Emily Carr University of Art + Design

Float School is the catalyst and culmination of many embodied, affective, and improvisational experiences that create the opportunity to ask, “what can school be?” We find ourselves asking this question, as artists and educators, because we are often drawn to imagining how else we could learn together, and under what other terms, feelings and environments learning could occur. Float School is at once a site, a time, a collective endeavour, and a school.

Float School takes the shape of a School in the earliest understanding of the word, drawing from the etymological base of skholē, which translates as spare time, leisure, rest, or eas

Through its form and program, Float School embarks on collectively imagining diverse and multiple futures of the role of art, public engagement, and learning can play in various communities, and promoting access to these conversations through its numerous public-facing events. The activities presented throughout this publication are a summary of sorts, providing glimpses of what we’ve done with and through Float School alongside guides for how they may be carried forward.

We invite you to read this publication through the sections in whatever order and to whatever degree of detail that moves you. Float School is, if nothing else, an invitation to ask, “could this be school?” We hope you’ll wonder along with us.

– Justin Langlois and Holly Schmidt