meine nicht nur private Antwort, denn vielleicht interessiert es auch andere:
“Teaching is not possible.“
“But learning is.”
Anlässlich der Verleihung der Ehrendoktorwürde "Doctor of Letters" am 20. Sept. 2014:
I was fourth of five children and unlike my brother and sisters I opted out of taking further education and apprenticed to a small country pottery family in Mashiko, Japan. I was 19.
I came across this pottery village a year before almost accidentally during the travel north of Japan with two of my high school friends. At that time I had already graduated from senior high and was attending a private preparation course for the art college entrance examination intending to study product design. After returning a few more times to this village over the course of next 6 months, to play with potters wheels I decided to become a potter and persuaded one peasant potter family to take me in as general helping hands. It was my own decision and I arranged everything by myself. I was relieved and grateful that my parents did not object to my decision.
I never looked back since, so to speak. I stayed with this family for two and a half years then an opportunity came and I started my own pottery. After 10 years in Mashiko I came to England. It was 41 years ago, 1973, and I was 29. I am glad to report to you that I am still here and I am still enjoying making pottery. But like any other life, I had my fair share of ups and downs. One of those downs was saved by an offer of teaching in 1978. Knowing nothing about ceramics education, I accepted this offer purely for money and accepted it enthusiastically. I was that desperate at the time.
The financial crisis was narrowly avoided by this offer but the other even bigger crisis was still there. I was losing faith in pottery. Pottery was no longer exciting me. I am not here to tell you my life story. If you have such a strange interest, go to the British Library Oral Archive on the internet. Nearly 70 hours of such obscenity was recorded over last few years and available on line from this autumn. In this 70 hours I spent almost 5 hours talking about education. And I am planning to condense this 5 hours to 5 minutes here today. Because I thought the subject is appropriate for this occasion!
Although I said I took an apprenticeship it was nothing formal. People there did not teach me anything, but allowed me to learn. And I have learned a lot about the practicality of making pottery, but some other aspect of ceramics such as the chemistry of, the science of, the history of and the art of ceramics I was determined to educate myself. I relied largely on books, museums, occasional public lectures for such porpoise. I never had tutorage or guidance of any kind from anybody else apart from a few friends I developed in this village. In other words I have never been taught. Yet here I faced the situation of being paid to teach! What is the teaching? that was the question, and I had no idea.
Obviously this school, offering me a job, must have thought I had some thing to teach, so I started to check what I already knew. That was remarkably difficult. It is true that trying to find out what you don’t know is impossibly difficult. That is because by definition what you don’t know what you don’t know. Until you face a problem that is. Then you know something you don’t know. And a potter’s life is full of those problems. So I always lived with a bunch of things I didn’t know but I should know. Although I solved those problems one by one as much as I could and I was good at it, new problems were popping up all the time. They still do even after a half a century in business. So I was always aware of what I did not know. That was a part of my life. On the other hand you never think about ‘what you do know’ because there is no issue there. You take this for granted. But the teaching seems to deal with this, ‘what you know’, and I was unfamiliar with that.
So I started conscious observation of what I did in my studio. “What I did”, “how I did” and “why I did” to be precise. I also referred to my old note books, diaries and logbooks. I started to reread my old collection of ceramics books and even bought a few new books. Gradually things were coming back to me. Great, I have something to teach after all. But I begin to see much more in it. I saw a lots of mistakes I made in my past. I saw that some of success could be improved upon. On top of that I began to see some trace of pattern emerging in my problem solving. Eventually I recognized the nature of this pattern. This was “the Design Development Methodology” of which I have been taught while I was attending that private preparation course for the art college entrance examination, but not at this school. During this period I was attending an evening class organized by Art Appreciation Club of my old senior high school. This Club established a kind of tradition that a student who is accepted to Tokyo Art University will volunteer to be a tutor of weekly evening tutorial class for one year for club members to prepare for the art college exam. I was never a member of this club while I was at school but since I was aiming for an art school I was invited to join. This was 2D design exercise and a typical project went like this. “Pick a summer vegetable or vegetables and draw 2D design composition on that theme”. Typically one project went over two weeks. First week you go there with your design ideas on A3, 50 leaves sketch book. second week you come up with final design, coloured on A2 water paneled paper. This first week exercise when I attended first time shocked me. You were supposed to come up with 100 ideas, 50 leaves 100 pages. And explain how you’ve arrived at the final design. Those evenings were nice and cosy gathering of 5 or 6 people but my first one was not. To my amazement every one of them came up with minimum of 80 ideas except me. I managed meager 20 something. And my explanation couldn’t convince myself. If I look back even now it was a miraculous class that our volunteer teacher was only a few years senior than us and himself was still undergraduate student. Yet he could suggest us a million more possibilities for each of us and some of them were so remarkable yet so obvious, that you say to yourself “Why on earth didn’t I know that?” After a few months or so of embarrassments I begin to understand the logic of it and started to enjoy such evenings. What surprised me even more was how easy it was to lean this skill of expanding ideas and picking up most promising thread among them. It is a skill of systematic thinking. I shared those enlightening weekly evenings almost for 8 months with others. When I gave up the idea of going to the art college, I stopped going to this gathering and eventually forgot all about it.
But this exercise of “trying to know what I know” brought me the memory of those sweet evenings along with “the Design Development Methodology” complete. May be its like riding a bicycle for the first time after 30 years. The only thing I needed was to pick up the bicycle. I had no hesitation using this method for my pottery teaching, although it needed some modification, it was not a big deal. In fact I myself started to use my modified version of ‘the method’ for my own project with success. I became an enthusiastic preacher who practiced what he preached. Which was not as good as a preacher who preached what he practiced but a lot better than a preacher who preached what he did not practice. But real fun began when I started to ask myself ‘why I make what I make’ question. As I promised before, I am not telling you my life story here so I am not going start this but you try this at home. After giving yourself a few handsome well considered answers why you make what you make, just keep insisting upon asking ‘but why’, ‘but why’, ‘but why’. It’s scary isn’t it? It is, and ugly, and interesting.
This search of ‘what I know’ made me acquainted with myself like somebody I never knew and that’s fascinated me. Along with other things I also discovered my love of clay, which I thought I have lost. What a magic. Teaching is good for you and it’s cost you nothing. Sorry, you get paid for it. Find the opportunity and teach. That’s my suggestion to you all. ---- “Ah,,, Mr. Yasuda you talk about the virtue of teaching but surely teaching should be to do with the student, isn’t it?” --- “Dr., Dr. Yasuda not Mr.,, If you don’t mind?!!! “ ---- I know that’s a tough one. And if I have to be honest, I have to be brunt about it here.
“Teaching is not possible.“
“But learning is.”
I have already mentioned a miracle. Despite my claim I made, that I have never been taught I have been taught once by this undergraduate student. What he taught and what I have learned was in fact “How to learn”. “Design Development Method” was a “method of learning”. Learning is what I did for all my life, and I knew a thing or two about it. Including shortcomings of learning without guidance. So I have taught my students how to learn. That’s it: I taught ‘how to learn’. I thought that was the only worthwhile thing to teach and learn. Well, if you say ‘to teach how to learn’ is the teaching” then I must have been reinventing a wheel all these years. And this ‘reinventing a wheel’ maybe the biggest pit hole you may fall in if you don’t have a formal education. --- This is my punch line for this evening’s shaggy dog story, and you may laugh now and be aware.
My father died many years ago, he was 72. I will be also 72 next year. My mother passed away 12 years ago and she was the grand old age of 89. At her funeral in Tokyo my younger sister told me that my mother expressed a regret that she and my father was not able to send me for university. They were financially stretched at that time. This was news to me because to take an apprentice ship was my own choice and it made me sad to know they suffered such a guilty conscious for all those years unnecessarily.
I am most humbled to be given this honor. It was truly beyond my imagination.
Although they are no longer here I like to dedicate this award to my parents.
Thank you
Hier noch ein Link zu einem Film - "Made in China"
viewtopic.php?f=17&t=4611
Leider, wieder nur Englisch.
Wer etwas dieser Art in deutscher Sprache kennt - bloss her damit
