Welcome to RAPP Lab Outcomes!

ENTER THE MATRIX HERE!
 

How can methods and findings of Artistic Research develop a learning and teaching culture, through which the student’s ability to critically reflect on and in their artistic doing can be fostered? This question forms the centre of the RAPP-Lab project (2020-2023, co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union), of which the final results, working materials and documentation are presented in this exposition.

[Open exposition here] 

RAPP Lab Reflection-based Artistic Professional Practice 

Final Results – Introduction by Evelyn Buyken

1. What is RAPP Lab?

2. What is RAPP Lab about? 

3. What is RAPP Lab’s research frame? 

4. How to use the RAPP Lab-Matrix presented in this exposition?

1. What is RAPP Lab?

RAPP stands for "Reflection-based Artistic Professional Practice". Under this acronym the project brings together the expertise of six Higher Music Education institutions in Europe: 

Conservatorio di Musica Santa Cecilia (Rome),

Eesti Muusika- ja Teatriakadeemia (Tallinn),

Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln (Cologne as coordinator), 

mdw – Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien (Vienna),

Norges musikhøgskole, NMH (Oslo), 

Orpheus Instituut (Ghent) and the 

Association Européenne des Conservatoires/AEC (Bruxelles).

RAPP Lab is a three-year EU-funded research project supported by the ERASMUS+ programme "Strategic Partnerships" (2020-2023). During a series of six multi-national experiments, described as Labs, advanced music students had the opportunity to try out new teaching and learning formats. 

The project focuses on the development of artistic study programmes. It is not or only in a wider sense informing scientific- or scholarly-based study programmes in Music. RAPP Lab is a research project which explores how methods of Artistic Research can inform and enhance learning and teaching settings in artistic study programmes. 

2. What is RAPP Lab about? 

Reflection is a key term and at the heart of the project. But this project is not creating an ontological and theoretical concept of reflection in artistic practice. It asks: How can methods and findings of Artistic Research develop a learning and teaching culture, through which the student’s ability to critically reflect on and in their artistic doing can be fostered?

RAPP Lab does not assume that individual artistic teaching is unreflective. Rather, RAPP Lab emphasizes that sayings like “Do it until it sounds well!” or “Do it like I do!” relate to an old conservatory thinking that belongs to history and that it is the motivation of Higher Music Education institutions to guide students to self-learning and to a teaching at eye-level.  But there still is a need to give concrete examples and research-based hand-on-tools to implement learning and teaching settings in which this self-reflective, experimental learning atmosphere can emerge. And not only directed to teachers, but also to students: How can students learn to get to know, to articulate their own reflective potential? 

And this is exactly where RAPP Lab comes in: It is about developing concrete methods for artistic study programmes that can be used both as fragmented solutions for individual lessons, for group lessons, for artistic-scientific formats, and for interdisciplinary collaborations. 

We as a RAPP Lab team propose: Reflection-based artistic practice 

• should have a self-esteem in itself,

• is something, which a student should be allowed to learn as a competence for professional development and personal growth,

• should be fixed in study programmes and not happen by accident,

• and its role for students should be visible.

And for this, we need Artistic Research and its methods:

• to foster an experimental and open sense of coming to results as a process of doing (knowing-in-the-making),

• to promote ‘research’ as a continuum between experimental-artistic to scholarly based searching and

• to strengthen the attitude of learning as an open process.

3. What is RAPP Lab’s research frame? 

RAPP Lab considers reflection in a wide sense: as a verbal as well as a bodily practice. To reflect can mean to listen and react carefully during an improvisation. It can mean to write an exposé, to day-dream, to wonder, to have an ‘aha-moment’ under the shower, to be inspired within in a chat with a colleague, to lose control or to collapse.

RAPP Lab’s research questions are: 

1. How can we playfully investigate the relationship of reflection and the student’s artistic practice, without saying this or that is reflection?

2. How can a reflective attitude in handling artistic material occur in specific learning environments? How can e.g., the focus on the bodily sensitivities we rely on while playing, singing or dancing change and develop my reflective skills? 

Together with our partners, we developed six different thematic fields of experimentation (Lab 1-6). These aimed: 

1. to try out different ways of enhancing (self-)reflexivity in artistic practice,

2. to identify concrete methods from these experiments 

3. and to transform them into reproducible material. 

Each Lab had its own research question:

Lab 1 (NMH Oslo): How can we enhance musical practice through identifiying, developing and enacting a structured model of critical reflection?

Lab 2 (Orpheus Institute): How can we empower and encourage our reflective potential through developing cognitive skills and conceptual models outside our own main expertise? 

Lab 3 (HfMT Cologne): How can we explore reflexivity in artistic doing from perspectives of embodied and silent knowledge, from states of moving, hearing, sensing and mobilizing the known as well as the unknown?

Lab 4 (mdw Vienna): How can we enhance our ability to reflect our artistic practice and art-based scientific methods, through experiencing them in different social, cultural and artistic contexts?

Lab 5 (EAMT Tallinn): How can we broaden our knowledge of self and musical identity through developing skills in autoethnography in writing, self-interviews and self-observations?

Lab 6 (Santa Cecilia Rome): How can we allow individuals to reflect on their own artistic practice through 'conscious improvisation' and learning to take risks, do choices, and stay in intimate situations without following a so-called ‚ex cattedra‘ teaching figure? 

Insides and perspectives from the Labs can be also found here: www.rapplab.eu

4. How to use the RAPP Lab-Matrix presented in this exposition?

With this exposition you will gain insights into the final results of the RAPP Lab project: the Lab Handbook with the Practical Guide, the “Catalogue Raisonné” and documentations. 

If you read the RAPP Lab-Matrix vertically, each Lab is presented within six chapters: Introduction – Methodology – Collaboration & Communicarion – Culture of pedagogy – Agency & Social Impact – Interdisciplinarity. These chapters lead into the Practical Guide, which is the essence of each Lab and may inform and inspire you to transform the ideas of the various Labs into your own work. 

All six Practical Guides together form the Lab Handbook, which you will find in the lower right corner.

If you read the RAPP Lab-Matrix in a horizontal way, you can gain insight into values and guidelines which stand behind the whole project, we call it our “Catalogue Raisonné”. 

In the last row of the RAPP Lab-matrix you will find various documentation material, which has been produced during or after each Lab. This is a perfect place to search for concrete examples and hand-on experiences, how the idea and set-up of each Lab has been performed.