Tavian Hunter reflects on the Art Educators Lab event from 30 November 2024
The Creative Mapping: Art Educators Lab felt less like a workshop and more like a collective pause. A moment to breathe, listen and sit with the complexities of what it means to teach, learn and make space through art—especially at a time when so many educators are exhausted.
Meera Chauda delivering a presentaion.
We began simply. Introductions moved beyond names and job titles, with Meera Chauda using postcards from Tate as prompts to share memories, emotions and histories. What emerged was striking: images became portals to our lived experience. People spoke about protesting in their youth, queerness and Blackness as states of being and shyness, trust, abstraction, home, and loss. Words and images folded into one another, reminding us that visual literacy is inseparable from language, memory, and feeling.
There was something grounding about starting here and acknowledging that education is never neutral. It is shaped by where we come from, what we carry, and what we are still trying to make sense of.
That grounding deepened as we moved through the Stuart Hall Library with Sepake Angiama. Listening to Pauline Oliveros, to Ursula K. Le Guin and fragments of an education: documenta 14, became an embodied
act. Reading together, overlapping voices, pausing in shared silence. When Sepake closed by saying that “a radical act of education is just listening,” it landed not as a slogan but as a practice we had already begun.
The session on traversing hierarchy, led by Kaitlene Koranteng asked us to think about archives differently. Not as fixed systems of order, but as living, sometimes resistant spaces. Writing keywords on post-it notes, feelings, textures and instincts, challenging traditional categorisation. Some found it difficult. Others felt that “the books found me.” Conversations emerged about inaccessibility, dense formats, outdated media, and the tension between knowledge created for validation versus knowledge that is felt, shared and transformative.
Kaitlene Koranteng address audience
Mapping became a metaphor for learning itself: sometimes disorienting, sometimes guided by instinct rather than instruction. Ideas like “anti-category,” “pathologies,” “inventions,” and “intangible books” surfaced, alongside a desire for resources to travel—to move beyond shelves and institutions to where they are needed.
What stayed with me was the insistence that education should not be siloed. That maths and science, art and ecology, archives and lived experience are already entangled—if we allow them to be.
Discussions with Meera on radical pedagogy reinforced this. Radical practice was described not as something loud or dangerous, but as careful, sustaining and rooted in care. Naming things honestly. Practising “radical politeness.” Being concise and intentional with language. Allowing discomfort, sensing, and perception to be part of learning.
The archives session invited us to choose an item that spoke to us as a pathway or direction. Responses were deeply personal: books as conversations across generations, as ways to speak about race, home, movement, and unhomeliness. Institutional memory sat alongside personal memory, reminding us that archives hold emotion as much as information.
The final workshop, led by Exodus Crooks, brought everything into the body. Can I Go to the Toilet? used a deceptively simple question to expose how autonomy is negotiated—and often denied—in education. Through making, discussion and play, we were asked to think about choice: what we give up, what we protect, and how we might practise self-determination within restrictive systems. It was practical, unsettling and quietly powerful. 
At the end of the day, when asked to share one word, people said: nourished, blessed, joyful, resonant, grateful. That collective response felt like evidence in itself. Proof that something significant had happened—not because it was neatly packaged, but because it resisted being put in a box.
The Creative Mapping lab reminded me that education can be slower, softer and more relational. That listening is a method. That disorientation can be productive. And that care—radical, intentional care—is not an add-on to pedagogy, but its foundation.
Browse the Education Archive
Recommended Reading & Resources
Resources on the day
- Tricia Hersey, Rest Is Resistance
- Kobena Mercer, Cosmopolitan Modernisms
- Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
- Pauline Oliveros, Quantum Listening
- Under the Mango Tree: Sites of Learning
- Shade Podcast, episode: Space
Other Resources
- One & Other – Resource Packs and Boxes
- bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress
- Maths Matters: Using Maths to Experience the World Around Us
- Filter (interactive teaching resource)
- Digital Art Resource for Education (DARE) – Primary CD-ROM
- Growing Up in Hackney (iniva education)
- Portraiture Education Pack
- The Visible and the Invisible: Re-presenting the Body in Contemporary Art and Society (Teachers’ Notes)
Further Reading
- Politics of Space
- Claudette Johnson, Portraits from a Small Room
- Whose Map Is It? New Mapping by Artists
- Arts Education in Secondary Schools: Effects and Effectiveness
- This Paper Is Intentionally Blank
- Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life