In this essay the authors provide arguments that teaching is an art and that teachers can learn much about their trade from a careful study of the performances of other artists. Artists and teachers have the same basic challenge: in order to be successful, both groups have to obtain and retain peoples’ attention. This also holds for popular music artists. Ten female student teachers specializing in the Pre-school and Foundation phases of schooling (four-to-six-year olds), and six lecturers from the Faculty (...) of Education at the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa, participated in a workshop at a local game lodge. During the workshop, videos of ABBA songs and Mamma Mia! The Movie were analyzed and discussed. The theme of the workshop was “Being an Excellent Teacher: Appreciating ABBA.” The 4D-cycle of Appreciative Inquiry– Discover, Dream, Design and Destiny–was used as a methodological framework to identify numerous positive themes with possible classroom applications from the songs and the film. These themes were then connected to educational theory and embedded in the insights of Benny Andersson, Björn Ulvaeus, Judy Cramer and other people involved with ABBA. A reflective report by one student teacher about the impact the workshop had on her views of teaching and an excellent class that she presented is also included. (shrink)

Autonomous labor and its attendant values have now become familiar tools of neoliberal capitalism: work has become freelance, flexible, mobile, project-based, hybrid and temporary. If these conditions are novel to the general economy, this way of working is not new to artists, who began experiencing these precarious conditions long before Post-Fordism was a buzzword. The contributors to Mobile Autonomy, drawn from a variety of disciplines including art, political philosophy and sociology, examine the alternate working methods and economic models developed, in (...) theory and in practice, by artists and other creative professionals to make artistic work viable in contemporary social, economic and political conditions. (shrink)

Toward the end of his monograph The Craftsman, the American philosopher Richard Sennett describes two different ways of building a house.1 The designer of the first house is the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the designer of the second house is the architect Adolf Loos. Though both men embrace the same principles of the New Realism—"purity," "simplicity," and "honesty"—the results of these two builders are fundamentally different. Wittgenstein was not satisfied at all with his abode in the end. Though he says (...) it has "good manners," he accuses it of lacking a great deal of "primordial life." Therefore the Jewish philosopher will never build a house again, apart from his hut in Norway and his one house on the .. (shrink)

Play is becoming increasingly central to our society. This is not only confirmed by the excessive attention for sports in mass media. In the corporate world also, particularly in management, the importance of play is acknowledged, as well in, for instance, role training, meeting skills, and team-building. The annual “outward bound” business retreat often includes group play. Metaphorically as well, life and professional life have come to be viewed as a game. Without batting an eyelid, speculators play their virtual game (...) in the financial markets as if they were no longer aware that their actions also affect the real economy. More and more people increasingly lose themselves in play. Since the 1950s, play has also... (shrink)