Course
Curriculum
The New School is a centre for free enquiry, where students can determine their own rhythm and pace through unprejudiced adventure. Instead of binding themselves to the standardising tasks of a syllabus, against which they are measured and ranked according to the accuracy of regurgitation, our students blaze their own trails under sympathetic guidance. As well as write, they can paint, film, sew (or sow) or perform to inscribe their findings. Informed by collective seminars and reading groups, the results are gathered by the week and ebb and shift under supervision. Through developing a critical-creative voice, and working together in a spirit of companionship and trust, we believe they will find autonomy and resilience as citizens.
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The curriculum comprises an open-ended series of one-year, stand-alone programmes, designed to allow students to combine their studies with life’s wider obligations and nourishments, such as family and work. We were delighted - and pleasantly surprised - to see that 50% of the 2022/23 debut cohort applied to return to NSotA the following year to continue working with us. Several of them expressed a desire to return for a third year, to be joined by returnees from 2023-24. This has fostered an invaluable sense of fellowship and continuity.
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The academic year runs from late-September to mid-June and is composed of three terms totaling 32 weeks with additional reading interludes. From 2024 a yearly cohort will comprise 40 students, a number that affords viable grounds for collaborative community. Their tenure at the New School is overseen by the Director of Studies who works closely with each student to co-curate a bespoke study programme that results in a unique research project in collaboration with his/her peers.
To bring this to fruition, students are appointed a number of supervisors from the Ensemble pool, which is comprised of teachers across the UK and the world. These could be practitioners as well as academics with whom students work closely on assembling a portfolio, while participating in a programme of weekly seminars.
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This pattern is designed to allow the in-depth study of an area, alongside the exploration of topics that might not necessarily seem relevant to individual research: an open-minded immersion in a variety of subjects, themes and methods from which new possibilities might emerge. Students are thereby encouraged to think of themselves as researchers from the very start of their time at the New School. The on-line monthly journal, e-flux, and the Documents of Contemporary Art anthology series published by the Whitechapel Gallery & MIT are good indicators of the level at which teaching is pitched.
Anthropocene Seminar: "Friday Afternoon in the Universe"
The connective tissue is the weekly Anthropocene Lecture-Seminar, an afternoon gathering for which students are given preparatory materials. For our first two years, these were held in-place and live-streamed from October Gallery’s beautiful premises in Bloomsbury on a "Friday Afternoon in the Universe" (J. Kerouac), between 2.00pm and 5.30pm, complemented at times by field-teaching and on-line seminars.
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For the 2024-25 academic year, the NSotA caravan rolled 1200 yards westward to the Fitzrovia border, where seminars are hosted by Kairos London, a radical new centre for cultural change at 84 Tottenham Court Road, which is fully wheelchair-accessible. For extra-curricular occasions we shall return to the Gallery and join the Art Workers' Guild in Queen Square to take advantage of its illustrious Arts and Crafts-era meeting rooms.
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Teaching directly addresses the challenges of interdisciplinarity as an approach in and of itself. Seminars are introductory in nature and are designed to build confidence by welcoming in the new and the surprising, while respecting the fact that subject disciplines have established their own formal characteristics.
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The sessions give emphasis to individual intellectual and creative development and collaborative group work, alike. Teaching is shared between Ensemble members and visiting international speakers drawn from multiple disciplines. The seminar is designed to broach the full range of enquiry that characterises the Environmental Humanities.
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The centripetal format gives scholars extended time to ask questions of the speaker following a 90-minute presentation. The seminar is preceded by a 30-minute movement class. The ritual of tea and cake is unfailingly observed at half-time. Conversations often continue thereafter into the night at a neighbouring pub or on-line.
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As the year progresses, scholars will find that their teaching reflects the need to encourage greater freedom and experiment, both within and between disciplines. This is in line with the New School’s principle of the student as co-producer, with a stress upon exploratory process rather than designated outcomes.
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The subject outlines on the Seminars page stand as both indicative single Anthropocene Seminar topics for the teaching year and as possible micro-courses to be co-designed with students as part of their research project supervision.
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The Anthropocene Seminar is complemented by Focal Point. This is an optional, autonomous scholar-led discussion group that meets fortnightly on Tuesdays on-line, in order to sustain connections and support new learning. The group leader changes each time and s/he designates a theme in advance, which may extend to reading recommendations or a presentation. ​
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Project Supervisions
The individual or small-group encounter with an Ensemble member is the centre of our teaching model. This emulates the University of Cambridge’s supervision system and guarantees a level of close attention from which scholars greatly benefit.
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The supervision takes the form of an hour-long meeting in which a supervisor discusses a critical essay or piece of creative work that students have recently prepared in relation to an overall project. This could be an exploratory, even raw piece, which might then be further developed, qualified or challenged. Gatherings intensify in their frequency after the Christmas holiday and are arranged independently by the supervisor and the scholars. The approach is informal, open and conversational without being casual.
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The programme was augmented in the 2023-24 academic year by four blocks of small-group, weekly critical-creative seam classes, as a means of building a collaborative environment and preparing scholars for the intensity of their project work.
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For 2024/25, NSotA pioneered a more flexible and experimental model, which has expanded the nature of the scholars' project research and brought this to the forefront of the curriculum. We have taken our direction from the cohort's independently-organised reading and discussion groups around subjects such as rivers, food, migration and urbanism, alongside thrilling acts of cooperative endeavour, including the quarterly Resonance FM NSotA sound collage. These qualities of self-determination and camaraderie are now formally acknowledged and invested within the New School curriculum.
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Project-work now takes on an expressly collaborative orientation through the fostering of concerted small-group gatherings around shared interests. These will be steadily shaped into multi-disciplinary narratives - integrated acts of critical-creative making and performance - for wider distribution, presented in the first instance at the end of the academic year and published on a dedicated space on our website.
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These arrangements afford the opportunity for even greater range and depth, and might extend to working alongside communities under social and ecological stress in the UK or abroad. This does not necessarily preclude individual ventures, but these are generally woven into more collective undertakings. The example of the Institute of Ecotechnics, the October Gallery's umbrella organisation, stands as an immediate precedent with all kinds of possibilities to be charted.
Project research is intensively supervised in keeping with the New School's established Critical-Creative Seam pedagogy. A group of four people, for example, might benefit from 20 supervisions over the year, which would be given by several of the 100+ Ensemble members. This could, in practice, take the form of a number of improvised micro-courses that might be co-curated with supervisors, as well as a series of one-off encounters.
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The general aim is to configure NSotA’s collective expertise and resources – including the extraordinary levels of experience and knowledge brought by our student cohort - into a form that repudiates the hierarchies and constraints of the industrial university, which cast the customer-student into the role of beleaguered entrepreneur of the self. The aim is to foster a hybrid postgraduate-level course and project-based research agency unique to the higher educational world.
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The total contact time per student is approximately 130 hours per academic year. This recognises that students should be entrusted to read and collaborate freely and adventurously beyond any prescriptive curriculum remit.
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We are most grateful for an arrangement with Birkbeck College, University of London, whereby NSotA scholars with refugee status and a UK residential address can consult and borrow books from its library, which is a ten-minute walk from Kairos.