Statements
Sisters Academy is today’s most creative and imaginative experiment for renewing education at all levels. Instead of adding on aesthetic and artful methods and adapting these to a restrictive system (e.g. time schedules), a fictive universe is created lasting several days. The participants are ‘sunk’ into this universe in such a way that all senses are evoked and honed towards thoroughbred learning. This doesn’t mean that teaching is bypassed. On the contrary. Teaching will be accomplished according to plans, however, dressed in new rules, norms and language. The teachers will be prepared beforehand with ‘drops of inspiration’ from the fictive universe in order to get inspired towards new forms of teaching. A courageous, innovative, and unique initiative!
Also read Darsøs take on Sisters Academy in her article Arts-in-business from 2004 to 2014 – From experiments in practice to research and leadership development in Artistic interventions in organizations: Research, theory and practice. See more here.
Lotte Darsø, Associate Professor in innovation and creativity, Department of Education, Aarhus University, member of Sisters Academy Advisory Board
When the Sisters Academy dissolves the usual connections of the ordinary schoolroom (time-schedules, schemes of classification, of rules of order) and lets the participants step into a completely different universe it also permits them to experience perceptively how new relations among pupils, and between pupils and teachers, produce new ways of understanding education. In this sense the Sisters Academy becomes a radical democratic strategy to explore how we can draw the new contours, places and connections of a future educational landscape.
Anne Mette W. Nielsen, PhD., is temporarily appointed post doc at The Danish Centre for Youth Research (CEFU) and external lecturer at the Departments of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen.
In a time where education reforms for primary schools, high schools and universities are on the agenda we need to figure out how we can work and think in new ways. This is why we decided to engage in this radical project that turns our everyday world perspective upside down.
Gitte Bruus Albrecthsen, Head of Department, HF & VUC FYN Odense, FLOW, member of Sisters Academy Advisory Board
Sisters Academy can have a long-lasting impact that allows it to be of value to many future generations of students at the respective school. It is an artistic investigation with deep educational value. It is a known quality to turn things upside down in organisations, but maybe only for half a day as part of a seminar. This sort of investigation has never before been seen manifest at an entire school over the course of such a long time.
Marianne Ping Huang, Prodekan for uddannelse på Arts, Aarhus Universitet
From the moment you entered the door, you were in a magical, pensive, sensitive and poetic universe. And at the same time an immensely brave and an enterprenurial universe, where the human potential – of the student, the staff members and the visiting artists – was unfolding in so many interesting ways, that I’m still completely high on the experience. Read the complete comment.
Uffe Elbæk, former Minister of Culture and member of the Danish Parliament and spokesperson for Alternativet.