Disciplinary Elasticity and Alternative Practice

This class aims to expose students to many ways of approaching, starting, developing, and leading a practice. This course hypothesizes that only by being exposed to dozens of different ways to grapple with creating or transitioning a practice can someone begin to chart their own path. Apart from charting a path, practice is equally, if not more, about how one negotiates and reacts to unforeseeable opportunities and obstacles. Reaction is as important as action, and they are intimately intertwined. As the word denotes, practice is a form of constant learning and learning from real-time conditions, which the practitioner often cannot imagine beforehand. Only by addressing ‘real world’ market conditions does one learn the skills required to develop a robust practice and start to recognize the emergent market patterns that often define practice. The ‘theory of practice,’ especially concerning domains compelled to engage and create in the physical world, is a quizzical field of study. Attempting to ‘teach’ practice, a process that embodies learning through action, is to make academic something intended to be explored outside the hallowed walls of academia. The theory of how to swim is not the same as practicing swimming. An overly theorized approach to practice removes the student from the actual source of learning while indoctrinating an ideology often supporting the professionalization of practice over the exploration of emergent characteristics of practicing. This course is not about ‘teaching’ practice but instead learning from the experiences of a wide variety of guest practitioners to develop a broader definition of practice and a greater understanding of the types of contextual and self-imposed obstacles that exist, some of which are manageable while others prove insurmountable.