teaching as practice – johnros.com

an extended pedagogical syllabus statement

description

this is a teaching practice built on the belief that learning is never neutral. it operates across three distinct contexts — the school of the museum of fine arts at tufts university, ct state community college: naugatuck valley and studioell. across each of them, the same critical orientation holds: education either reproduces dominant structures of power or opens space for collective reimagining.

the work here sits at the intersection of studio practice, pedagogy and field criticism. it draws on feminist and marxist frameworks, black marxist and black cultural theory, queer theory and art history, disability justice and labor theory — among other traditions in productive friction with one another — to ask what teaching actually is, what it costs, who it serves and what it might be working against — and whose erasure its dominant forms have required. these questions are personal, not institutional. they inflect every syllabus, every critique, every correspondence — but they belong to a practice, not a policy.

the courses taught across these contexts span drawing and painting — understood expansively — with connections to mixed media, sculpture, installation and performance as methods for extending and testing the boundaries of those practices. not as fixed categories defined by their materials or historical boundaries, but as ways of thinking about color, surface, space, time and the body. work that correlates to this kind of thinking is welcome here even when it doesn’t immediately read as drawing or painting. this expanded understanding is not a convenience. it is a political claim about who gets to make art, what counts as legitimate practice and whose ways of working are recognized by the field.

objectives

this teaching practice is working toward:

a studio culture where product is secondary to being in practice — where research, process and sustained inquiry are the primary measures of engagement
non-hierarchical learning structures that redistribute authority, resist transmission models and hold space for collective governance
transparency about the conditions of artistic labor — precarity, visibility, compensation and the vast invisible work that sustains the field
an expanded understanding of drawing, painting and art making across media, dimensions and forms
critical awareness of institutions and their histories — what they make possible, what they foreclose and what they are working to preserve
access as a structural commitment, not an accommodation — learning environments responsive to bodies, histories and vulnerabilities
the development of each artist’s own language — one shaped by their specific obsessions, questions and research rather than by the field’s existing hierarchies of value

land acknowledgment

boston / medford — smfa at tufts

the following extended statement is adapted from the research of erin genia, whose work locating and naming the indigenous histories of these specific sites has made this acknowledgment possible.

tufts university is located on the traditional territories of the wampanoag, pawtucket, nipmuc and massachusett tribal nations, and at the site of the once-thriving native town of mistic. on the tufts medford campus, we are on what european and both enslaved and free african settlers called walnut hill. the mistic or missituk native community chose to plant these trees here to enjoy walnuts every year. this statement acknowledges that walnut hill, along with the larger mystic river watershed and surrounding lands, is part of the ancestral and unceded territory of the massachusett, pawtucket, nipmuc and wampanoag peoples. we recognize that tufts was built without permission on these sites and is a colonial project that disregards these relationships of care, inhabitation and protection. we also wish to recognize that we are sited in the area of what was once a slave-holding estate called ten hills plantation and that tufts benefited politically and economically from the economies of slavery that cultivated massachusetts and other states. here at the school of the museum of fine arts campus, we are in the back bay fens, historically a dynamic wetlands environment where the “quinobequin” and “mushauwomuk” come together. the presence of fish weirs such as the boylston street fishweir discovered during the construction of the nearby boylston street subway station tells us that the local massachusett native american community built and returned every year to both the coast and the fens to maintain weirs and to enjoy harvests of fish and shellfish. this syllabus statement acknowledges that the back bay fens, along with surrounding lands and waters, are part of the ancestral and unceded territory of the massachusett, pawtucket, nipmuc and wampanoag peoples. we acknowledge these legacies as a way to resist the ongoing settler-colonial project, and to stop the continued erasure of indigenous peoples and histories, in an effort to re-center our understanding of the lands that we benefit from through the university as part of indigenous life and culture. we recognize the presence and contributions of indigenous peoples in the student, staff and faculty at tufts.

waterbury, connecticut — ct state community college: naugatuck valley

ct state community college: naugatuck valley sits on the ancestral lands of the paugussett and wappinger peoples. the naugatuck river valley — whose name derives from an algonquian word meaning “lone tree by the fishing place” — has been home to algonquian communities for thousands of years, for whom the river was a vital and living resource. this land was taken through colonial dispossession. the golden hill paugussett people maintain a 106-acre reservation in colchester, connecticut — one of the few remaining land bases in the state — as a testament to enduring presence and sovereignty. this acknowledgment extends to the digital platforms and technologies used in our teaching, recognizing the indigenous communities connected to those places as well. we honor the ancestors, elders and all indigenous people — past, present and emerging — and all who came before us, by choice or by force, whose labor and resilience make these spaces possible.

colchester / eastern connecticut — studioELL + j o h n r o s studio

studioELL operates in colchester, connecticut and across digital spaces that connect them.

colchester and eastern connecticut sit on the unceded territory of the mohegan, mashantucket pequot, eastern pequot and golden hill paugussett peoples. the mohegan and pequot nations maintain federally recognized land bases in montville, norwich and ledyard — living proof of enduring presence despite centuries of colonial violence, dispossession and attempts at erasure. the golden hill paugussett hold a 106-acre state reservation in colchester itself.

studioELL operates across many lands of our faculty and enrolled artists and we hold deep respect for all of them — for the ancestors, elders and Indigenous peoples past, present and emerging whose territories our community works, makes and learns from. We carry this acknowledgment with us wherever the work takes us. We honor all who came before us — by choice or by force — and recognize the ongoing presence, sovereignty and labor of those who sustain these spaces.

new york city — j o h n r o s studio

new york city — manahatta — is the unceded homeland of the lenape people, known as lenapehoking. the munsee lenape, canarsie and wappinger peoples have called these lands and waterways home for thousands of years — long before colonization reshaped the region entirely. the “purchase” of manhattan in 1626 — a transaction the lenape understood as an agreement to share the land, not to surrender it — marked the beginning of a colonial project of forced displacement that continues to shape the city today. the lenape are a diasporic people who remain deeply connected to this land and are its rightful stewards. new york city is home to one of the largest urban indigenous populations in the united states.

we honor all who came before us — by choice or by force — and recognize the ongoing presence, sovereignty and labor of those who sustain these spaces.

learning together

this teaching practice exists inside institutions — and institutions carry histories of exclusion, hierarchy and unequal access. we name that directly. the work we do here is shaped by those conditions whether we acknowledge them or not. we acknowledge them — and we work against them.

the three contexts in which this practice operates are not equivalent. the art school, the community college and the artist-run independent studio are shaped by different economies, different student bodies and different degrees of access to the institutions, networks and histories the art world recognizes as legitimate.

the art school produces a pedigree. it trains students to speak the language of the institution and the larger industry — to navigate its hierarchies, reproduce its assumptions and inherit its lineage. who makes art, what counts as serious practice and whose history is worth studying are questions that tend to answer themselves in predictable ways.

the community college, while ostensibly preparing a student body for the workforce, often patronizes the very people it claims to serve — constraining possibility through its own institutional precarity, reproducing socioeconomic strata and reinforcing socially constructed narratives about who belongs where and what they are capable of. the systems were not designed with these students in mind. that is not an accident.

the artist-run independent studio operates outside institutional credentialism entirely. studioell is explicitly anti-institutional — a critical space built on the belief that practice does not require permission, that learning does not require a credential and that the most generative teaching often happens in the gaps the institution cannot or will not fill. this is both its freedom and its ongoing vulnerability.

moving between these contexts is not neutral. teaching the same course at smfa and at ct state community college: naugatuck valley is not the same act. the bodies in the room are different. the stakes are different. the histories students carry into the studio are different. pretending otherwise would be a form of erasure. what holds across all three is the same critical orientation — but how it lands, and what it demands, shifts with the room.

paulo freire named the foundational problem: education organized around the deposit of knowledge into passive subjects reproduces domination. the alternative — problem-posing education — reframes learning as a dialogical process grounded in lived experience, where teachers and students become co-investigators of the world they share. bell hooks extended this by insisting that engaged pedagogy requires the teacher to relinquish authority rooted in domination — not authority itself, but the kind that forecloses rather than opens. teaching, in this frame, is a practice of freedom that demands vulnerability, care and risk from everyone in the room.

knowledge moves in multiple directions here. everyone in the room brings something necessary — research, practice, questions, lived experience. none of that is secondary. the knowledge this teaching introduces serves each artist’s development — not the other way around.

on access, accommodations and divergence

access is not an accommodation — it is a structural commitment. the accommodation letter model places the burden of proof on the student, requiring them to demonstrate a need the learning environment should have been designed to meet from the beginning. this teaching starts from the other direction. openness, flexibility and responsiveness to the full range of bodies, histories, economies, ethnicities, neurologies and lived experiences are the default — not the exception granted to those who ask correctly.

this is a deliberate position — one that pushes back against institutional models that treat accommodation as an exception to be earned through documentation, diagnosis and bureaucratic navigation. those systems place the burden on the person who needs support, often at the moment when they are least resourced to carry it. everyone deserves the support they need to learn and make. no one should have to justify that need to access it.

i name this directly because i have my own divergencies. i rely on the patience, flexibility and care of the people i work with — in classrooms, in studios and in the broader contexts of my practice. i ask the same openness in return. a room that works for everyone requires everyone’s participation in building it. if something about the course structure, the pacing, the environment or the demands of a specific prompt isn’t working, reach out early. we will figure it out together.

this means thinking about who is in the room and who is not. whose knowledge is recognized and whose is rendered invisible. z nicolazzo’s work on trans students in higher education reinforces this — the classroom is a space where gendered norms, administrative violence and affective labor shape who is recognized and protected. teaching must attend to this. it cannot be assumed away.

mia mingus names this as access intimacy — the felt, relational quality of shared understanding around access needs. it is not a policy. it is a practice of attention, built over time, in relation, through genuine care for who is in the room, what they need to be fully present in it and who has historically been excluded from it altogether.

this does not mean the institution disappears. formal accommodations — extended time, alternative formats, adjusted deadlines and other support structures — are available through institutional channels and are worth pursuing when needed. at tufts, the staar center coordinates these processes. at ct state community college: naugatuck valley, contact the office for disability and accessibility services (odas). accommodations cannot be enacted retroactively at either institution, so reach out early if you need institutional support alongside what this course can offer. but the course itself does not wait for documentation to begin caring. that is the starting point, not the fallback.

community agreement

this is a working document. it is returned to and revised based on what is actually experienced in the room. it holds across all three teaching contexts, though how it is practiced will shift depending on who is present and what the space requires.

hold space for vulnerability and risk. hold each other accountable with care.
use fair and respectful language. allow room for mistakes — we are all learning.
listen to understand, not just to respond. disagree with ideas, not people.
move with generosity. stay open to correction.
embrace discomfort as information. not everything resolves — that is part of the work.
when conflict arises, address it through dialogue. call in rather than call out.
stay present, especially when it gets hard.
use language that is gender-inclusive, anti-racist and respectful of how people identify. language shifts — what feels neutral to one person may carry harm for another. when in doubt, ask or listen.

studio structure

on teaching as living labor

teaching is living labor. it is durational, affective and relational. it does not end when class ends. it is not separable from care, from social responsibility or from the conditions that make learning possible or impossible for a given student in a given moment.

this labor is also, often, uncompensated. part-time lecturers, adjunct faculty and independent educators sustain enormous amounts of invisible pedagogical work that institutions benefit from without adequately supporting. labor should be compensated. this is said directly and without apology — because transparency about the conditions of teaching is itself a pedagogical act.

on the conditions of artistic labor

the art world is structured around vast amounts of invisible work. gregory sholette names this as dark matter — the ecosystem of makers, teachers, administrators, community practitioners and cultural workers whose labor sustains the visibility of a small elite. most artists exist below the threshold of recognition yet keep the field alive. this is structural, not incidental.

post-fordist precarity has migrated into artistic life — this is the argument julieta aranda, brian kuan wood and anton vidokle make, and it holds. flexibility, self-direction and creative autonomy, once framed as freedoms, have become mechanisms of extraction. the artist who works constantly, who is always available, who treats rest as failure — this figure is not liberated. they are captured by a logic that recodes exploitation as passion.

when students are told that product is secondary to being in practice, this is not romanticism about process. it is a political claim — that compulsive production, anxiety around output and the equation of busyness with seriousness are symptoms of a system that does not serve artists. practice, understood as durational, research-driven and unresolved, is a form of resistance to that system. rest is part of this. so is failure. so is not knowing.

on non-hierarchical learning

the traditional classroom reproduces hierarchy through fixed roles, unidirectional knowledge transfer and assessment systems that prioritize compliance over curiosity. this teaching works against that by naming it and actively redistributing authority as a default rather than an exception.

this means rotating leadership in critique. it means building community agreements as living documents rather than posted rules. it means making space for students to lead, to fail, to redirect and to challenge. jesse stommel’s work on ungrading resonates here — grading as typically practiced functions as a mechanism of control that prioritizes external validation over internal motivation and compliance over risk.

in contexts where institutional requirements mandate letter grades — as they do at ct state community college: naugatuck valley — assessment is approached as transparently as possible. in practice, this looks like:

courses are graded on participation, process and documentation. twice each semester students complete a self-assessment form — at midterm and at the end of the term. these forms are the primary instrument for grading. students review their own work, check off completed assignments and assign themselves a grade with a short written justification. the form is a guide for weighing their own progress — and the basis for a grade conversation.

the midterm is a check-in. it is not recorded and carries no institutional weight. it exists to help students see where they are and where they want to go. the final grade is arrived at collaboratively — the student assesses their own work, assigns a grade and justifies it. we discuss it together. the instructor reserves the right to adjust, but the student’s assessment is the starting point.

coursework is completion-based. did you do the work? did you bring genuine engagement to it? those are the questions. the qualitative judgment lives in participation and in how work is presented and reflected on over time — not in any single piece.

this does not resolve the tension between institutional grading and genuinely liberated learning. it names it. the grade is a requirement. how we get there — through process, through risk, through failure and recovery — is where the teaching actually lives.

on critique

critique is one of the primary pedagogical tools of studio teaching — and one of the most frequently misused. in dominant models, critique tends to center the viewer’s taste, the instructor’s preferences or a canon of external references. work gets measured against other artists, other exhibitions, other practices. the artist in the room becomes a student of someone else’s language rather than a developing practitioner of their own.

this teaching operates from a different set of commitments. critique here is structured around the work in front of us and the artist who made it — their language, their intentions, their questions. the methodology is sequential and intentional:

look first. before anyone speaks, we look. we give the work time to exist in the room without the pressure of interpretation.
describe what you see. objectively, specifically, without judgment or interpretation. what is actually there — color, surface, scale, material, gesture, structure, relationship. this is harder than it sounds and more useful than most people expect.
the artist speaks. they set the context — what they were working toward, what questions drove the work, what they want from the conversation. this reorients the critique around their intentions rather than the viewers’ assumptions.
critique through their lens. from this point, the conversation stays close to the artist’s stated language and intentions. the question is not “what would i do” but “how can we best support this specific practice, in its own terms.” external references — other artists, other exhibitions — are set aside. we are here to read this work, not to position it within a field.
support, not prescription. feedback is offered in the spirit of support rather than correction. we ask questions, we name what we see, we identify where the work’s own logic is being fulfilled or resisted. we do not impose our own aesthetic preferences or redirect the work toward our own interests.

this methodology draws on several texts that inform how critique is practiced across all teaching contexts:

berkun, scott. “how to give and receive criticism.” scottberkun.com, 2004.
bread and puppet theater. cheap art manifesto. 1984.
dunn, jancee. “ask this one question.” the new york times, 2022.
kent, corita. 10 studio rules. immaculate heart college, 1967.
lerman, liz. critical response process. liz lerman dance exchange, 1990.
ros, john. studio visit rules. studioell, ongoing.
ros, john. ima working statement. intermission museum of art, 2023.

on studioELL

studioELL exists because institutions are not enough. it is an independent studio teaching framework built on the belief that learning does not require credentialing, that practice does not require institutional permission and that the most generative teaching often happens outside the structures that claim to authorize it.

studioELL operates without fixed terms, borders or institutional rhythms. sessions happen when the work calls for them — through correspondence, remote conversation and in-person visits. the model is built around the artist, not the institution. what that looks like varies: some practitioners engage intensively over short periods, others maintain a slow and sustained conversation over years. the pace, the frequency and the form of engagement follow the needs of the practice — not a semester calendar, not a roster, not a credit requirement.

structure determines what institutions can offer. studioELL exists in the gaps that structure leaves open.

it is also, like all independent educational work, precarious. it is sustained by the same invisible labor it seeks to make visible. this is named not as complaint but as context — because understanding the conditions under which teaching happens is part of understanding what teaching is.

reading

pedagogy

brown, adrienne maree. holding change: the way of emergent strategy facilitation and mediation. ak press, 2021.
freire, paulo. pedagogy of the oppressed. continuum, 1970.
hegyi, dóra, zsuzsa lászló and franciska zólyom. creativity exercises: emancipatory pedagogies in art and beyond. tranzit.org, 2021.
hooks, bell. teaching to transgress. routledge, 1994.
hooks, bell. teaching community. routledge, 2004.
lara, ana-maurine and drea brown, editors. teaching black: the craft of teaching on black life and literature. 2020.
mitchell, tania d., david m. donahue and courtney young-law. “service-learning as a pedagogy of whiteness.” equity & excellence in education, vol. 45, no. 4, 2012, pp. 612–629.
nicolazzo, z. trans in college. stylus publishing, 2017.
parker, priya. the art of gathering. riverhead books, 2018.
ross, loretta j. calling in. st. martin’s press, 2023.
stommel, jesse. “ungrading: why rating students undermines learning.” in ungrading, edited by susan blum, west virginia university press, 2020.
thorne, sam. school: a recent history of self-organized art education. sternberg press, 2017.

art practice + labor

aranda, julieta, brian kuan wood and anton vidokle, editors. are you working too much? post-fordism, precarity and the labor of art. sternberg press, 2011.
bryan-wilson, julia. art workers: radical practice in the vietnam war era. university of california press, 2009.
davis, ben. 9.5 theses on art and class. haymarket books, 2013.
demos, t.j. decolonizing nature: contemporary art and the politics of ecology. sternberg press, 2016.
hersey, tricia. rest is resistance: a manifesto. little, brown spark, 2022.
jackson, shannon. social works: performing art, supporting publics. routledge, 2011.
kuppers, petra. studying disability arts and culture: an introduction. palgrave macmillan, 2014.
la berge, leigh claire. wages against artwork: decommodified labor and the claims of socially engaged art. duke university press, 2019.
massie-blomfield, amber. acts of resistance: the power of art to create a better world. canongate, 2022.
mingus, mia. “access intimacy, interdependence and disability justice.” leaving evidence, 2017. leavingevidence.wordpress.com.
odell, jenny. how to do nothing: resisting the attention economy. melville house, 2019.
povinelli, elizabeth. geontologies: a requiem to late liberalism. duke university press, 2016.
robinson, dylan. hungry listening: resonant theory for indigenous sound studies. university of minnesota press, 2020.
sholette, gregory. dark matter: art and politics in the age of enterprise culture. pluto press, 2011.
thompson, nato. seeing power: art and activism in the 21st century. melville house, 2015.
ukeles, mierle laderman. maintenance art. edited by patricia c. phillips, prestel, 2016.

marxist critique + cultural theory

davis, angela. women, race and class. random house, 1981.
federici, silvia. caliban and the witch. autonomedia, 2004.
fisher, mark. capitalist realism: is there no alternative? zero books, 2009.
fraser, nancy. cannibal capitalism. verso, 2022.
glissant, édouard. poetics of relation. university of michigan press, 1997.
hartman, saidiya. scenes of subjection: terror, slavery and self-making in nineteenth-century america. oxford university press, 1997.
hartman, saidiya. wayward lives, beautiful experiments. norton, 2019.
mata, irene. domestic disturbances: re-imagining narratives of gender, labor and immigration. university of texas press, 2014.
moten, fred. in the break: the aesthetics of the black radical tradition. university of minnesota press, 2003.
moten, fred and stefano harney. the undercommons: fugitive planning and black study. minor compositions, 2013.
robinson, cedric. black marxism: the making of the black radical tradition. university of north carolina press, 1983.
sharpe, christina. in the wake: on blackness and being. duke university press, 2016.
spillers, hortense. “mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: an american grammar book.” diacritics, vol. 17, no. 2, 1987.
weeks, kathi. the problem with work: feminism, marxism, antiwork politics and postwork imaginaries. duke university press, 2011.
wynter, sylvia. “unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom.” cr: the new centennial review, vol. 3, no. 3, 2003.

additional references

ros, john. “from quiet to resistance: practice, space and abstraction.” january 2025. studioell.org/gallery/melissa-dunn/8/
ros, john. ima statement. intermission museum of art, 2023. johnros.com/wp-content/uploads/2023_ima_statement_final.pdf

other notes

on refusal

refusal is not a dramatic act. it is not a manifesto or a walkout or a clean break from the systems that contain us. it is something quieter and more persistent — a way of moving through institutions while refusing to be fully captured by them. it is a practice of attention — of framing — of naming what is usually left unnamed.

the refusals here are observations made visible — noticing that transmissive models of education reproduce domination, that grading functions as control, that neutrality is always a position, that care and teaching are inseparable. none of this is new. the structures have always worked this way. what shifts is the willingness to say so directly and to build accordingly — within the same rooms, the same syllabi, the same institutional calendars that everyone else is working inside.

this is what makes refusal generative rather than merely oppositional. it does not require leaving. it requires seeing. and then acting from what you see — consistently, repeatedly, without the expectation of resolution. something accumulates in that persistence. it doesn’t always have a name. it rarely gets credited. but it produces something — a different kind of room, a different quality of attention, a different set of possibilities for the people inside it.

it is also lonely. working against institutional logics from inside institutions means operating in a space of ongoing friction — between what the institution demands and what the practice requires, between legibility and integrity, between the language the field recognizes and the language that actually fits. emancipatory language gets absorbed into institutional branding. radical pedagogies become selling points. the co-optation is constant and often subtle.

the classroom is not the revolution. but it is a site where alternative forms of relation can be rehearsed — where students can practice thinking differently, making differently and being with one another differently. that rehearsal matters. it accumulates across students, across years, across contexts. it does not resolve anything. but it keeps something alive that the institution would otherwise extinguish.

that is not nothing. in the current moment, it may be everything we have.

love and care as resistance

love and care are not soft ideas here — they are acts of resistance to tyranny, exclusion and domination. care is active attention to one another, to the land we occupy, to the histories we inherit and to the futures we shape. love is commitment to equity, justice and solidarity.

in this classroom, care means listening, supporting and holding one another accountable with compassion. love means cultivating belonging for those historically excluded from artistic and educational spaces.

together, love and care sustain our practice and protect against the forces that divide and silence.

this is unfinished

this statement is unfinished by necessity. it will be revised by experience, by the students encountered across all three teaching contexts, by ongoing doctoral research and by the institutions this practice continues to work within and against. it is offered here not as a conclusion but as a position — one held with conviction and open to transformation.

john ros is an artist, educator and doctoral researcher working across studio practice, pedagogy and field criticism. they teach at the school of the museum of fine arts at tufts university and ct state community college: naugatuck valley and run studioell, an artist-run independent studio art school.