How do you plan for and support student learning through appropriate approaches and environments?
Context (ca. 50 words)
I run the second semester unit on BA Design for Art Direction in which students work on analogue and digital objects, produce a magazine, and explore modes of distribution. The project culminates with a public-facing event at a South London art institution. The unit requires students to engage with objects and publications, individual research and collaboration, project development and production.
Evaluation (ca. 100 words)
To support these activities, I’m applying the following environmental and methodological approaches:
- Community building[1]
- Developing a welcoming and creative atmosphere
- Providing scaffolded exposure to professional contexts
- Ensuring variety and constructive alignment[2] with resources[3]
- Including diverse teaching environments
Through making inclusivity[4] an orienting node in my practice, drawing on the concept of Signature Pedagogies (Shulman, 2005), and exploring the impact teaching spaces have in art and design education (Bishop, 2012) (Orr & Shreeve, 2017), I support learning by introducing students to professional environments and methodologies in the following ways:
- Gallery visits
- Bookshop and library visits
- Online archive tours
- The studio
- Walking between college and local institutions
- Technical workshops in specialist studios and process areas
- Theory lectures and specialist practitioner talks and workshops[5]
- Public presentation of their work
Moving Forwards (ca. 350 words)
Considering curriculum design in relation to community building and integrating so-called ‘professional’ contexts, I include sessions which take place off campus. Student feedback from across years suggests that visits to institutions or studios outside of university are some of the most enjoyable and formative experiences.[6]
I plan the workshops and lectures in this unit in relation to the professional activities and environments I’ve experienced as an artist, designer, and editor, and that students are likely to encounter in their professional lives[7]. I aim to provide students opportunities to rehearse methods and approaches in the studio ahead of public presentations.
For several years I’ve run exhibition projects with year two students culminating in public presentations[8]. These projects have provided students with opportunities to work on different outcomes[9] in a variety of roles[10] and gain experience that correlated more or less directly[11] with equivalent professional environments.
Orr and Shreeve point to the need for practitioners teaching in universities “to make a translation and to reframe the practice so that its key components can become accessible to those learning it.” (Orr and Shreeve, 2017, p.100). In planning projects, I set out opportunities for students to workshop scenarios before they encounter them in unfamiliar and pressured public contexts.
Underpinned by ongoing community building and communication activities discussed, I approach projects that include public presentations with students with care, bringing my professional experience to students via appropriate methodologies[12] (Orr and Shreeve, 2017, p. 98), and remembering the distinctions that need to be drawn between the spheres of cultural spaces and higher education spaces. As Claire Bishop[13] states: “art is given to be seen by others, while education has no image. Viewers are not students, and students are not viewers, although their respective relationships to the artist and teacher have a certain dynamic overlap.” (Bishop, 2012, p. 214)[14].
Acknowledging these conditions whilst taking into account observations I’ve made at previous student-led public events of the autonomy exercised by learners in these situations, expressing skill and confidence in this not-the-university context[15], I continue to reinvigorate my pedagogic practice exploring how I can refine this process of translation, learning from projects I’ve run outside the university[16] and models developed in the burgeoning alternative education settings emerging in the past decade or so[17].
Summer School: The Stories We Tell Ourselves, Kunstverein München, 2021
John Latham, Work No.3, 1969
Archival resource referenced in developing Overpresent, a student project hosted by Flat Time House in collaboration with BA (Hons) Design for Art Direction, 18th June–2 July 2020
References
Biggs, J. (2014) ‘Constructive Alignment in University Teaching’. HERDSA Review of Higher Education, 1, 5-22.
Bishop, C. (2012) “Pedagogic Projects: ‘How do you bring a classroom to life as if it were a work of art?’” in Artificial Hells. London: Verso
Orr, S and Shreeve, A. (2017) Art and Design Pedagogy in Higher Education: Knowledge, Values and Ambiguity in the Creative Curriculum. London: Routledge
Shulman, L. (2005) Daedalus, Summer, 2005, Vol. 134, No. 3, On Professions & Professionals (Summer, 2005), pp. 52-59
Thorne, S. (2017) SCHOOL. Berlin: Sternberg Press
[1] As discussed in detail in my Case Study 1, ensuring time is set aside for community building activities is an important aspect of each session, this includes methods such as reviewing shared Agreements and Aspirations, thematic check-ins, workshopping collaborative decision-making tools, and using dialogic generative exercises developed more Nonviolent Communication workshops such as: As I Hear You Say That.
[2] John Biggs’s (2014) concept of Constructive Alignment proposes that materials and activities in the curriculum are aligned with learning outcomes and assessment criteria to provide students with a clearly correlated structure.
[3] In adhering to the principles of Constructive Alignment (Biggs, 2014) and UAL guidance for inclusive teaching and learning, I consider the relationship between materials provided to students on Moodle, in the studio, on trips, and in workshops, how their introduction is staggered, and how they will appeal to different learners.
[4] Inclusivity in this sense is guided by the concepts developed in the social model of disability and applied through an “inclusive learning environment” as described in more depth in my Blog Post 2.
[5] As the sole member of the course team working on this unit (all colleagues are hourly paid lecturers), I have relative autonomy to work with a variety of specialist practitioners who can bring their practices to the students first hand, as discussed in detail in my Case Study 1.
[6] I have received this feedback verbally by students across years in informal unit review discussions.
[7] In planning the unit I set out to include workshops which scaffold challenges that students will face later in the unit–for example in the first part of this unit I invited visual artist Agata Madejska to develop a spatial workshop with me, to run in the studio, that factored in some of the challenges of installing an exhibition in a gallery space in anticipation of the public presentation students will engage in at Forma at the end of their project.
[8] I’ve facilitated projects at Copeland Gallery, Peckham in 2017 and 2018; concurrently in Elephant and Castle Shopping centre and at Flat Time House, Peckham in 2018; and at Flat Time House–online during the COVID pandemic–in 2020.
[9] Projects have included: curating public programmes with an international panel of artists, activists, and researchers; developing, designing, and producing publications; designing and producing exhibitions; communication activities including writing press releases and preparing social media, and interpreting and communicating archival material.
[10] Both individually and collaboratively–with tutor support–students create teams for design and production including graphic designers, project managers, picture editors, curators, and so on.
[11] In the section of Teaching practices for creative practitioners titled ‘The ‘real-life’ problematic’, Orr and Shreeve (2017) describe the proximity of these kinds of activities to professional experience whilst acknowledging the distinction from being in a semi-educational/professional environment that inevitably tends towards another kind of experience. They say: “They are two distinct spheres of activity” and point to the fact that: “In education the object is to enable learning, whilst in creative industries, the object is to produce a product, performance, artwork or service.” (p.100)
[12] Bringing these experiences of professional practice to my teaching practice I identify with the Teaching Strategies Orr and Shreeve name as ‘Paralleling’,‘Dovetailing’, and ‘Collaborating’ (Orr and Shreeve, 2017, p. 98).
[13] Claire Bishop draws attention to the pedagogic turn in art projects from around the millennium in the penultimate chapter of her influential book ‘Artificial Hells’ (Bishop, 2012), Pedagogic Projects: ‘How do you bring a classroom to life as if it were a work of art?’.
[14] Another form of overlap is described by Orr and Shreeve as Learning Whilst Teaching or Specifically for Teaching. The reciprocal relationship described by this term best reflects the nature of the exchange between students and myself in the process of making a project of this kind. The next term in Orr and Shreeve’s list, The Removal of Boundaries to Both Practice and Teaching, also resonates. I bring professional relationships from my practice as an artist to student projects, and have the opportunity to develop my practice in tandem with students in public-facing projects that we work on together, gaining insight from new perspectives in the process.
[15] As part of a year two exhibition event hosted at Flat Time House in 2018 several students who had difficulty engaging in studio sessions took on new roles in which they flourished.
[16] As well as the public-facing student events listed in this study I’ve also participated in running workshops outside the university, most formatively the Summer School at Kunstverein München with Eva Wilson and Maurin Dietrich in August 2020.
[17] There are many examples of alternative education models emerging over the past decades: Projects such as Anton Vidokle’s unitednationsplaza (2006-7) and The Floating University (2018-) in Berlin, Open School East, London/Margate (2013-), and the itinerant schools and sessions run by artists such as manuel arturo abreu and Kandis Williams. Sam Thorne’s book SCHOOL (Thorne, 2017) sets out a useful first-hand account of independent art schools over the past 20 years.