Learning to Be: The Modelling of Art and Design Practice in University Art and Design Teaching

Learning to be an artist or designer is a complex process of becoming. Much of the early phase of ‘learning to be’ occurs during the time emerging artists and designers are students in university art/design programmes, both undergraduate and postgraduate. Recent research reveals that a critical role in assisting students in their maturing identities as artists and designers is played by artist/designer‐academics teaching in university art and design programmes. By maintaining active art/design practices and drawing from these in their teaching, artist/designer‐academics model professional practice to students. Witnessing and interacting with such modelling is part of the process of students learning the shared discourses, views and practices of the art or design worlds to which they aspire to belong. The modelling of professional practice is critical to an artist or designer's ‘learning to be’ experience because it enables students to access the tacit and nuanced behaviours, languages and cultures that constitute contemporary art or design practice. This article outlines findings from a recent Australian study revealing the role of professional practice modelling in university art/design teaching. It highlights the centrality of professional practice modelling to artist/designer‐academics in their beliefs and approaches to teaching their academic disciplines. In critically exploring the research data and findings this article describes the role that modelling of practice plays and how it comprises a core part of the value that artist/designer‐academic participants contribute to the teaching of art/design education.     

Ethos of Ambiguity: Artist Teachers and the Transparency Exclusion Paradox

Addressing changes in conditions for practitioners that can be related to education policy in England and Wales since 2010, this article presents issues faced by teachers of art and design and their responses in practice. The current insistence on transparency in education emerges through policy that audits performativity, in a limiting skills bank. Practitioners in art and design are particularly affected by what I term ‘the transparency‐exclusion paradox’, as they battle to maintain the subject area and are ‘othered’ by the English Baccalaureate and Progress 8. I will discuss an emergent ‘ethos of ambiguity’ among artist‐teachers and contemporary artists, with a theoretical basis informed by Beauvoir and Foucault. Empirical data from research participants will be evidenced, to explore strategies of response in inclusive social practice. This article adds to literature that considers the effects of policy in implementation and it contributes to research on creative expressions of ambiguity in the arts.     

Art and Creativity in the Global Economies of Education

Creativity: what might this mean for art and art educators in the creative economies of globalisation? The task of this discussion is to look at the state of creativity and its role in education, in particular art education, and to seek some understanding of the register of creativity, how it is shaped, and how legitimated in the globalised world dominated by input‐output, means‐end, economically driven thinking, expectations and demands. With the help of Heidegger some crucial questions are raised, such as: How can art maintain its creative ontological and epistemological potential in the creative economies of globalisation? Is it possible for art and the creative arts to act as a process of ‘revealing’ and ‘becoming’ and ‘throwing light’ on the world while working within the market economies of innovation and entrepreneurship where creativity has become a generalised discourse? What matters in this discussion is to find a way to argue for the sustainability of art education as a creative mode of enquiry through which self and the world may be better understood, identity might be realised as difference and being‐in‐time might be possible.     

Envisioning the Future: Working toward Sustainability in Fine Art Education

Fine art education provides students with opportunities to acquire knowledge and skills to respond creatively to their experience of society and culture. Fostering creative ways of knowing, thinking and doing requires studio learning conditions that promote the exploration of embodied perceptions, material sensibilities and conceptual ideas that are provisional, socially constructed and ever changing. Traditionally, art schools provided these conditions unchallenged because they were autonomous. Since the 1980s, however, art schools have been integrated into the academy, and face increasing pressure to meet the institutional demands of being in a university. Some argue this changed status means the academy, with its research and pedagogic traditions, is actually straitjacketing creativity. Furthermore, contemporary art practice has changed as artists are increasingly experimenting with interdisciplinary modes of working. This article discusses a two‐year major change initiative, undertaken within an urban Australian art school, designed to respond to this complex set of changed circumstances. It considers ways to address institutional compliance and viability demands while maintaining deeply held values about how to foster creativity in undergraduate students. The outcome is a new organising structure and renewed curriculum for the largest programme offering in the school: the fine art undergraduate degree. Educational renewal is conceptualised as a creative process and the approach to change is thus adapted from creative research methodologies. By treating pedagogy and curriculum design as a creative process, this change initiative, rather than straitjacketing creativity, has re‐envisioned an epistemological framework for undergraduate fine art that will sustain creativity education into the future.     

The careers of fine artists and the embedded creative

While there is a growing body of scholarship on the creative industries and on the career trajectories of graduates from creative industries programmes, there has to date only been a limited amount of research that examines in detail, the careers of fine arts graduates. Fine art is arguably the least ‘vocational’ of creative disciplines, in that there are relatively few employers that seek to employ fine artists as fine artists. If fine arts graduates are not employed in their chosen field – that is, in the ‘Creative Trident’ terminology, in a core creative occupation – how do their careers parallel or differ from those of other creative graduates? Do they find employment as ‘embedded creatives’, using or applying their experience and practice in sectors beyond the core creative industries, or as ‘support workers’, enabling and facilitating the creative work of others? Do they experience portfolio careers? And how do their artistic training and attitudes to creativity affect their working relationships and experiences? This article draws on rich qualitative data about the experiences of a small group of graduates (including the author) who all graduated from the same course at the same institution in the UK in 1994, to provide some insights into the career paths and trajectories of a sample of fine arts graduates.     

Room 13: The Movement and International Network

Room 13 is a global uprising of creative and entrepreneurial children who are responsible for a growing international network of student‐organised art studios. Each Room 13 studio facilitates the work of young artists alongside a professional adult artist in residence, providing an exchange of ideas, skills and experience across the ages. The result is an ongoing collaboration between adults and young people and a thriving culture of philosophical enquiry driven by a motivation to think and to learn. My own experience with Room 13 spans from that of the student, to adult artist and practitioner. Working under the direction of subsequent student‐management teams, I have been fortunate to be involved in the process by which Room 13 has gone on to establish an international network of student‐run art studios, serving an expanding global community of young artists. The emerging global movement surrounding these studios calls for a serious revaluation of what art is – and who is qualified to make it. Room 13 not only augments the case for the work of young artists, but presents a challenge to the current systems for art education. As the quality of formal arts education is eroded by a universal need to standardise educational experiences, the training that Room 13 provides motivates individuals and develops their creativity in a way that outstrips anything that schools, or even art colleges, can currently offer.     

Fostering Creativity: A Multiple Intelligences Approach to Designing Learning in Undergraduate Fine Art

Curriculum and pedagogy in undergraduate fine art can promote an approach to learning creativity that is more about being an artist than knowing about art. Lecturers can provide a road map for developing particular dispositions, in relation to student ideas and perceptions, to foster personalised creativity. This requires that lecturers have an ability to harness the range of learning approaches and interests that students bring to their studio learning environments. One way of doing this is to construct learning activities in ways that engage students' multiple intelligences so they may acquire deeper understandings of their own creative processes. Fostering this kind of creative think tank is artistry of an educational kind. In this article we explore such a creative think tank by examining a particular lecturer's pedagogical approach. We discuss how and why this lecturer designs activities in a way that draws on multiple intelligences to stimulate learning and foster creativity. Using narratives, we analyse this particular curriculum through the lens of multiple intelligence theory and explore how the pedagogical approach develops the whole person. We found that by attending to relationships and focusing on a plurality of intellect this particular curriculum and pedagogy promotes transformative learning in students studying fine art.     

Encountering Pedagogy through Relational Art Practices

Two artists involved in ‘socially engaged art’ practice were invited to work with art education teacher candidates and instructors in an effort to rethink notions of teaching, learning and art. We initiated this residency, which we called ‘The Summerhill Residency’, to examine how learning encounters might create environments for meaningful exchanges between the ways in which artists and secondary art education teacher candidates learn to think about pedagogy and the nature of artistic learning. Drawing upon Bourriaud's theory of relational aesthetics, we consider, yet trouble, the relational aspects of the processes and products of the artist residency, and examine the crisis of imagination that permeated teacher candidates' experiences. Throughout the project, a/r/tography offered a rich form of living enquiry that opened up possibilities for learning within a community of enquirers.     

Special educational needs and art and design education: plural perspectives on exclusion

Abstract

Education policy proposals by the UK Coalition government appeared to be based on a process of consultation, participation and representation. However, policy formation seems to prioritise and confirm particular ways of knowing and being in the world. This article recognises the ontological and epistemological invalidation at work in education policy by examining the shared context for policy formation in special educational needs (SEN/D) and art and design education. There is value in recognising plurality, acknowledging the ways in which apparently singular policies relating to special education are understood through subject or disciplinary perspectives. The neoliberal aim to foster an economically productive ‘subject’ is evident in policy formation relating to art and design education as well as SEN/D. Both subjects, the disabled child and art and design education, are defined as excessive and are excluded where they do not conform to particular notions of productivity. The article explores theoretical frameworks that are essential for recognising meaning in education when subjects cannot be put to work.     

Creativity,Art and Learning: A Psycho‐Social Exploration of Uncertainty

What makes it possible for artists to stay with the anxieties and uncertainties of the creative process? This aspect of an artist's development is rarely theorised or addressed despite it being an essential aspect of creative practice. It is a capacity, similar to tacit knowing, that is gradually acquired and learnt, and cultivated over time as part of the process of practising art and being an artist. The role of tacit knowledge as a key aspect of fine art education is well documented and is a learning experience that artists are familiar with. However, what tends to get focused on in discussions about tacit knowing are the practical, usually physical and technical, aspects of learning from experience to the exclusion of a range of mental or psychological capacities that are also a fundamental part of the tacit knowing process and vital to the learning necessary to be an artist. These mental capacities, which include being able to tolerate high levels of excitability, periods of nothingness, chaos, uncertainty and not‐knowing, are also, I suggest, passed between tutor and student as a form of tacit knowledge. This article draws on the experience of one artist, both as a learner and as an emergent practising artist, in developing this ability. The role played by art tutors in supporting student artists to develop a capacity to stay with the anxieties of the creative process is also explored.     

Teacher as Conceptual Artist

Teachers in arts education frequently struggle with their professional identity. When asked, arts teachers often answer that they believe that their main responsibility is education at the expense of understanding themselves as artists. The Mexican‐American artist and teacher Jorge Lucero questions whether an occupation as teacher necessarily impedes a creative practice. The finding that both progressive pedagogy and conceptual art share certain characteristics forms the basis for his concept of ‘teacher as conceptual artist’. In short, Lucero proposes that a teacher’s practice, in and beyond the classroom, simultaneously can be his or her creative practice. This qualitative intervention study explored whether or not the concept of teacher as conceptual artist holds the possibility to narrow down the gap between teacher and artist identities. The intervention consisted of a three‐day project led by Lucero in which nine arts teacher students were familiarised with modes of operation as a conceptual artist. In the three following months, these students implemented lessons in primary and secondary education based on those modes. Prior to the project, ‘elicitation‐interviews’ were used to explore how students perceived their professional identity and at the end of project semi‐structured interviews were conducted. The findings suggest that through the modes of operation as a conceptual artist, students who mainly identified as an artist were able to integrate a teacher identity in their artist identity, but the modes of operation also gave students who withheld their artist identity from the classroom an opportunity to live their artist identity in the classroom.     

美术教育中幼儿创造力的培养

幼儿美术创造力是幼儿感受美、创造美的能力,是基于兴趣的更高层次创造性思维的审美体现,兴趣和思维进展水平是对美术教育中幼儿创造力发展的评判标准。因此,培养幼儿美术创造力的基本途径应当包括依据幼儿年龄和个性特点针对性的采用合理的教学方法和手段,利用不同绘画形式激发幼儿创造性思维以及对幼儿进行情感教育来激发他们的创造灵感等教育方法。     

The Role of Artists in Sites for Learning

Socially engaged, participatory and educational arts activities have been recognised by artists as a legitimate area of creative practice for a considerable time. Current policy initiatives around social inclusion and life long learning demonstrate that this government has a keen interest in the transformative nature of creativity and participation in arts activity. This paper explores the significance of the, Arts Council's Artists in Sites for Learning Scheme and a related piece of research within the context of recent cultural agendas and governmental policy initiatives. The research examined the ‘forms of engagement’ that occur between artists, participants and others and concludes that the role the artist inhabits within this form of creative practice is multifaceted and highly sophisticated. This paper also raises key issues concerning the ‘value’ and critical assessment of this form of practice and the need for appropriate support for (and evaluation of) it in the future.     

论艺术设计教育中创造性思维的培养

创造性思维是艺术设计中处于核心地位的思维能力,它以发散性思维为主要特征,讲究科学理性和艺术感性的融合,并强调灵感和直觉的运用。在艺术设计教育中培养学生的创造性思维能力,要让学生突破思维定势,学会发散思维;了解创造性思维的过程,学会捕捉灵感,形成创意;要改进评价机制,营造富有竞争力的艺术设计教学氛围来激励和启发学生的创造能力。     

“设计艺术”概念初探

设计艺术有别于纯粹艺术创造活动。艺术创造活动关注艺术家本身的感受,将艺术家思想用艺术品作为媒介,向受众传递思想;艺术设计活动是在功能性基础上的创造活动,解决实际生活中存在的问题,设计作品实用是其主要的目的。     

Participatory creativities: developing a research design for children’s pastoral encounters with the natural world

ABSTRACT

In this paper, the author discusses the interrelationship between creativity, children’s experiences of the natural world and pastoral education. Based on a research design developed whilst undertaking a professional doctorate in education (EdD), and grounded in a theoretical framework of children’s rights, the author explores the creative uncertainties of collaboratively researching children’s educational experiences with nature. The paper considers the ways in which the research design supports a pastoral care agenda, whilst encouraging the emergence of ‘creative artefacts’, alongside the extent to which the focus of the research, encounters with the natural world, might be deemed pastorally minded in its own right. The children who have participated in the research then draw the paper to a close, sharing what their involvement in the project has meant to them. Images and excerpts of children’s own creative reflections are offered as illustration of the powerful confluence of the Creative and the Pastoral.     

文化创意产业快速发展背景下的高职艺术设计类专业人才培养模式探析

文化创意产业的快速发展为高校艺术设计教育的改革与发展提供了广阔的空间,同时也提出了新的要求。对于高职艺术设计类专业来说,只有改革人才培养模式,因地制宜培养富有创新精神和创造实践能力的复合应用型人才,才能适应文化创意产业的发展和市场的需要,从而推动我国文化创意产业的进一步发展。     

Art and Design Education in the Ecology of Care

In the light of challenges arising from contemporary issues such as inclusivity, sustainability and justice, the connections between art, design and caring appears to be pertinent. What role can artists and designers play in the ecology of care? How can we lead art and design students to connect and lend their creative skills to care needs? Drawing on the ethics of care and a relational view on health this article highlights the various teaching approaches and initiatives introduced at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, to support and guide students to realise various art and design for health and wellbeing projects that provide opportunities for students to part take in ecology of care using their creative skills. Although creative explorations at the intersection of art, design and caring is still at an early stage, outcomes from this ongoing effort have been encouraging in response to the shifting social needs to create a more inclusive and flourishing society in Singapore.     

Senegalese Art in U.S. Schools: Transporting Contemporary African Diaspora with Decolonized Perspectives

Abstract

This article investigates the ways in which global art making and cultural practices have been conveyed in U.S. schools and considers questions about how art education can engage in decolonization. This special issue's theme of Diversity, Globalization, and Education is approached through the window of visual art by examining the work of three contemporary Senegalese artists and one U.S. artist in the sociopolitical contexts of history and current events, and asserting ways in which curriculum in U.S. schools may be considered with a decolonizing lens by integrating the artists’ perspectives.