Organised by the AHRC’s OWRI Language Acts and Worldmaking project working in partnership with a British university, this Change Lab was held for an invited audience at Tate Modern London on 24 May 2018 from 12 to 2:30 in the afternoon as part of the Tate Exchange Who are we? exhibition on identity and migration.
The Change Lab is a research-led, participatory intervention method developed in Finland and used worldwide to transform all kinds of organisations. Built upon strong theoretical foundations, it takes a practical approach to address complex and often contradictory organisational issues that cannot be solved using mainstream, ready-made forms of intervention. Over a number of sessions, it uses discourse-analysis tools to make sense of current practices, identify tensions and contradictions, and jointly find resolutions. This session zero was intended to showcase the method and pilot it as we prepared to launch a full Modern Languages Change Lab intervention at a British university shortly. At this starting point, the lab involved staff and students engaging in cultural-historical analysis of the various phases of development of their teaching and learning practices through discussion as they co-created visual models of their past systems of educational activity and imagine a collective new model for the future.
A Stitch in Time was a durational work, combining participatory engagement, collective–making, performance and film. This project drew upon the research of Inma Álvarez and Carlos Montoro’s AHRC-funded Language Acts and Worldmaking project, which focused on the transformative and pivotal role of language teachers as creative mediators between languages and diverse everyday cultures. The exhibit also incorporated a live filmmaking element with cameras positioned on one side of the collective table. The film team recorded and re-edited the relational conversations, the detailed craft-making mixed with short interviews with teachers reflecting on pedagogy, practice and the current status of language teaching and learning in education.
