Course
Curriculum
The New School is a centre for free enquiry, where students can determine their own rhythm and tempo through unprejudiced adventure. Instead of binding themselves to the standardising tasks of a syllabus, against which they are measured and ranked according to institutional expectations, 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. The results are gathered by the week within seminars, and ebb and shift under supervision. We believe that working together in this spirit of companionship and trust is the way to foster citizen autonomy and resilience.
​​​
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.
​
The academic year runs from late-September to mid-June and is composed of three terms totaling 32 weeks with additional reading interludes. A yearly cohort comprises approximately 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 programme that results in a unique research project in collaboration with her/his peers.
To bring this to fruition, students are appointed one or more 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 lecture-seminars and classes.
​​​
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 elegant premises in Bloomsbury on a "Friday Afternoon in the Universe" (J. Kerouac), complemented at times by field-teaching and on-line seminars.
​​
For the 2024-25 academic year, the NSotA caravan rolled 100 yards to the north for lecture-seminars hosted at the Art Workers' Guild in Queen Square to take advantage of its illustrious Arts and Crafts-era meeting rooms. Its wheelchair accessible rooms are shall be our home for the foreseeable future.
​​​​​
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.
​​
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.
​​​
The centripetal format gives scholars extended time to ask questions of the speaker following a 90-minute presentation. The seminar is preceded by a 15-minute movement class. The ritual of tea and cake is unfailingly observed at half-time. Conversations often continue thereafter into the night at the neighbouring Queen's Larder pub or on-line.
Critical-Creative Seam Classes
​​​​​
The Anthropocene Lecture-Seminar is complemented by a changing programme of weekly on-line, small-group evening classes known as the Critical-Creative Seam (C-CS). These 90-minute gatherings foster an informal collaborative environment, which allows for a more in-depth subject enquiry. The seminars usually run in subject blocks of three or six meetings, which aim to prepare students for the intensity of their research project work.
​​​
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.​​​​ The Topics page indicates the range of C-CS themes for which classes might be offered during the teaching year.
​​​
These centrally-organised gatherings are 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. ​A number of community spin-offs have emerged from these meetings, including independently-organised reading groups around shared interests such as rivers, food, migration and urbanism, and the creation of the quarterly Resonance FM Sound Collage and end-of-year NSotA Show. ​​​​​​
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, with the essential difference that they can choose to work either individually or collaboratively on their research.
​​
The supervision takes the form of an hour-long, on-line 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. The undertaking might also extend to fieldwork alongside communities under social and ecological stress in the UK or abroad. 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.
​
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.​​​​​​ The ensuing work is 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.
​​​
The broader aim of the curriculum 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 ambition is to foster a hybrid postgraduate-level course and project-based research agency unique to the higher educational world.
____________________________
​​​​
The total formal contact time per student is approximately 150 hours per academic year. This recognises that students should be entrusted to read and collaborate freely and adventurously beyond any prescriptive remit.
​​​
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 the Art Workers' Guild.