Group Project
Project Statement
The American public school system is designed to treat learning as a competitive process, by which schools, teachers, and students are ranked and funded based on standardized testing metrics. This system not only fails to lower academic achievement gaps, but equates learning with memorization, decentering students’ voices and strengths beyond testing ability. Through the design of artifacts, this project challenges our perceptions of the role of education by making legible the impacts and limitations of standard, rote, and authoritarian learning models. Group Project explores how we may instead support public school educators in centering student collaboration, creativity, and agency. Posing the question, “what if the arts classroom operated as a collective?”, this work creates possibilities for secondary public school students to work together, engage with their communities, and inform how they will go on to navigate the world. In order to better prepare students in the face of the mounting challenges of our future, it’s imperative we rethink education beyond competition and information delivery to a democratized method that motivates and empowers our youth.
In this installation, Group Project invites the community to step into and consider contrasting education models’ value systems and corresponding methodologies. The Building Ideas project operates as a live lesson plan demonstration which asks participants (students) to closely consider and expand on each other’s contributions. Through additive questions, responses, and artwork, participants work towards creating a visual map of shared experience.
Artist Bio
Austin Roch is an architect, designer, artist, and educator based in Portland, OR. Their work is rooted in participatory placemaking, from our classrooms to our streets. Existing at the intersection of design-build, place-based activism, and hands-on skill-building, the center of their practice is people: exploring how we communicate, support each other, and build our worlds together. As a member of the local non-profit City Repair, Austin explores how collaborative space creation and practices of care can help create more resilient and connected communities. Their work in education expands this practice by asking how interdisciplinary collaborative and community-based curricula might support student agency and empowerment. You might find Austin hosting a workshop, designing a participatory project, planning a table-top game night, or painting intricate details in gouache. By far, their favorite projects are those created with other people; so let’s make something together.
