Art and Design Pedagogy in Higher Education

Knowledge, Values and Ambiguity in the Creative Curriculum

Susan Orr, Alison Shreeve

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315415116
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Teoría y práctica de la educación

Art and Design Pedagogy in Higher Education provides a contemporary volume that offers a scholarly perspective on tertiary level art and design education. Providing a theoretical lens to examine studio education, the authors suggest a student-centred model of curriculum that supports the development of creativity.

The text offers readers analytical frameworks with which to challenge assumptions about the art and design curriculum in higher education. In this volume, Orr and Shreeve critically interrogate the landscape of art and design higher education, offering illuminating viewpoints on pedagogy and assessment. New scholarship is introduced in three key areas:

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• curriculum: the nature and purpose of the creative curriculum and the concept of a 'sticky curriculum' that is actively shaped by lecturers, technicians and students;

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• ambiguity, which the authors claim is at the heart of a creative education;

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• value, asking what and whose ideas, practices and approaches are given value and create value within the curriculum.

These insights from the perspective of a creative university subject area also offer new ways of viewing other disciplines, and provide a response to a growing educational interest in cross-curricular creativity. This book offers a coherent theory of art and design teaching and learning that will be of great interest to those working in and studying higher education practice and policy, as well as academics and researchers interested in creative education.

Part 1
Art and design education territories

1
Introduction

Art and design pedagogy

In this volume we offer a rendering of creative, studio based pedagogy. Opening the door of the studio, we explore art and design education with a particular focus on the role of knowledge, values and ambiguity. This is messy and uncertain territory, and by ‘helicoptering’ above the field we explore commonly applicable practices and approaches to teaching, learning and assessment across art and design.

Students studying art and design in higher education are on a journey that involves identity transformation. Our students journey towards proto artist/designer status on to their graduations, where they exit into the world of professional practice. As Kinniburgh (2014) points out in the context of design, students are developing dual identities as students and professionals from the moment they embark on their studies. In this volume we consider this arc of learning from a range of perspectives. The chapters offer the weft and weave of the territory building up embroidered narratives that tussle with the challenges and paradoxes of creative teaching and learning. Dineen and Collins (2005:46) describe art and design students as explorers finding their own way ‘through territory which is at least partly uncharted’. In relation to art and design, we investigate the ways that the student’s journey is shaped. Studio education is not delivered. Studio education is forged.

A look at the dazzling diversity and creativity of art and design students’ graduate degree shows serves to remind us that when students embark on a course in art and design, the tutors and the students do not know what the final learning destination will be. The students work with staff to co-create the learning. As Buss (2008) observes, art and design students do not follow a path; they leave a trail.

Our particular focus is on undergraduate teaching and learning, but where relevant we bring in research from the school sector and postgraduate education. Whilst there is a scarcity of research in art and design higher education pedagogy (Svennson and Edstrom 2011), we note a growing body of recent publications that are extending the scholarship in this area (Tovey 2014; Lyon 2011; Fleming 2012; Llewellyn and Williamson 2015). This development reflects recognition of the importance of researching pedagogy in the disciplines (Kreber 2009). Paradoxically, a granular examination of teaching and learning in specific disciplinary contexts can surface pedagogical insights that have resonance beyond disciplinary boundaries (Harman and McDowell 2011; Trowler 2014). In this volume we are looking at curriculum, teaching, learning and assessment in the specific territory of creative, studio based education addressing readers who research and practice in this area, but we also draw out conclusions that will have wider educational relevance. The disciplinary focus offers a lens to look at educational practices beyond art and design.

At this point it is necessary to take a moment to contextualise the ways we talk about disciplines in general and art and design more specifically. Disciplines are perhaps best explained as persisting to provide useful shorthand social groupings with which to identify oneself within academia and are likely to persist because we need to be able to refer to complex and shifting ideas about legitimised knowledge and the creation of identities within formalised pedagogic environments, including the presence of creative disciplines in the university. There are several recent books that explore pedagogy by focusing on either design or fine art (see, e.g., Tovey 2014 or Daichendt 2010). We explore art and design higher education in one volume because we believe that art and design have elements in common, namely: a flexibility in the ways that curriculum is understood and applied; an emphasis on practice and making rather than on transmission; a reliance on students working independently and the employment of part-time creative practitioners to teach (Yorke et al. 2013). However, we also recognise that it is an oversimplification to argue that art and design is one discipline. In fact Trowler (2014) argues that art and design is too broad to be defined as a discipline, containing within the term many different subjects in various stages of development:

Some of the sub-areas of art and design, such as fine art, do count as disciplines, but others, such as design for performance, are too young and restricted to yet have developed regularised sets of discourses, ways of thinking, procedures, emotional responses and motivations.

(Trowler 2014:10)

This volume is expressly concerned with the kinds of teaching and learning practices which make up the grouping of creative subjects which comprise the art and design or creative industries subjects – a large conglomerate which masks many of the differences and subtleties between and within subject areas. The range of distinctly different sub-disciplines includes textiles, fashion, furniture, product design, graphics, or communication design, advertising, fine art, photography, sculpture and media based courses. This is not an all-inclusive list. Media’s disciplinary position within art and design is contested by many and seen as a distinct subject area in its own right. Design may include computer games, linking closely to computer sciences and communication, thus overlapping and extending into other disciplinary areas. As new fields of employment emerge, and as technologies evolve, so new nuances emerge and evolve in art and design courses, making it difficult to fix the precise nature of the subject areas and what and how knowledge is valued and taught within individual courses. This leads directly on to the increasing centrality of interdisciplinarity and the challenge of constructing curricula which traverse disciplines (Mendoza et al. 2007). We acknowledge notions of interdisciplinarity and fluidity between and within subject areas (Trowler 2014).

Discipline groupings can be as much about conflict as about community. A more fine-grained study of disciplinary difference is provided by looking at local work groups or teaching and learning regimes at course level (Trowler and Cooper 2002). Conflicts between subgroups in the sciences reveal structural impediments to more collaborative working between different but related subjects (Tuunainen 2005). This can also happen within art and design, as challenges to identities and beliefs about the nature of the subject and the allegiances established as an academic sometimes feel threatened by attempts to force new interdisciplinary activities into the curriculum. As one looks more closely at disciplines, subjects and the practices within them, more differences and tensions appear, and art and design is no exception.

Art and design can be likened to a spectrum of related practices. Art is the practice of an aesthetic approach to the world originally based on drawing and observation preceding the creation of artefacts which relate to, reject or respond to previously existing works of art and to life experiences from the perspective of the artist. Contemporary art encompasses many different kinds of approaches embracing the conceptual and the digital. It involves many kinds of media and skills and is increasingly co-created, transdisciplinary and working with multiple stakeholders. Art is no longer a practice for the solitary artist working in a garret with paint and easel. Design on the other hand has an applied focus which requires rethinking how objects and artefacts, or products, services and communication, might improve or embellish the way we live. ‘Art and design’ is a catch-all phrase which, like other disciplines, fragments into many different kinds of subject areas, each with its own distinctive ways of working, thinking and acting. At the overarching level there are similarities, and as one digs deeper it is possible to see a landscape with alliances, shared ideas, approaches or ideals in a patchwork of more closely related or distant groupings. As with other disciplines these subject groups morph and change in relation to economic, political and technological development, social practices, global enterprise and local social influences. For example, whilst there are more than 130 available fine art courses in the UK, each course will be different and represent a different cultural configuration, variation in beliefs and approaches and different connections to the world within and outside academia. From the widest to the most subtle differences in art and design there are similarities and idiosyncrasies from the macro and meso to the micro level.

The sticky curriculum

Turning to the subject of curriculum we present the idea of the sticky curriculum in art and design. Sticky is a term which has multiple meanings, and we use it advisedly to convey the challenges, conflicts, dilemmas and ambiguity in the creative curriculum. What follows is a series of definitions which contributes to the complexity of the term as we use it throughout the volume:

The word sticky has connotations which range from something unpleasant that might be described as ‘goo’ which adheres where you don’t want it to and becomes annoying and hard to escape. The opposite of this is true when sticky is used to describe something which is delicious like ‘sticky toffee pudding’ or Thai sticky rice. Most of us like the sweet stickiness of caramelised sugars, whether they are the product of caramelising the outside of a steak or concentrated sugars in sweets and deserts. Stickiness might be something to be enjoyed, to be cleaned away or to be suffered.

Stickiness can be a property of the weather; the very air around us might be perceived as hot and damp, or sticky, suggesting a pervasive quality, something almost universally affecting us, as opposed to the unwanted but localised blob of sticky chewing gum on the sole of your shoe. Widespread stickiness or local stickiness are both possible.

Sticky might also be used to describe a difficult situation, where the outcome is uncertain and reaches a point where it might go one way or another. Stickiness is therefore ambiguous, tentative, teetering, carrying possibilities and potential for one outcome or another. The sticky point might be difficult to negotiate, a barrier of some kind which holds positive or negative possibilities. Working through a sticky patch is challenging or hard work. Sticky situations hold the possibilities of positive or negative outcomes. Sticky situations are difficult or challenging and inherently ambiguous.

Stickiness also suggests clumping or grouping, like sticky rice, which is attracted by something pulling or gluing things together. Where this is used in social networking or in a business sense, it is bringing people together to engage in an activity or to see something of collective interest. This stickiness is an attraction or focus creating a social gathering.

As children most of us enjoyed making a sticky mess; it is part of the joy of getting stuck into creative play. Sticky substances were things to get your hands into, to create and make, to glue and stick, to enjoy and revel in. Sticky can be enjoyable and engaging with a sense of liberation and freedom to explore with materials.

Sticky might also be something which some people do not enjoy. A mess can feel like a failure and a sticky mess one from which you cannot extricate yourself – a problem which is insoluble or which leaves unpleasant traces behind even when you think you have escaped. A sense of failure or guilt might attach itself to a sticky situation.

Someone might demonstrate unwillingness to carry out a particular action. This suggests a reluctance to proceed or engage, a sticking point which is difficult for them where they are unwilling or reticent. Sticky suggests reluctance or unwillingness to proceed or holding back.

Surfaces are sticky if they adhere to other things; a property of stickiness is to hold or restrict movement, gluing things in place or preventing change. This could be a positive outcome, if you want to hold things together, or a negative one, if you perceive this as being stuck and unable to change or develop. Stickiness as a positive or negative force for change is associated with being stuck, unable to move although you might wish to, or held down by a force which is not of your own making. Sticky might result in being stuck or in the serendipitous joy of things happily in position.

Sticky substances have a tendency to stretch when they stick to different surfaces; they are elastic, mutable and in extreme cases form strands of connecting stickiness. Sticky can be elastic and stretchy.

Harnessing the complex and nuanced meanings of the word sticky, we offer the idea of the sticky curriculum as a unifying theme that provides the connective tissue for the ideas explored across each chapter. The sticky curriculum offers a theory of art and design curriculum. Rather than a curriculum which is understood as content consisting of lists of topics and engagement in pedagogies which help students to learn those topics, we see the curriculum as a complex web of activities in which students forge a way to becoming a creative practitioner. The sticky curriculum presents ambiguity and unclear options which require negotiation for those working in higher education; for those translating creative practice into pedagogic activities; for those who are in a position as learner and find themselves as experts in innovative forms of knowledge and processes and for the technical teams supporting material learning opportunities. All these participants encounter the stickiness of fluctuating roles and responsibilities in studio learning environments, whether these are located in virtual spaces, in the studio, in the university or outside it. Stickiness abounds in the curriculum to be enjoyed or fought; learning to live in and through the ambiguous territories that comprise learning in art and design, those who negotiate it successfully have forged an identity as a creative practitioner creating work that embodies who they are in their creative personas. Our graduates have learnt not only skills and knowledge in its many forms but also practices which enable them to enter the diverse creative workplaces and flexible working spaces that characterise life in the creative and cultural arena post graduation.

Studio curriculum can appear to have little form or shape, but there is a sticky and complex, loose structure. Art and design curriculum comprises skills, practices and theories, and the ways that these components stick together creates a personalised curriculum for each student. Art and design curriculum is sticky because it is complex and contentious. For one student the curriculum may be viewed as a wonderful set of opportunities, whilst for another it is experienced as a chaotic mess. To summarise, we assert that art and design curriculum is sticky for these reasons:

• it is messy and uncertain;
• values stick to it in ways that are difficult to see;
• it has an elasticity, being both sticky and stretchy;
• it is embodied and enacted – it sticks to the person; and
• it is troublesome and challenging.

Creativity

Readman (2015:1) asks ‘what do we talk about when we talk about creativity?’ In this volume we discuss art and design education, and we explore creativity within this context. Creativity is fundamental to the pract...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• PART 1 Art and design education territories
• PART 2 Art and design education practices
• Index