ASchool seeks to generate critical pedagogies by workshopping, experimenting with, and developing open syllabi, collaborative teaching and learning, strategies, and methods of collective knowledge creation and negotiation. Artists, activists, students, teachers, and researchers are actively included to foster the collective endeavor of emancipatory and diverse study. Using open-source infrastructure, experimental approaches, and the active involvement of local partners, the school will create frameworks for new curricula and learning environments, which will later be implemented at network partner institutions.

The School investigates the media-technical conditions of educational practices, both within and beyond academia. It examines the technical as well as the institutional, cultural, and political conditions of how we talk about, teach, and understand media today. In line with the long history of critical pedagogy, it seeks to develop a para-academic understanding of media studies in response to the growing influence of machine learning processes, emerging data worlds, and the diversification of media knowledges.

The workshop at transmediale explores the tools of pedagogical practice, particularly from the perspective of those who teach in the field of media studies. It invites participants to share and critically reflect on the technical infrastructures mediating learning/teaching environments. What kind of proximities and distances are inherent in how we teach because of the infrastructures we rely on and what are they productive for? As more and more of our educational infrastructure is capitalized, we want to examine the implications and consequences of this condition. In order to promote open education as well as a ‘critical media literacy’, the workshop seeks to reflect on alternative tools and infrastructures of para-academic education.

ASchool network members and invited participants for the workshop at transmediale are Clemens Apprich, Ren Loren Britton, Djamila Grandits, Fabian Hesse, Goda Klumbyte, Naoki Matsuyama, Valerie Messini, Nelly Y. Pinkrah, Michelle Pfeifer, Carolina Pinto, Sophie Publig, Mikkel Rorbo, Denise Sumi, Nikola Supukovic, Mitra Wakil, and Stefanie Wenner.