibilities for pupils (Ibid. p.63). From this assumption, springs the idea to imagine a studio school. Typical of the art school are the studios where students work in function of their artistic practice. The kind of work in the studio is related to exercises that bring the student into contact with the materiality of things therefore using specific tools and techniques. The work that ranges from woodworking to glass-blowing, mould making, sketching, recording and processing audio, weaving textiles, etc. is not in the first place to bring things into production, but to make matter tangible, manipulable and free for use. The art studio is that place or opportunity where something within the world is made into a 'thing', proffered and free for new or re-use. This way, the studio is the space separated from direct output and use. Art studios are a way of partitioning off a space from certain obligations that are oriented toward instruction, commerce, and management, and hence towards a predefined destination and output . They are spaces wherein expertise, value and authority are in some sense deactivated or rendered inoperative (Lewis and Heyland 2021). Taking this idea into account, in this paper, we explore the question whether it is possible to conceptualize school making as studio work, and accordingly teacher training as an exercise in creating studio practices. These are situations in which everyone, as an artist, can start working together with ‘things’. These practices are not related to a particular discipline, but are a-disciplinary in spirit, as they pre-exist disciplinary demarcations. The main question then is what are the materials and tools of studio school, and more in particular of studio teacher training? 

Our central research question is: how can we create studio practices within teacher training practices (i.e. an environment that is increasingly organized around learning output and instruction)? Which conditions need to be created in order to transform the school, and the teacher training in particular, into a ‘studio practice’? In order to respond to these research questions we 1) do a theoretical study of the concept of ‘studioing’ as an artistic practice and contrasting it to learning; and 2) stage performative interventions together with visual art students, students of the educational master in the arts, and artist lecturers in the educational master. The performative interventions imply that we set up exercises in which the school itself acts as artist material, but also in which students create situations in which particular spaces or contexts (a café, a taxi, a cemetery, … ) are transformed into studios. Hence, instead of starting from learning input and output, we want to enter upon concrete materialities and situations: not from what we want to do with the materials and instruments, but from what we can do together with the materials and instruments,: what the materials and instruments ask of us, and which gestures are necessary to make the materials speak (cf. Ingold 2019). Hence, combining theory with practice we want to explore a design for the studio school (i.e teacher training) that is practice informed and practice informing theory.

Expected outcomes of the project are: -A reconceptualisation of education and teacher training from the perspective of an artistic studio practice: a practice that disrupts the logic of learning and transform the role of teacher training from a discipline that prepares students to become a teacher, to an a-disciplinary practice. That is a practice in which students and the teacher engage with the material in an un-predefined way. -Our final goal is to install studio school as an ongoing practice that reflects on the possibilities of the school while simultaneously serving as an educational context for students to experiment with the context of the school. Hence, besides a conceptualisation of a studio for teacher training, based on the results of our interventions, we develop a design of a studio school within the school that permanently questions and disrupts relationships within the school -A manual for the use of the school as artist material. A manual that serves as a reflection on the art school as it invites people who are not connected to the school in any way to make use of it.

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