THE HEDGESCHOOLPROJECT
The Hedgeschoolproject was developed by artist and educator Glenn Loughran, between 2006 - 12. Hedge schools first emerged in Ireland during the Cromwellian regime 1649 to 1653, and then as a response to the Penal Laws from 1723 to 1782 which were laws prohibiting Irish Catholics from taking part in the commercial or intellectual life of their country (McManus, 2004). Often described as people’s schools, Hedge Schools were subversively organized by priests and rural workers in barns and behind hedges throughout Ireland. When we consider the emergence of the hedge school movement we cannot deny the traumatic reality in which it developed, colonial politics made it necessary for such pedagogical movements to sustain cultural and economic survival. The Hedgeschoolproject was not an attempt to anthropologize those traumas, but rather to take from the name what traces of emancipatory affirmation are left open by the movement in its relation to the present. In this sense the Hedgeschoolproject is an attempt to re-signify the idea of the hedge school, as a unique moment of collective education, a name for future thinking rather than an ‘object’ of historiography.
Conceived as a series of concept schools, operating across multiple social and geographic contexts, each hedge school was used methodologically to contextualize the guiding principles of the inquiry. Within this context, each school construction was supported by the study of the historical Hedge school movement, its guiding principles (equality, emancipation) and the various ways that these principles could be revitalized in contemporary contexts where they remained immanent. Over a six-year period there were three iterations of the project and each iteration was between 1-2 years, from development to realisation. The first iteration The Eco House (2006)was developed with early school leavers in a rural context, out of straw bales, in a horse field. The second iteration, The Literacy House (2008), engaged with the Traveller community in N. Dublin, and finally in 2012, the third iteration of the project, The Precariat Academy was implemented at the Kaunas Textile Biennale in a freight container, with precarious workers from the surrounding sewing factories. Central to the Hedgeschoolproject was an exploration of education as an evental form, that is, education as a specific type of intervention.
THE ECO HOUSE 06
THE LITERACY HOUSE 08
THE PRECARIAT ACADEMY 10
