For the first time, School for Poetic Computation (SFPC) teachers and members of our steering committee went on a retreat to reflect on our work and think about our future. The retreat was hosted at the Strange Foundation in West Shokan, NY. In this post we have published our notes and learnings from the retreat.
SFPC is a hybrid school and artist-residency. Our main program is a ten-week immersive session which happens in the spring and fall. The first seven weeks focus on classes, workshops, field trips and discussions. The final three weeks are structured around the Student Showcase, an exhibition of student works in progress and class assignments.
The tension between school and residency models provides fertile ground for students to get exposure to new skills and ideas, and a chance to more deeply explore making projects. For teachers, SFPC is a hybrid school and research group. We iterate on four tracks of study, sometimes passing the curriculums to new teachers over the years. For example, one track of study, the Critical Theory track, was originally taught by Allison Burtch and has been iterated on by Taeyoon Choi, Morehshin Allahyari, and is currently taught by American Artist. Teaching and organizing SFPC has been an incredibly rewarding experience because of the warm community and impact that our students create after the program.
After dinner, we jumped into a group discussion. We discussed:
- Curriculum
- Schedule
- Community
Here are edited notes from conversations between the participants (Teachers, TAs, and SFPC Steering Committee): Sebastian Morales, Tiri Kananuruk, American Artist, Nabil Hassein, Tega Brain, Sam Lavigne, Fernando Ramallo, Matt Jacobson, Melanie Hoff, April Soetarman, Lauren Gardner, Todd Anderson, Brian Solon, Taeyoon Choi. The initial notes were prepared by Fernando Ramallo, and facilitated by Lauren Gardner and Taeyoon Choi. The text is edited by Taeyoon Choi and Celine Wong Katzman.
We speak from the perspective of teachers, administrators, teaching assistants (many of whom are alumni). Most of the conversation has been anonymized except for specific references or personal remarks. Some of the notes are edited as an action list for future teachers and organizers.
Curriculum
We offer classes on software, hardware, critical theory, poetry and professional development. Are there similar topics that come up in classes? How do we tie those together? How do we help students work between and across classes? We don’t define “poetic computation” as a static concept. Instead, each class is an expression and exploration of its possibilities. There are a lot of opportunities to have homework and class activities inquire deeply into poetic computation.
Overlaps — One thing that happened this session was serendipitous overlaps: Sam covered a topic in Scrapism and we talked about a similar topic in Zach’s class Recreating the Past. Students enjoyed combining that overlap. Teachers didn’t know in advance and improvised as they went. Sam noticed that Recreating the Past was using OpenCV, so he showed the students OpenCV in Python to combine it. It was a happy accident and seemed to go well.
Students contributions — it was great to see homework assignments that spanned lessons across classes. Students come up with cool things on their own (for example, Galen’s poem for hardware class related to a reading in the critical theory class). Another example of a student coming up with an interesting, self-motivated project between classes was Elizabeth’s exploration of fashion through image averaging in Sam’s class and writing about it in an essay she contributed to the Code Poetry zine.
Schedule
The question is still: How challenging and intense is SFPC supposed to be? How stressful and intense should it feel to be a student? How do we feel about the schedule and workload as teachers?
TAs recalled their experiences as student s — “It’s as hard as I wanted it to be. If I wanted to stretch yourself, I could. If I didn’t, it was okay. I liked the communal cooking, people taking care of each other, telling each other to sleep and practice self care.” It’s important to maintain that culture of care. SFPC can be really hard as long as the students are taking care of themselves. It’s okay if they don’t finish every assignment. It’s good to have things outside of SFPC, art shows, gallery, space for extra office hours, resources.”
In a larger perspective, balance of work and life is important. If students feel overwhelmed with homework they won’t be able to use the resources. It’s natural that different students focus on different classes. The curriculum should be thorough and nuanced enough for them to do this. Generally, SFPC should not be stressful like engineering and architecture school. But in some cases, when the curriculum was too loose, when teachers were not as present, the cohort didn’t gel very well. It wasn’t a good experience without enough structured offerings. Teachers should provide as much as they can.
Clarity — Melanie organized a short session and discovered office hours were more popular as the session progressed. Some students didn’t understand what office hours were for. It’s important to say whether just coming to chat is okay or if a student has to have a question in mind. Students in Code Societies had their own office hours for other students to see them. In the feedback forum, they wished that practice had been established earlier because they got so much out of it. Melanie would set examples of what to talk about (eg. career path after sfpc, a reading, etc.) and reminded students sign up a day before. We had to constantly remind students to sign up during the longer sessions too.
3. COMMUNITY
We have over three hundred alumni in our network now. It’s a fair mix of international and New York-based folks. We want to figure out ways to keep them involved and get their support to diversify our student body and community. We’ve been making strategic efforts towards diversity and inclusion for a few years. However, we hope to do better outreach and prioritize diversity and inclusion to work towards a better racial and gender ratio in our community.
Finding existing communities — What communities already exist that we can reach out to? We could travel to different neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, where we live, and do workshops to spread the word about SFPC. A good example of another institution that does this is the Wikimedia foundation. They host events aimed at specific audiences (e.g. edit-a-thons for women) and these events take place in public spaces like libraries and community centers.
The ten week immersive is tightly connected to our mission: “More poetry, less demo,” which provides transformative learning experiences to our students. The ten week program accomplishes something really unique and we don’t want to change it too much. But there’s mission-based work that can bring diversity to our community. What makes SFPC a more well rounded experience? Shorter sessions are opportunities for new people to become engaged with the school in the long term. How can we extend a mission-based approach with shorter sessions?
Tuition — There is one base price that can be subsidized by 50% for students in need. Because the cost of our operations (rent, utilities and staff) is increasing, we have to raise our tuition. That might be prohibitive for some. Would a sliding scale model offset those costs? At Brooklyn Free School, the sliding scale is based on your tax return reports, which is the most fair possible way. Tuition is anywhere from $0 to $30,000. The student body is more diverse than any other school in the neighborhood because of that model. A third party handles the tax paperwork.
If we want to change the culture of technology, we need to be proactive about diversity and inclusion, which will take effort and resources. We have to figure out ways to get funding that doesn’t conflict with our mission. We can’t expect people in financial need to pay our tuition and stop working to attend. We will explore ways of getting funding while preserving the integrity of the program and community.
On the second day, we discussed the logistics of proposing and organizing smaller sessions and our plans for 2019 onward.
Special thanks to the Strange Foundation and Willa Köerner for hosting us.
