Troubling Territories: Discomfort in Co‐Construction

Abstract

The Valuing Voices project (funded by Paul Hamlyn Foundation) offered an opportunity to reconsider the territorial boundaries of learning in the arts by a group of teachers, artists, pupils and university lecturers. This article will consider the importance of the troubling or discomfort exposed within the processes of learning over the life of the project (before it was paused due to the 2020 CO‐VID 19 pandemic). There is considerable interest in defining zones of discomfort as a means of understanding the importance of resilience and determination in learning. Much of this stems from the work of Vygotsky, who described zones of proximal development. His work has subsequently been applied to learning activities in general and his particular interest in learning in art has been overlooked. Paul Hamlyn Foundation recognised the challenges of developing effective teachers of art and wanted to provoke some alternative opportunities by funding a number of projects across the UK. Valuing Voices was one of these which grew from an existing alliance of schools (catering for a range of additional needs), a number of artists (visual, sound and movement) who had previously only worked in mainstream educational settings and university staff specialising in art education. An earlier project had facilitated some dialogue within their traditional roles, but Valuing Voices set out to explore something more challenging as everyone involved became part of a co‐construction team. Much is written about the processes of collaboration, teamwork, communities of practice and related models of multiple learners operating together. This article sets out the additional lessons learned by all Valuing Voices participants occupying the zone of learning originally described by Vygotsky, where there was no ‘knowledgeable other’ to enable and further the learning process and all must deal with feelings of inadequacies and immense uncertainties. This was produced in recognition that little literature has been published on the process of co‐construction itself. The structure adopted here sets out the issues, the development of the two‐year project and the emotional and cognitive aspects explored along the way.