Enquiry Through Practice at Tate

I joined Tate Learning in 2010 as the Head of Learning Practice and Research.  One of my first tasks was to write a strategy for learning research, something that had not existed in the organisation until then.  In many ways this was liberating, as although research had been done in the departments at Tate Modern and Tate Britain for several years, there was no predetermined model or entrenched history to dictate the terms of the strategy. Instead the opportunity presented itself to devise a way forward for learning research that emerged from the practice itself.

The Strategic Framework for Learning Research I wrote outlined several aims, of which advancing knowledge was only one. Research was also identified as a means of making learning processes and practice more visible, instilling care and excellence across all areas of work and assisting the professional development of Tate Learning staff and others in the sector. Overall the ambition was to build a research culture within Learning and at the time of writing the Framework I looked particularly at models of practice as research and reflective practice within the arts and education, seeing these as a means of embedding critical rigour and developing new knowledge.

A central pillar of the Strategic Framework was the programme of ‘enquiry through practice’, which detailed how staff would frame a series of questions to inform their programmes and undertake to critically reflect on and articulate in some way the development of these initiatives in relation to the identified questions. The term ‘enquiry’ was used consciously in preference to ‘research,’ as the process was, certainly in its early iterations, deliberately relatively unstructured and organic. The intention was for staff to be largely responsible for how enquiry through practice was formulated, rather than imposing a strict model.

The Framework anticipated that the enquiry through practice strand would involve learning programmes that would not look radically different from the existing provision. In other words that the workshops, talks, interpretation resources, digital provision and longer-term projects would remain in place, but underlying these would be a changed approach. Certain key principles underpinned this shift. Teams would move away from outcome driven programming to a focus on more open-ended and reflexive investigations. In doing so they would reframe their relationships with artists and other professionals working on their programmes to enhance collaboration and exploration. They would locate participants as active co-investigators. And they would articulate and disseminate the new insights generated through this process to feed into the work of the department and, ideally, to inform the museum and arts education sector more widely.

So, how does enquiry through practice work? Firstly, questions are central alongside a willingness to explore and test ideas and knowledge, individually, as a team and in conjunction with participants in a programme and/or the visitors to the museum. One of the questions posed by the Young People’s Programme, for example, has been ‘how can we support young people aged 15 to 25 to programme for their peer group in the gallery?’ The activities the YPP team put in place are understood to be an investigation with young people of that question, informed by an understanding of the practical and theoretical context within which the team are working. In my interview with her for my current research, Rachel Noel, the Curator for the Young People’s Programme represented her process of research diagrammatically:

She described this process in the following terms – ‘You start with a question, or a query. Then you test it. Then you reflect on what’s happened. Then you analyse. Then there’s ‘test again’, and then there’s something like ‘go outwards’ or maybe it’s like, ‘explore’, ‘look for references’. Ultimately, you start broad, refine, refine, refine, explore everywhere, start broad, refine, refine, refine, look for references. You read, and you look at what else has been done, and you reflect on what you’ve done. So ultimately you come up with new ways of thinking about your original question or query.’

In my experience, enquiry through practice at Tate brings new understandings but always prompts further questions. Staff are constantly learning and re-inventing the practice, hence the outcomes of the research process – the events or activities – are never definitive. Rather they can be understood as Karin Knorr Cetina describes as ‘epistemic objects,’ in that they are defined by their incompleteness and by their ability to generate further questions. This is true of the programmes with young people and adults at Tate, which are characteristically open, rather than conclusive. Framed within the context of enquiry through practice, learning events and activities operate much like phenomena within an experimental process. They emerge through a questioning process, are explored, tested and analysed and provide provisional insights that inform the unfolding process of enquiry.

Looking back, I am conscious that the enquiry through practice that has taken shape in the Learning department since 2010 is a hybrid concoction of various approaches to knowledge generation. It borrows from formulations of reflective practice, most notably Donald Schon’s articulation of reflection in and on action, wherein practitioners naturally surface and interrogate problems they come across in their work . Similarly, in following a broadly cyclical process of doing, reviewing, learning and then applying that learning it resembles Kolb’s 1984 experiential model of learning . Yet I see the programme diverging from these formulations. Enquiry through practice seeks to contextualise practice theoretically and formalise the hitherto organic and essentially individual processes of questioning, problem posing, action, reflection and application that Learning curators employ. Important components of that formalisation are team members making explicit the questions underlying their programmes and committing to meet and share with others the experiences and knowledge they acquire through doing the programme. The collaborative activities of planning, revising and applying new insights sit at the heart of enquiry through practice, moving it beyond individual knowledge creation.

At the same time, the process is concerned with generating insights about the work through the doing of it, which aligns with conceptions of practice based and practice led research and with action research. However, the deliberately unstructured and self-determining quality of enquiry through practice means I would hesitate to equate it entirely with these more formalised constructions of research, at least in terms of how they are circumscribed within universities. It has, through the hard work of my colleagues in Learning, evolved to become its own practice as research methodology that is now embedded within the department.