2Strategies, Tactics and Change

2.0Introduction

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121

In Higher Education Funding Council for England’s (HEFCE) 2004

invitation to bid for CETL funding there are broad references to the

strategic impact CETLs would have on the hosting institution and on

the wider HE community. The potential for CETLs to fail to deliver

positive effects beyond their hosting institution was one of the key

concerns raised during the consultation phase on the development

of the CETL initiative.

Many institutions were concerned that the creation of a fixed

number of CETLs might weaken rather than strengthen the

promotion of excellence across the whole HE sector.

(HEFCE, 2004)

The invitation to bid goes to some length to avoid being prescriptive

about how individual CETLs might meet the main aims to ‘reward

excellent teaching practice and to invest in that practice further in

order to increase and deepen its impact across a wider teaching and

learning community’. It does this to the extent that it occasionally

appears vague in its terms. However, it was unquestionably HEFCE’s

intention that the CETLs would enhance excellence in learning and

teaching both at the host institution and across the sector and that

this enhancement would affect students’ learning experiences and

outcomes, teachers’ practice and institutional cultures for learning

and teaching. This was made explicit in three of the six ‘objectives for

the CETL funding initiative’, which required CETLs to:

…support and develop practice that encourages deeper

understanding across the sector of ways of addressing students’

learning effectively… [influence] practice and raise the profile of

teaching excellence within and beyond their institutions; and

demonstrate collaboration and sharing of good practice and

so enhance the standard of teaching and effective learning

throughout the sector. (2004)

One of the key mechanisms for supporting change was that the

work of CETLs would be underpinned by evidence. In some instances

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this was instrumental: the bids had to offer evidence of existing

excellence to be considered for progression from stage one to stage

two of the bidding process. However, CETLs were also expected to

develop credibility across the sector by underpinning their work with

scholarly approaches; they were expected to:

…stimulate excellent practice through teaching that is informed

by scholarly reflection, developed through innovative and

adventurous thinking, extended through tested knowledge to

learning in new contexts … [and] deepen staff involvement in

critical scholarly reflection and evaluation of current teaching

by strengthening the CETL’s research (and administrative)

infrastructure. (2004)

And, in the guidance notes to the invitation to bid, HEFCE

suggested questions that bid writers ask of their proposals including:

‘What evidence gives you confidence that your approaches have

worked and will continue to work?’ It also suggested that the answer

should consider ‘evidence of published research, and of scholarly

and evaluative work related to teaching and learning effectiveness’

(2004). This is as close as HEFCE gets to an expectation that CETLs

should have a track record and a mission to extend pedagogic

research. In fact it is interesting to note that this last reference is

the only one made to research undertaken as part of CETL activity

(other references are to research students as potential beneficiaries,

research-led learning, student acquisition of research skills, etc.).

This collection of papers, falling into the theme of Strategies,

Tactics and Change, opens discussions on how CETLs have promoted

enhancement and change. Many CETLs are building on wider

policies for the development for universities and colleges and their

relationship with the world beyond the institution, for example,

Dearing (1997), Lambert (DTI, 2003), Cox (2005), ‘Higher Education

at Work’ (DIUS, 2008a) and ‘A New University Challenge’ (DIUS,

2008b). This collection of papers also expands and details arguments

that began to unfold in the GLAD conference: ‘Drivers for Change’ in

Cambridge 2007, in particular, Brown et al., discussing the shifts in

emphasis between teaching, research and administration, and course

development in art and design education; and Blair et al., arguing

for a new model of pedagogic practice to respond to change and

contemporary cultural, social and economic conditions (Drew, 2008).

In this session Alison Shreeve argues for developing pedagogic

research as a provocation for change beyond CETLs whilst Ellen

Sims looks at broader educational development activities focused

on ‘perfecting practice’. Several papers look at specific areas of

research and development that have formed part of CETL activities

including papers by Jane Osmond on the application of threshold

concepts and Ben Johnson on the ‘Emotional Studio’, drawing on

a wide range of pedagogic research to argue for the ‘substantial

pedagogic freedom’ available to learners in the studio.

Mike Neary’s paper, the ‘Student as Producer’, discusses the

student as co-researcher, sharing in the wider mission for places of

‘higher learning’ to generate new knowledge; and Megan Lawton et

al., look at ‘academic literacies’ and how student learning is enhanced

through research-like activities. Tom Hamilton et al., Alan Clarke,

and Angela Rogers and Steven Kilgallon all look at the situations

for learning, including issues of ‘ownership’ of the projects, learning

spaces and learning resources. Finally, Mark Stone et al., look at the

formation of communities of practice across colleges, particularly FE

colleges that are delivering HE-level art and design courses.

Dialogues in Art & Design: Promoting and Sharing Excellence

References

Cox, Sir G. (2005) Cox Review of Creativityin Business: Building on the UK’s Strengths. London: HMT.

DIT (2003) The Lambert review of business-university collaboration. London: Department of Trade and Industry.

DIUS (2008a) Higher education at work: unlocking talent. London: Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills.

DIUS (2008b) A new university challenge: unlocking talent. London: Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills.

Drew, L. (ed.) (2007) The student experience in art and design higher education. Drivers for Change Conference, Cambridge.

HEFCE (2004) Centres for excellence in teaching and learning: special initiative invitation to bid for funds, Bristol. www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2004/04_05/ (accessed 08/09).

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2.1Research, Learning and Teaching

2.1.1Why Bother with Research into Learning and Teaching in Art and Design?

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125

Alison Shreeve

Creative Learning in Practice (CLIP) CETL

London College of Fashion

University of the Arts London

Abstract

The Centres for Excellence in Art and Design in England and Northern

Ireland were set up with the express intention of recognising and

rewarding excellent practice in teaching and learning and to further

that practice across the sector. In order to bid for the funding a two-

stage process entailed demonstrating excellence with evidence from

stakeholders, including employers, students, external examiners and

the institutions’ internal evaluations. There was also an expectation

that there would be engagement and capacity building in pedagogic

research. This paper argues that research into learning and teaching

is an important activity for educational institutions in art and

design and should be maintained beyond the life of the Centres for

Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETLs) and embedded into art

and design education cultures.

Introduction

The Centres for Excellence in Art and Design in England and Northern

Ireland were set up with the express intention of recognising and

rewarding excellent practice in teaching and learning and to further

that practice across the sector. There was also an expectation that

there would be engagement and capacity building in pedagogic

research. This paper argues that research into learning and teaching

is an important activity for educational institutions in art and

design and should be maintained beyond the life of the CETLs and

embedded into art and design education in spite of the potential

barriers to engagement presented by differences in disciplinary

cultures. Following a brief overview of pedagogic research I will

discuss the potential barriers to engagement and the importance of

overcoming these.

What is research into learning and teaching in HE?

Research may take many forms, but basically it is a structured

enquiry that focuses on a question or set of questions that arise from

aspects of teaching and learning practice and ways of systematically

enquiring into that practice. A good teacher will constantly be

asking questions of their teaching, such as did my students learn

from that particular session, what worked for them and why? How

can I improve and how can I maximise the learning potential for

students? Good teaching is like good design, a process of enquiry

and evaluation, often collaborative, expansive and imaginative. This

kind of constant evaluation might be argued to be research into

teaching and learning. However, in order to differentiate enquiry into

our own practices from educational research more generally Ashwin

and Trigwell (2004) use the following table:

Table 1 Investigating Teaching and Learning

Level Purpose of investigation

Evidence gathering methods and conclusions

Investigation aimed at

Example

1 To inform oneself Verified by self Personal knowledge

Learning

2 To inform others within that context

Verified by those within the same context

Local knowledge Course evaluation

3 To inform a wider audience

Verified by those outside that context

Public knowledge

Research article

126 Dialogues in Art & Design: Promoting and Sharing Excellence

The signifying factor is the extent to which there is engagement

and dialogue with existing debates around teaching and learning

and the increase and sharing of knowledge. If the knowledge is

retained within the tutor’s own experience or that of their close team

there is limited articulation and relation to experiences beyond the

course. This can lead to reinventing the wheel, as there is limited

reference to and building on previous knowledge and pockets of

isolated excellence from which we cannot learn as a community. If

there is engagement with the wider sector knowledge can be both

shared and built upon. Through using and referencing theories of

teaching and learning, the practices that usually remain tacit may

be made explicit.

The range of research into learning and teaching is incredibly

varied, and covers aspects of the students’ experience, teaching and

teachers, specific groups of learners and specific kinds of activity.

It may also include quantitative and qualitative approaches, be

longitudinal, a broad survey or an in-depth personal narrative. It

may focus on the whole education sector, an institution, course or

individual. It may be comparative, representative or atypical. What it

is not, is a description of practices.

What can it tell us?

Research into situations as complex, mutating and organic as education

can only hope to be illuminative, and the more research that is done

from as many perspectives as possible, the better the picture of learning

and teaching will be. Research situated in well designed and carefully

executed projects can suggest ways to move forward, what factors

help students to learn, what hinders learning and what helps tutors

to teach. There are also benefits to institutions through enquiry into

systemic issues around policy and procedures. Research can provide

unexpected insights or reaffirm suspicions. Such knowledge also has

implications for action; both to more widely disseminate and debate the

outcomes and to take action to improve as a result of research. There is

always an ethical dimension and a fundamental driver in research is to

improve the world as we find it, and critical pedagogy (e.g. Freire, 2006)

exemplifies an approach that seeks to make education democratic.

What are the barriers to engagement in educational research in

our sector?

Although many would argue that knowledge about education,

learning, knowledge and knowing is universally applicable in the FE/

HE sector in the UK, there are many who believe that disciplinary

ways of being actually influence our understanding of teaching and

learning practices and what we do (e.g. Becher, 1994; Neumann et al.,

2002; Entwistle, 2005; Lindblom-Ylanne et al., 2006; Brew, 2008).

The disciplines could be said to entail particular cultural practices

(Trowler, 2005), or to consist of ‘signature pedagogies’ (Shulman,

2005), which are characteristic to the discipline.

Art and design practices are embedded in practical, physical,

visual and material artefacts and processes. The written word is not

the predominant form of communication and for many art and design

practitioners and educators writing does not come easily, requiring,

like any form of practice, the motivation, time and energy to perfect it. In

addition to this there are a high percentage of dyslexic students in the

discipline and one might assume a similar percentage of academics.

Writing, however, is the main form of communication in educational

research, although there is a growing body of methods based on

the visual and artefact within the research process (e.g. Emison and

Smith, 2000; Silverman, 2001). Communication and interpretation

of the data is still primarily written, though new technologies are

opening up alternative forms for presenting research.

Tutors are required to be professional in terms of their commitment

to and understanding of the world of education with its socially

and politically driven agendas. The emphasis on a quality learning

experience for students, the quest for excellence and striving for

recognition and status, the expectation that they will be involved

in research and/or consultancy in their creative practice, and the

constant challenges of budgetary constraints, pressures of time,

space and new technology, all add to an almost impossible burden

for the full-time tutor. How can research into learning and teaching

be incorporated into this increasingly demanding role?

In addition to those who might consider themselves to be full-

time career academics in art and design education, there are a

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significantly high proportion of part-time and fractional teaching

appointments. The proportion of face-to-face teaching students

encounter from part-time and fractional staff while at college may be

as high as 70 per cent of the total (estimate from ADM-HEA personal

communication: Clews, 2008). The reasons for employing so many

part-time staff are numerous, but they are often seen as the link to

current creative industry practices. The relationship experienced

between practice and teaching for part-timers (practitioner tutors)

is complex and variable (Shreeve, 2008; Walker, 2008). They are

engaging in two separate cultural activities – their practice and their

teaching – which can be conceptualised as two separate cultural

worlds. Although many practitioners may experience practice and

teaching as a continuum, this does not necessarily mean that they

are comfortable with an academic discourse or want to spend time

inquiring into the intricacies of learning and teaching.

Resistance to professional development of practitioner-tutors is

evidenced through a reluctance to embrace the ‘education speak’ that

is the predominant discourse of quality assurance, staff development

through accredited and non-accredited processes and indeed,

of educational research. The concepts, ideas and debates about

learning and the student experience originate in the wider education

sector, not usually within our specific disciplinary environments.

We have not often appropriated the discourse for ourselves and

engaged in conversation beyond the art college. For example, social

learning environments where students come together to informally

support each other’s learning are now engineered through libraries;

learning in the studio has long provided such a situation and this is

now recognised by others who replicate the studio environment for

other disciplines, as it supports a student-centred learning approach

(Smith Taylor, 2009).

Engagement with employers is encouraged across the sector, but

industry practitioners often teach art and design students, and live

projects with industry partners are common. Authentic assessment

strategies, enquiry-based learning and many other initiatives have

been and continue to be characteristic of art and design education

but we tend to take these ways of learning and teaching for granted.

Why question a way of life that we have both been through as

students and we reproduce as tutors? Are we providing the best

education we can for our students and how would we know if we did?

Art and design performs worse than any other sector in the National

Student Survey. Can we contribute to debates about teaching and

learning in all disciplines or do we tend to be isolated? We have our

‘own’ disciplinary journals for art education, but we do not frequently

contribute to many journals beyond our own disciplines.

A reluctance to embrace the wider educational discourse

may be linked to two factors. First, the primary medium of our

discipline, which is visual and artefactual, is a far more immediate

communication tool than a structured argument through a written

paper or through a text book. The majority of student learning

will be through making, experiment and evaluation. The artefact

and its associated traces of process we assume speaks for itself.

If students produce creative, innovative outcomes why would we

need to question the efficacy or the processes of our teaching?

Second, the mechanisms through which our students learn are

habitual, complex and experiential. With such ingrained, material

approaches we inhabit an educational environment that expects

both students and staff to work with and through complex, chaotic

and ambiguous situations. Tutors are constantly challenged and

appear to work at the edge of chaos in a zone of creativity that often

requires them to suspend judgment and take risks. For example, a

tutor interviewed about their teaching describes it in this way:

…your relationship to students is different from student to

student. There are some students that come to an idea which

I just can’t get my head around. But I trust them and I’ll say go

with your instinct because they’re a strong student.

A ‘pedagogy of ambiguity’ (Austerlitz et al., 2008) is prevalent

where the tutor is frequently living through uncertainty and unable

to fully articulate the path ahead. Both student and tutor are on a

shared journey of discovery. Working within environments that are

constantly shifting and uncertain, the discourse of educational

Good teaching is like good design, a process of enquiry and evaluation, often collaborative, expansive and imaginative.

128 Dialogues in Art & Design: Promoting and Sharing Excellence

research appears to be an alien culture and one that might require

alternative sets of skills to either creative practice or to teaching.

How might we overcome barriers to engagement in pedagogic

research?

Overcoming a general reluctance to undertake research into learning

and teaching may be a long-term goal, but as the CETL initiative

has shown, there are tutors who are willing to engage and adopt

a systematic critical enquiry into their practices. Having funds to

release tutors from some of their teaching duties, or to support

those who are part-time teachers to undertake research is one

way to enable this to happen. Encouraging tutors through project

funding, with careful mentoring and support from more experienced

researchers, helps to develop a community that begins to own the

discourse of educational research as well as to adapt it to include

disciplinary-sensitive concepts and knowledge. If these kinds of

activities are to become embedded in the culture of the discipline

it will require investment by institutions to enable people to engage

and to support others to become pedagogic researchers with

the confidence to adapt and develop methodologies in line with

disciplinary practices.

An example of new approaches to research is exemplified in the

10by10 project at the ARTSWORK CETL at Bath Spa University. Here

researchers are developing ways to enquire and produce information

about the relationship between practice and teaching, which are

visual. Such moves towards developing and appropriating research

methods that are more sympathetic to the ‘natural’ environment of

art and design suggest how educational research might become more

accessible to teachers and more directly relevant to dissemination

within the community of art and design education.

Why should we bother?

The CETLs, together with groups such as GLAD (Group for Learning

in Art and Design), CHEAD (Council for Higher Education in Art and

Design) and the ADM–HEA subject centre have begun to enable more

research into learning and teaching in art and design higher education,

but why is it important to continue to develop and expand this research

and why do we need to have practitioner-teachers involved?

We need to understand what the signature pedagogies (Shulman,

2005) of our practice as art educators are and why such approaches

work in order to both develop them and to provide the best education

we can for students in a complex and changing world. If we do not

articulate and develop awareness and knowledge based on research

we are unlikely to be able to defend our beliefs about art and design

education in the university in the light of growing demands for

uniformity and conformity, usually originating in sectors outside our

own disciplinary context. How are we to argue for what we believe

and develop learning in creative arts if we do not base our arguments

on sound research and enquiry methods?

Developing a questioning approach to learning and teaching is

also in line with our own practices. Learning is at the heart of creative

practice; it is what drives us to create. These approaches motivate

our practices and the same conditions should pervade teaching.

All too often though there are no debates and no questioning of

learning and teaching, simply reiterations of didactic formulae.

Creating interest within a community of teachers who examine

their teaching practice is a healthy situation and one in which the

issues are alive and the discourse of education can be integrated

into creative teaching and learning practices. There is no reason

why ‘education speak’ should not become part of a discourse of art

education, integrated into and informing our learning; enhancing

and extending our own creative arts practices and recognising that

teaching is also a creative profession. This may best be achieved

through developing our own discipline-based research in arts

education, by applying theory and developing outcomes that are

based in our own disciplinary language.

Conclusion

I have set out what I believe to be important reasons to engage with

research into learning and teaching in the disciplines of the creative

arts. I have also outlined some of the barriers to engaging. These are

not insurmountable obstacles, but present a challenge to all of us

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to evolve methods and approaches that are sympathetic and speak

to our colleagues in ways that make the language of research into

learning and teaching acceptable and meaningful.

We might start with the notion of scholarship being an extension

of our own creative practices, where enquiry is a fundamental part

of what we do. By expecting tutors to also enquire into their practice

as creative educators we will begin to evolve a discourse and culture

where unpacking traditional approaches to teaching and learning

may help to stimulate the idea that teaching is and should be a

creative act. Without such an enquiry-led approach we are in danger

of being forced into modes of working that are inappropriate and

undervalued in the wider university culture. We have much to learn

and much to offer, but we can only do this through engagement in

learning and teaching research with the wider HE research community

as well as within our own. We need to be able to engage others in

educational discourses, using theories developed elsewhere and

also articulating our own approaches and theories about learning in

order to engage with the higher education sector as a whole.

References

Ashwin, P. and Trigwell, K. (2004)Investigating educational development, in P. Khan and D. Baume, (eds) Enhancing Staff and Educational Development. London: Kogan Page.

Austerlitz, N., Blythman, M., Grove-White, A., et al. (2008) Mind the gap: expectations, ambiguity and pedagogy within art and design higher education, in L. Drew, (ed.) The Student Experience in Art and Design Higher Education: Drivers for Change. Cambridge: JRA Publishing.

Becher, T. (1994) The significance of disciplinary differences, Studies in Higher Education, 19(2): 151-162.

Brew, A. (2008) Disciplinary and interdisciplinary affiliations of experienced researchers, Higher Education (in press).

Emison, M. and Smith, P. (2000) Researching the Visual. London: Thousand Oaks; New Delhi: Sage.

Entwistle, N. (2005) Learning Outcomes and ways of thinking across contrasting disciplines and settings in higher education, The Curriculum Journal, 16(1): 67-82.

Freire, P. (2006) Pedagogy of the Oppressed (M.B. Ramos, Trans.). New York: Continuum. (Original work published 1970.)

Lindblom-Ylanne, S., Trigwell, K., Nevgi, A. and Ashwin, P. (2006) How approaches to teaching are affected by discipline and teaching context, Studies in Higher Education, 31(3): 285-298.

Neumann, R., Parry, S. and Becher, T.(2002) Teaching and learning in their disciplinary contexts: a conceptual analysis, Studies in Higher Education, 27(4): 405-417.

Shreeve, A. (2008) Transitions: variation in the experience of practice and teaching relations in art and design. PhD. Lancaster University.

Shulman, L.S. (2005) Signature pedagogies in the professions, Daedalus, 134(3): 52-59.

Silverman, D. (2001) Interpreting Qualitative Data: Methods for Analysing Talk, Text and Interaction. London: Thousand Oaks; New Delhi: Sage.

Smith Taylor, S. (2009) Effects of studio space on teaching and learning: preliminary findings from two case studies, Innovative Higher Education. Online, 07/08.

Trowler, P. (2005) The sociologies of teaching, learning and enhancement: improving practices in higher education, Revista de Sociologia, 76: 13-32.

Walker, A. (2008) 10x10 project website. http://10by10.info/ (accessed 20/07/09).

Dialogues in Art & Design: Promoting and Sharing Excellence

2.1Research, Learning and Teaching

2.1.2‘Stuck in the Bubble’: Identifying Threshold Concepts in Design

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Jane Osmond

Centre of Excellence for Product and Automotive Design (CEPAD)

Coventry University

Abstract

This paper briefly details the journey to date that the Centre of

Excellence for Automotive and Product Design (CEPAD) at Coventry

University has taken toward identifying threshold concepts in

design, one of three research strands outlined in the original 2005

CETL bid document. The research allowed the emergence of tacit

assumptions and knowledge of the discipline and details how a

threshold concept for first year design students was identified. The

paper then proposes two questions for discussion arising from the

work with the aim of exploring the possible impact on the higher

education art and design community.

Introduction

This paper briefly details the journey to date that the Centre of

Excellence for Automotive and Product Design (CEPAD) has taken

toward identifying threshold concepts in design (Osmond et al., 2007,

2008, 2009), one of three research strands outlined in the original 2005

project bid document. The paper then proposes three questions for

discussion, which have arisen from the work, with the aim of exploring

the possible impact on the higher education art and design community.

The journey

The journey began with a consideration of possible threshold

concepts for the first year of study for the transport and product

design course at Coventry University, with threshold concepts being

defined by Meyer and Land (2003) as concepts that:

…represent a transformed way of understanding, interpreting or

viewing something without which the learner cannot progress.

(p.1)

As transport and product design staff felt that the successful

development of spatial awareness skills was crucial if students

were to gain entry into the design community of practice, a

research question was formulated to examine if spatial awareness

was a threshold concept. First year students and their tutors were

interviewed in order to define the term ‘spatial awareness’ as it

applies to the transport and product design course, and also identify

other potential threshold concepts. In relation to the meaning of

spatial awareness, the data yielded a multiplicity of meanings from

staff, and little knowledge from students. However, several potential

threshold concepts were identified, the more practical of which were

incorporated into the development of a pilot spatial awareness

measurement tool, which, it was hoped, could be used to assess

students’ suitability for the course at application interview.

The pilot measurement tool was implemented with a first year

cohort of 114 students alongside The Purdue Visualisation of

Rotations Test (Bodner and Guay, 1997), the latter being a recognised

tool for measuring spatial awareness. The results of both tests were

compared with students’ end-of-year assessment results and no

correlation was found. Therefore, despite the emphasis by staff on

the importance of students’ spatial awareness development, there

appeared to be no common definition available and end-of-year

assessments did not specifically measure it. The research team

concluded from this that spatial awareness was not a threshold

concept, at least for the first year of study.

However, a potential threshold concept did emerge from the

data, tentatively identified by staff as the ‘confidence challenge’

and defined as the ability to inculcate design conventions and

expand upon them using information from a variety of sources

and experiences.

This confidence enables students to tackle what Buchanan (1992)

describes as ‘wicked’ problems, which:

…have incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements;

and solutions to them are often difficult to recognize as such

because of complex interdependencies. (p.6)

132 Dialogues in Art & Design: Promoting and Sharing Excellence

Further investigation into the ‘confidence to challenge’ was

undertaken during the third and fourth year of the CETL project and

revealed that the actual threshold concept is the process that leads

to the confidence to challenge. Tentatively labelled the ‘toleration of

design uncertainty’ it is defined as:

…the moment when a student recognises that the uncertainty

present when approaching a design brief is an essential, but at

the same time routine, part of the design process.

Both the design (Cross, 1992; Dorst, 2003, 2008) and the creativity

literature (Kleiman, 2008; De-Bono, 1995; Baillie, 2003; Amabile,

1983 in Vidal, 2009) recognise this moment, and at its simplest it

can be understood as the process before a ‘eureka’ moment, which

Tovey (1984) describes as an ‘incubation’ period:

It is possible that the incubation periods, that time of apparent

inactivity during which the designer’s brain furiously grapples

with the problem, is simply the period during which the two

halves of the brain are out of touch or unable to agree. By

contrast, the moment when they do suddenly come into

alignment would be the classic ‘eureka’ point’. (1984: 226)

Further, Wallace (1992) describes it as ‘problem bubbles’:

Progress through many simultaneous tasks involves solving

hundreds of individual problems… To solve a particular design

task, the complete set of problem bubbles associated with

the task must be solved; but many, many bubbles not directly

related to the task will be entered between starting and finishing

the task… (p.81)

Therefore, some students may get stuck in Wallace’s problem

bubble when searching for design inspiration, and this is reflected

by this student quote:

I think during the very beginning I really struggled to really

know what I should do in my projects – you really spend a lot of

time to think about it but the result is not really that good as you

expected because you keep surfacing around, you can’t really

make decisions about doing … that’s one of the most negative

feelings because you don’t know what to do sometimes – I

mean I understand you do projects … it is not really satisfying

teachers, you learn during the process, but still you want to

know what they really want.

As reported in Osmond and Turner (2009), the toleration of

uncertainty fits Meyer and Land’s (2003) definition of a threshold

concept as transformative in that the students accept that this is what

a designer ‘does’ and thus they begin their journey to the designer

identity. It is irreversible in that they would find it very difficult to

‘un-think’ themselves from a design identity, and integrative in

that they realise that everything they know, learn and experience

is a legitimate source of inspiration (for example, accepting that

those moments when they dance around the bubble thinking about

subjects that are not directly related to their task may turn out to

be the most important part of the process). And, most of all, it is

troublesome in that the students will constantly experience and re-

experience the ‘surfacing around’ as they hunt for a solution, even

when they attain the status of professional designer.

Therefore, it is argued that the toleration of design uncertainty

is a transformative moment for design students: without this

transformation, students can remain in a liminal state, described as:

an in-between state of uncertainty and insecurity in which they do

not enjoy full community membership status and struggle both to

make sense of the underlying episteme and also to find their own

creative identities as design practitioners. (Osmond, et al., 2007)

The most recent data to emerge from the study indicates that

passing through the toleration of design uncertainty may or may not

take place for some students before they enter university, and could

Accepting that those moments when they dance around the bubble thinking about subjects that are not directly related to their task may turn out to be the most important part of the process.

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134 Dialogues in Art & Design: Promoting and Sharing Excellence

therefore be related to the kind of creative educational background

they have previously experienced. It is possible then that students

who arrive at university having not passed through this threshold

and who also face large class sizes and the concomitant staff:student

ratio may remain in Wallace’s problem bubble far longer than is

necessary. In addition, this may pose even greater difficulty for those

international students who are used to a more prescribed curriculum

that privileges a ‘rote’ style of learning rather than a ‘creative’ style.

These findings have obvious implications for course design and

deserve further investigation. Further investigation is also indicated

into how applicable this threshold concept is to other creative

disciplines. To date, interest has been shown by the art and design

sector and measures are underway to locate appropriate sources

of funding.

Conclusion

The research into threshold concepts in design at Coventry

University has highlighted that as a research framework it is capable

of surfacing – often tacit – assumptions and knowledge that form the

episteme of a discipline, which Perkins (2006) defines as:

a system of ideas or way of understanding that allows us to

establish knowledge. (p.42)

In this case, the research identified that spatial awareness

development, although of critical importance in terms of the

development of designers, was not actually the critical element during

the first year of study. Further, the research framework allowed the

examination of several other pieces of tacit knowledge, in particular ‘the

confidence to challenge’, which again did not prove to be a threshold

concept, but did allow the researchers to identify the process leading

up to it: ‘the toleration of design uncertainty’. The identification of this

threshold concept was then underpinned by its presence in the staff and

student data and in the design and creativity literature. More recently,

data has indicated that students’ ability to pass through this threshold

may be linked to their previous creative educational background.

Therefore, using the threshold concept research framework has

enabled the surfacing of the episteme that is characteristic of a

discipline, and this knowledge can now be used as a baseline for

further investigations. In this case, it is hoped that this will be a focus

on the examination of students’ previous educational backgrounds

and potential applicability to other creative disciplines.

Questions

1. The threshold concept has been identified as peculiar to the

transport and product design course at Coventry University.

However, the recognition of, for want of a better phrase, the

‘eureka’ moment, in the design and creativity literature, points to

the possibility that the threshold concept may well exist in other

creative disciplines. Therefore, should we – and if so, how do we –

examine this possibility across other creative disciplines, such as

music, dance and fashion to name but a few?

2. If every design student does face design uncertainty at some

point in their design education, and does not achieve toleration

of design uncertainty before they get to university, it could be

argued that the increased number of students on design courses

and concomitant staff:student ratios may mean that they do not

get the appropriate support and ‘safe’ space that allows them to

experience this transformative moment. Therefore, should we, as

educators in creative disciplines, be:

• Recognisingthatestablishedteachingandlearningstylesare

often predicated on class sizes that were historically much

smaller, and students who were perhaps better ‘university-

trained’?

• Researchingandidentifyingwhattypeofcreativeeducational

background is the most successful in preparing students for

the toleration of design uncertainty?

• Redesigning courses that privilege the threshold concept

and thus take into account the lack of appropriate creative

background in both home and international students?

135

References

Baillie, C. (ed.) (2003) The TravellingCASE: Fostering Creative Thinking in Higher Education. UK Centre for Materials Education. Learning and Teaching Support Network.

Bodner, G. and Guay, R. (1997) The Purdue Visualisation of Rotations Test, The Chemical Educator, 2(4): 1-17.

Buchanan, R. (1992) Wicked problems in design thinking, Design Issues, 8(2). Cross, N. (1992) Research in design thinking, in N. Cross, K. Dorst and N. Roozenburg, (eds) Research In Design Thinking. Delft: Delft University Press. DeBono, E. (1995) Exploring patterns of thought: serious creativity, Journal for Quality and Participation, 18(5): 12-18.

Dorst, K. (2003) Understanding Design: 150 Reflections on Being a Designer. Amsterdam: BIS.

Dorst, K. (2008) Design research: a revolution-waiting-to-happen, Design Studies, 29(1): 4-11. Kleiman, P. (2008) Towards transformation: conceptions of creativity in higher education, Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 45(3): 209-217.

Meyer, J.H.F. and Land, R. (2003). Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge: linkages to ways of thinking and practising within the disciplines, in C. Rust, (ed.) Improving Student Learning. Improving Student Learning Theory and Practice – 10 Years on, pp.412-424. Oxford: OCSLD.

Osmond, J. and Turner, A. (2008)Measuring the creative baseline in transport design education, in C. Rust, (ed.) Improving Student Learning – For What? Oxford: OCSLD.

Osmond, J. and Turner, A. (2009) The Threshold Concept Journey: from Identification to Application. Threshold Concepts: From Theory to Practice. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers (in press).

Osmond, J., Turner, A. and Land, R. (2007) Threshold concepts and spatial awareness in automotive design, in R. Land and J.H.F. Meyer, (eds) Threshold Concepts Within the Disciplines. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

Perkins, D. (2006) Constructivism and troublesome knowledge, in J.H.F. Meyer and R. Land, (eds) Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding: Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge, pp. 33-47. London and New York: Routledge.

Tovey, M. (1984) Designing with both halves of the brain, Design Studies, 5(4): 219-228.

Vidal, R.V.V. (2009) Creativity for problem solvers, AI and Society, 23: 409-432.

Wallace, K. (1992) Some observations on design thinking in N. Cross, K. Dorst and N. Roozenburg, (eds) Research in Design Thinking. Delft: Delft University Press.

Dialogues in Art & Design: Promoting and Sharing Excellence

2.2Engaging with Learning

2.2.1Perfecting Practice: Engaging with Learning and Teaching in the Creative Subjects

136

137

Ellen Sims

Creative Learning in Practice (CLIP) CETL

Chelsea College of Art and Design

University of the Arts London

Abstract

The University of the Arts London is host to the Creative Learning in

Practice Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CLIP-CETL),

which has supported a number of individual and course-based

evaluative and developmental projects.

The CLIP-CETL approach to engaging staff with learning and teaching

focuses on the development of scholarship of learning and teaching

through working with tutors and students, building on excellent

practice in a range of contexts, seeking to elicit, analyse and evaluate

what is often implicit in practitioner-teachers and the experience of

developing pedagogies for extending practice-based learning.

This paper argues that staff welcome opportunities to innovate in

learning and teaching but need space, time and support to do it. A

pragmatic approach – one that acknowledges the reality of teaching and

learning in our subject areas, and working with people in their contexts

rather than telling them what to do – is key for successful engagement.

Introduction

Since 1999 The Higher Education Funding Council for England

(HEFCE) has set national priorities for learning and teaching in

higher education (HE). Funding to reward and embed excellence and

innovation has been made available through the Teaching Quality

Enhancement Fund and the establishment of Centres for Excellence

in Teaching and Learning (CETLs).

The University of the Arts London (UAL) is host to the Creative

Learning in Practice Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning

(CLIP-CETL), which has funded a number of individual and course-

based evaluative and developmental projects to inform and enrich

teaching practice through research, working with tutors and students

and building on excellent practice in a range of contexts.

This paper seeks to demonstrate how the experiences of staff

and students are enhanced through pedagogic and professional

development activities and to set out potential models for engaging

with learning and teaching in the creative arts in UK HE. It further

identifies and addresses issues for staff and institutions seeking to

participate in and support developmental activities by suggesting

answers to the following:

1. What is good teaching?

2. What are the benefits and obstacles to engaging with learning and

teaching development?

3. What strategies work?

What is good teaching in the creative arts in HE?

Since the Dearing Report in 1997 elevated interest in HE teaching and

the quality of the learning experience for students, debates around

what characterises good teaching (e.g. Ramsden, 2003; Prosser and

Trigwell, 1999; Biggs, 2003) have ensued. For creative arts subjects,

the teaching excellence recognised in the awarding of the CLIP-CETL

is based on student-centred, inclusive approaches to authentic

learning in practice, underpinned by social theories of learning (e.g.

Lave and Wenger, 1991; Lave, 1996; Wenger, 1998). Such pedagogies

are founded on the claim that learning to practise in the creative arts

requires engagement with authentic activities in context.

The ‘Teaching Landscapes in the Creative Arts Subjects’ cross-

UAL research project suggests that practitioners characterise good

learning and teaching as ‘performative’ – that is that students have the

opportunity to perform as practitioners, offering interactions with the

physical and material, where learning is by ‘making and doing’ – visible

and explicit (in the process and products that are outcomes of learning);

experimental (emphasising the development of ideas); and encouraging

of independence, professionalism and critical/reflective thinking.

Good teaching is seen as being responsive to student needs and

‘tailor-made’. The role of the teacher is therefore seen as facilitation

or as McWilliams (2008: 266) suggests, one of being a ‘meddler’,

138 Dialogues in Art & Design: Promoting and Sharing Excellence

‘mutually involved in assembling and dis-assembling cultural

products’ with learners. This is a shift from the conception of the

teacher as all-knowing.

Why is it important to engage with professional development?

While the ‘Landscapes’ project suggests that teachers are taking

their role of facilitation of learning on board, descriptions of their own

teaching practice are often at odds with student-centred approaches.

This suggests professional development could support further change.

Additional reasons for engaging with professional development

include professionalising teaching and giving teachers the language

of pedagogy to participate more fully in research and academic

discourse; engaging students as co-researchers and building learning

communities; and acknowledging the ‘liquidity’ of knowledge and

developing new forms of social engagement with the world.

McFarlane and Hughes (2009: 5) cite a number of authors who

suggest educational development is largely concerned with ‘improving

teaching practices and techniques including assessment and

curriculum design’. Pedagogic research provides a vital link with the

development of teaching and can make a contribution to the quality

of learning and teaching as well as contributing to policy and strategy

development and implementation; it is therefore an important aspect

of pedagogic development.

How do we successfully engage people at all levels with learning

and teaching?

The activities of learning and teaching development include

programmes of recognised professional qualifications along with a

range of approaches that seek to develop research-informed teaching.

These range from evaluation of individual and local practices to

scholarly approaches and contributions to the debates in art and

design pedagogy in HE. The CLIP-CETL has developed several strands

of funded activities, which have included curriculum development

funding; pedagogic research based on individuals’ practices; student

projects, which convey widening participation success stories;

participative cross-university research projects engaging experienced

and novice researchers; and bursaries for PhDs, PG Certificates and

PG Diplomas in Learning and Teaching in HE.

Within these projects a wide range of themes have been explored

including the use of technologies; the experiences of international

students; assessment practices and the language of assessment;

peer and collaborative learning; signature pedagogies in art

and design; spaces for teaching and the influences of space on

pedagogy; the emotional dimensions of tutor-student interactions;

and teacher conceptions of how they teach, what they teach and

how students learn.

The engagement of staff with learning and teaching has been

acknowledged by the UAL as an important part of strategic

development and in the past few years structures have been put into

place that are beginning to support this development. A pragmatic

approach that acknowledges the reality of teaching and learning in

our subject areas and working with people in their contexts, rather

than telling them what to do, is important.

This has been the CLIP-CETL approach – engaging individuals and

small teams in the exploration of the nature of their own pedagogic

practice, designed and evaluated to better understand and extend the

pedagogies of practice-based learning and teaching. This has been

done through the aforementioned funding used primarily to buy staff

time, as well as providing practical support using new technologies,

developing research and writing skills and mentoring. This approach

has worked well where the time to carry out the projects and reflect

has been properly ring-fenced and where participants have been

given further opportunities to engage their colleagues and (with

varying success) managers with these activities and outcomes.

It is of interest that engaging course directors has been such a

challenge, raising issues of professional identity; are course directors

managers or academic innovators and leaders? This issue was identified

in the first internal evaluation report (Blythman, 2008) as an issue central

to changing the institutional culture to encourage enhancement.

Successful participation has been reliant on the dedicated support

embedded in the organisational model of the CLIP-CETL, which

provided a coordinator for each of the participating colleges and built

139

local support networks. For example, PG Cert bursaries were offered

to staff to buy teaching replacement for additional study time and

dedicated support for building research and study skills, which the

cohort found beneficial. The participants acted as mentors to each

other and sometimes to subsequent cohorts. As a result subsequent

groups of PG Cert participants have had additional support in their

colleges, enhancing their experience and causing less disruption to the

course teams, which in turn increased buy-in from course managers.

A further slightly exceptional example is a project that recognised

and built on good practice, in this case collaborative approaches to

working in the fine art studios. The Virtual Studios project looked

at the different challenges and possibilities offered by online

collaboration. It was exceptional in that the tutors admitted to

engaging initially to fund the collaboration and were not particularly

interested in the pedagogic aspects but in the making of artworks,

even though they had identified learning outcomes for the students.

They measured the success of the project on the work produced

rather than the student learning.

This had an effect on the pedagogy in that the tutors attempted to

control the process and were reluctant to allow a student-led approach

due to anxiety over the quality of the work. Through facilitated

sessions with the students, which also built student confidence in

standing up for their ideas, the tutor was able to move to a more

facilitative role and allow the students to lead the collaboration.

If things didn’t go to plan it wasn’t a disaster but a learning/

creating opportunity. (Tutor, unpublished evaluation data)

What gave the project life was ending up going somewhere

completely different, not where you expected. That was the

excitement. Going off at a tangent. Constantly re-evaluating.

[That experience] is something to take away to our own practice.

(Student, unpublished evaluation data)

The model of providing rewards for building on existing good

practice in this case was successful in that it engaged reluctant

participants by not only providing funding and support but also by

communicating to staff that their teaching was valued. The project

has since been repeated in other courses and made sustainable by

previous participants mentoring new students and leading on not

only the direction of the project but the technology used.

Benefits to staff and students

Keeping in mind both the aspirational and pragmatic aspects of

engaging with pedagogic research and development, key questions

for staff are: What might doing this research change about you and

your practice? How might students’ learning be enhanced?

Participants in CLIP-CETL projects found that the main benefit of

taking part was the opportunity to try out and discuss new ideas with

colleagues and to follow up and share experiences. For example, for

the PG Cert bursary recipients, exchanging teaching methods and

getting feedback from peers were highly valued (CLIP-CETL Interim

Evaluation Report, 2007).

Benefits for staff are in the development of their own skills and in the

production of shared knowledge. Increased and ongoing engagement

with learning and teaching is evidenced, for example, in the numbers

of staff engaging in the debates, proposing projects and applying for

funding and fellowships, and in an increased interest in undertaking

further qualifications such as the Postgraduate Certificates and

Diplomas in Learning and Teaching in HE. It is worth noting that a number

have gone on to receive UAL teaching and professional fellowships.

The main benefits have been:

• Publishedarticle/conferencepapers

• Creatingadebatearoundtheissuesseenasimportant

• Developingabilitytohelpthestudentslearn

• Developingresearchskills

• Learningtogivepresentationstopeers

• Gainingvaluablefeedbackfromstudents

• Feelingchallengedprofessionally

• Introducingimprovementstothecurriculum

A pragmatic approach that acknowledges the reality of teaching and learning in our subject areas and working with people in their contexts, rather than telling them what to do, is important.

140 Dialogues in Art & Design: Promoting and Sharing Excellence

In addition, there has been a growing awareness of greater

applicability of project products and models to other courses,

leading to a higher level of awareness of pedagogy. This is a

key criterion for many internal funding opportunities and seen

as essential to supporting culture change. For example, the

outcome of a UAL teaching fellowship is Visual Directions, an

online visual resource for developing reflective thinking skills and

use of sketchbooks, which has been widely disseminated and is

being used and evaluated across a range of courses. It is serving

as a model for additional resources to extend the website. Staff

and students were engaged in the development and piloting of

the resource, which has proved to be a valuable learning and

teaching resource.

Obstacles and issues

Throughout the projects staff have been supported and mentored in

their activities by peers, more experienced colleagues and CLIP-CETL

coordinators. A number of workshops introducing pedagogic theory,

bid writing, research skills and methods, writing and presentation

have supported participants, who have gone on to engage and

support their colleagues. Less successful has been the support

available to individuals to embed and sustain development activities

in their own contexts due to a range of issues.

1. Time

HE teachers, technicians and managers are busy people. Evidence

provided in CLIP-CETL evaluations supports the notion that tutors

and technicians welcome opportunities to innovate in learning and

teaching but need space, time and support to do it:

I’m squeezed into a place now where I’ve got a lot of other

things on and I really haven’t got the space … I would have

loved to have said, ‘Oh yes I want to write parts of that paper

that’s going, you know, to be going out there’ but … I need,

you know, real good concentration space and when you’ve

got four hundred and fifty students to deal with that just ain’t

going to happen. (Staff interview: Third internal evaluation –

unpublished – Blythman, 2008)

2. Engagement at all levels

The original conception was that course directors and key team

members would participate in the CLIP-CETL projects together to

encourage embedding of innovation and whole-team learning.

However, it was inevitably course team members who carried out the

work as managers could not find the time or had other priorities:

…if other joint projects come up I’m really happy to be involved

… the biggest difficulty for me is always going to be, you know,

finding the time… The course management is very hard to step

out of. (Staff interview: Third internal evaluation – unpublished

– Blythman, 2008)

3. Building and sustaining a community

The programmes have focused on the establishment of a culture that

increasingly values and awards status to teaching. Key to the success

of engagement is the sense of identification with a community of

practice. Participation in the CLIP-CETL programmes has increased

year-on-year, and as a result the pedagogic research and development

community into which new members and knowledge are received is

ever-widening, increasingly visible and welcoming. However, staff

leave and new staff are always arriving. The model of community

building needs to be nurtured and sustained.

Strategies for further engagement

In strategising ways forward overall we need to be thinking about

how the CLIP-CETL approach can be sustained to further explore

emerging pedagogies and identify areas for further development.

This will require ongoing support for engagement with both the

scholarly and practical activities of learning and teaching practice.

The key to developing successful future strategies for engaging

staff lies in recognising the value of overcoming the aforementioned

obstacles and embracing the key successes identified. Particularly

141

References

Biggs, J. (2003) Teaching for QualityLearning at University. Buckingham: SRHE/Open University Press.

Blythman, M. (2008) CLIP-CETL internal evaluation report (unpublished).

CLIP-CETL interim evaluation report (07/07). University of the Arts London. www.arts.ac.uk/clipcetl-evaluation.htm (accessed 11/05/09).

Lave, J. (1996) Teaching, as learning, in practice, Mind, Culture and Activity 3(3): 149-164.

Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991) Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

McFarlane, B. and Hughes, G. (2009) Turning teachers into academics? The role of educational development in fostering synergy between teaching and research, Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 46(1): 5-14.

McWilliams, E. (2008) Unlearning how to teach, Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 45(3): 263-269.

Prosser, M. and Trigwell, K. (1999)Understanding Learning and Teaching. Buckingham: SRHE/Open University Press.

Ramsden, P. (2003) Learning to Teach in Higher Education. London: RoutledgeFalmer.

Shreeve, A. and Trowler, P. (2006) CLIP-CETL cross-university research project: Teaching landscape in creative arts subjects (project proposal).

Trowler, P. (2005) The sociologies of teaching, learning and enhancement: improving practices in higher education, Revista de Sociologia, 75: 13- 32.

Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of Practice: Learning Meaning and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

important is engendering a sense of community and belonging;

supporting peer engagement; support for development of new

skills, particularly in the area of research and communication of

outcomes; and pragmatic approaches based on the practitioner’s

teaching context.

Recommended actions include developing strategy to enable

academic staff to combine other duties with a pedagogic research

profile, perhaps based on internal exchanges and temporary

secondments. Structures like local and university-wide learning

development days (which enable staff to learn from each other) need

to be embedded.

More specifically we need to examine:

• Non-participation: possible reasons for it; how to encourage

participation

• Equalopportunity/accessissues

• Effectsofshiftingrolesandresponsibilitiesandlocusofcontrol

• Emotionsaffectingattitudestowardsworkandstudy

• How to identify systematically the impact of these projects on

student learning

The argument is therefore that our institutions need to develop

and resource pedagogic research and development strategies

that are informed by and integrated into the teaching and learning

strategies. The HEFCE funding for CLIP-CETL will run out in March

2010, and the future of funding for the types of activities described

herein is uncertain. Discussions with the University of the Arts

London suggest that the university values the contributions made

thus far, would like to sustain the activities and acknowledges

that engagement with the scholarship of learning and teaching

is key to implementing the university strategy for student learning.

The challenge will be to make it happen.

2.2Engaging with Learning

2.2.2Student as Producer: Risk, Responsibility and Rich Learning Environments in Higher Education

142

143

Professor Mike Neary

Reinvention Centre for Undergraduate Research CETL

University of Warwick

Abstract

In 2002, while at the University of Warwick, I established the

Reinvention Centre for Undergraduate Research, a Centre for

Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL). The centre, as the

name suggests, was inspired by the work of Ernest L. Boyer and the

commission established in his name. The core aim of the Reinvention

Centre for Undergraduate Research at the University of Warwick

and Oxford Brookes University is to ‘reinvent’ the undergraduate

curriculum through the promotion of research-based learning. In so

doing, the Reinvention Centre is attempting to recreate the notion

of an inclusive academic community where learners, teachers

and researchers are all seen as scholars in the common pursuit of

knowledge. The activities of the Reinvention Centre are intellectually

grounded in the previous work of those involved in research-based

learning at the two institutions, providing a framework within

which progressive educators now working with the centre are able

to develop their work in collaboration with each other and with

students in an atmosphere of mutual support and an ever-expanding

academic network (www.warwick.ac.uk/go/reinvention).

The problem for the Reinvention Centre was how to design a space

that allowed for closer collaboration between student and teacher.

Key to the Reinvention Centre’s commitment to research-based

learning is a critical pedagogy that challenges the idea of students

as passive consumers of education and emphasises the importance

of their being active producers of real knowledge and an integral

part of the research culture of departments and universities. In this

model, hierarchical relationships between student and teacher are

transformed to produce more fluid and elaborate collaborations

between producers of scholarly work. Addressing these theoretical

issues in practical ways calls for a critical rethinking and reinvention

of the spaces in which students learn. The Reinvention Centre’s

teaching space has been designed in order to offer a creative

response to these demands (Lambert, 2008).

Introduction

This paper, in discussing the implications of designing a university

education that is creative and full of social purpose, is grounded

in intellectual traditions of critical pedagogy (e.g. Paulo Freire

and Walter Benjamin), as well as the notions of ‘the scholarship

of teaching and learning’ (Ernest Boyer). The notion of ‘student

as producer’ rather than ‘student as consumer’ draws on work of

the Reinvention Centre and work at the University of Lincoln. The

main point is that designing a curriculum that is socially useful

and genuinely creative means rethinking the teaching and learning

experience and also requires fundamentally rethinking the nature

and purpose of higher education (HE).

The idea of the university is up for grabs

The role, function and nature of universities are subject to

increasingly intensive debate as higher education undergoes

profound transformations, nationally and internationally. There

is little consensus about the ‘idea’ or the ‘uses’ of the university

(Newman, 1996; Kerr, 1963), if there ever was. Universities are being

‘realised and reshaped’ (Barnett, 2005), ‘rethought’ (Rowland, 2006)

and ‘redefined’ (Scott, 1998). Some regard these transformations

positively, others feel the academic mission is undermined, leading to

‘crisis’ (Scott, 1984), ‘deprofessionalisation’ (Nelson and Watt, 2003),

‘corporatisation’ and ‘commercialisation’ (Bok, 2003; Slaughter and

Leslie, 1997; Callinicos, 2007), ‘ruination’ (Readings, 1996) and even

the ‘death’ of the university (Evans, 2004).

For many a key issue is the way the student experience has been

‘consumerised’ (Boden and Epstein, 2006). The concept of student as

consumer is based on a market-led model of corporate governance

where risky activity is motivated by profit-driven imperatives. I will

argue for a different model, based on taking progressive risks with

the curriculum, giving students more responsibility for their learning,

144 Dialogues in Art & Design: Promoting and Sharing Excellence

providing much richer learning environments. This model – not

student as consumer, but student as producer (Neary and Winn,

2009) – may be at odds with the market- driven paradigm of providing

services for students, but it has the potential to provide a framework

for teaching and learning promoting social responsibility as the key

organising function of the university, making it better able to deal

with the social emergencies that underpin its own crisis of identity.

Universities – research and teaching

While teaching and research are the central functions of a university,

higher education is characterised by an imbalance between these,

leading to an ‘apartheid’ between student and teacher. As Brew

(2006) puts it:

The relationship between teaching and research is intricately

embedded within ideas about what universities do and

what they are for. It is fundamental to what is understood as

higher learning and to ideas about the nature of the academy.

Understanding this relationship raises substantial questions

about the roles and responsibilities of higher education

institutions, about the nature of academic work, about the

kinds of disciplinary knowledge that are developed and by

whom, about the way teachers and students relate to each

other, about how university spaces are arranged and used,

indeed, it raises fundamental questions about the purposes of

higher education. (p.3)

My point, following Brew, is that in order to rethink the role and

function of the university we need to focus on the relationship

between teaching and research.

The reinvention of research-intensive universities

Much of Brew’s inspiration for re-engineering the relationship

between teaching and research comes from Ernest Boyer. Boyer

acknowledged the imbalance between research and teaching

and argued for teaching to be recognised as an important and

fundamental part of academic life. He provided a framework and

benchmark against which to consider the relationship between

teaching and research.

The most important obligation now confronting colleges and

universities is to break out of the tired old teaching versus

research debate and define in more creative ways what it means

to be a scholar. (Boyer, 1999: xii)

Boyer (1990) suggests four categories of what he refers to as

‘scholarship’:

• Thescholarshipofdiscovery:research

• Thescholarshipofintegration:interdisciplinaryconnections

• The scholarshipof application/engagement: knowledgeapplied

in the wider community

• Thescholarshipofteaching:researchandevaluationofone’sown

teaching

In 1999 The Boyer Commission, the ‘Reinvention of the Research’,

set out to create an Academic Bill of Rights for students, which included

the commitment for every university to provide ‘opportunities to

learn through enquiry rather than simple transmission of knowledge’

(Boyer Commission, 1999).

Walter Benjamin: author as producer

The Reinvention Centre for Undergraduate Research CETL was

inspired by the work of Boyer and the commission established in his

name. It utilised Boyer’s liberal humanist progressive pedagogies but

also found inspiration in the work of other radical thinkers, including

Walter Benjamin. The ‘student as producer’ is based on an article by

Benjamin, written in the 1930s. In his essay, the ‘Author as Producer’,

Benjamin sought to find a role for progressive intellectuals in a

society faced with the crisis of capitalism and the rise of fascism.

Benjamin argued that intellectuals work on products and on the

means by which the work is produced; that is to say, the process of

With students as active collaborators in the research, hierarchical relationships between student and teacher are transformed, producing more fluid and elaborate collaborations between producers of scholarly work.

145

146 Dialogues in Art & Design: Promoting and Sharing Excellence

production. Each work, therefore, is part of the organising function

of society. It is only by progressively reinventing the dominant

organising function that society can be transformed and crisis

averted. The organising function within which Benjamin was writing

was the social relation of capitalist production, defined through

the logic of waged labour and private property. For Benjamin, the

imperatives of capitalist production led to the horrors of Bolshevism

and fascism. Therefore, any alternative form of organising principle

must be antithetical to these extreme types of political systems

and be set up on the basis of democracy, collectivism, respect for

legitimate authority, mutuality and social justice.

Benjamin found examples of this alternative organising principle

in progressive forms of political art: in Dada, Brecht’s Epic Theatre

and the Russian avant-garde. These art forms involved the reader

and spectator in the process of production: they are the producers

of artistic content and collaborators in their own social world, the

subjects rather than objects of history:

What matters is the exemplary character of production … first,

to induce other producers to produce, and, second, to put an

improved apparatus at their disposal. And this apparatus is

better, the more consumers it is able to turn into producers –

that is, readers or spectators, into collaborators. (Benjamin,

1934: 777)

Benjamin’s thinking can be applied to the dichotomous relationship

between teaching and research in the contemporary university. It is

applied to reinvent the relationship between teacher and student, so

students are not simply consuming knowledge transmitted to them

but become actively engaged in the production of knowledge with

academic content and value.

This process, turning the student-as-consumer into the student-

as-producer is achieved by providing more research and research-

like experiences integral to the undergraduate experience. Thus,

students become productive collaborators in the research culture of

their universities. This is particularly important in a context where

students have been forced into the position of consumers in a service

culture that many academics regard as antithetical to the academic

project of the university (Lambert et al., 2007).

Reinventing the classroom

In the model of research-based learning, with students as active

collaborators in the research, hierarchical relationships between

student and teacher are transformed, producing more fluid and

elaborate collaborations between producers of scholarly work.

Addressing these theoretical issues in practical ways calls for a critical

rethinking and reinvention of the spaces in which students learn. The

Reinvention Centre’s teaching space has been designed in order to

offer a creative response to these demands (Lambert, 2008).

The classroom is rectangular: 120 square metres of light and colour

stripped of all decoration; white walls; blue rubber floor; primary

colour cubed seats; round yellow bean bags; and long monochrome

grey and black benches. There are no tables and chairs, nor any

obtrusive technology, only ethernet connection points, electric

sockets and Wi-Fi. There are no fixed screens or projectors creating

focal points where the teacher might stand to deliver a lecture. The

space is lit by spotlights set in the floor that shine up through the

rafters to the ceiling. Lacking tables and chairs, the room is not for

sitting in for long periods, but has been designed for movement and

dynamic interaction between student and teacher, emphasising the

importance of non-cognitive aspects of learning, including body and

other forms of non-verbal language.

The room melds the energy of the performing and fine arts, and

the critical sensibility that art generates. The artistic influences

informing the design are purism and neoplasticism, utopian art

movements that emerged in the 1920s as a protest against the

chaotic carnage of the First World War. The space is grounded in the

historical materiality of the real world. This ‘embeddedness’ in social

reality is manifest by the significance given to the area that acts as a

reality check for the whole room: the floor. The floor provides a sense

of gravitas and gravity for the entire space. The floor is a surface

for working on as well as walking on. It is heated and rubberised,

147

providing an all-around feeling of warmth and comfort. By making

the floor more than something to be trampled on, the space

recognises the significance of the floor as a site of social interaction,

and, with its emphasis on the symbolic importance, it is a reminder

of the ways in which floor space is used by other cultures, giving the

room a racial and ethnic intelligence.

As for technology, the room has movable audio-visual equipment,

allowing multiple points of focus counteracting the traditional

perspective of classrooms, built around a focal point establishing the

teacher as the dominant presence within the room. With no obvious

place for the teacher, each activity requires the space to be negotiated

by student and teacher. The lack of a dominating focal point reflects

the cubist anti-perspectival sensibility, consolidating the utopian

tendency of the room, which presents the future as something to be

constructed rather than ready-made. There is no fear of the future in

this space: no ‘future-proofing’ (Miller, 2001). The colours and shapes

of the furniture emphasise play in a serious space, recognising that

there are ways to learn ethics, values and responsibility through

activities that are serious, yet enjoyable and fun.

Academic literacy – Reinvention: a journal of student work

Reinvention: a Journal of Undergraduate Research is a biannual

online, peer-reviewed journal, dedicated to the publication of high

quality undergraduate student research. The journal welcomes

academic articles from all disciplines and is produced, edited and

managed by students and staff at Oxford Brookes University and

the University of Warwick. Manuscripts undergo a double-blind peer

review. Reviewers may include undergraduate and postgraduate

students but at least one review is completed by a faculty member

and recognised authority in the field of interest. As well as teaching

students how to critically appraise research, this protocol ensures

that papers are comparable to those published in traditional journals,

ensuring academic rigour and maintaining confidence in the journal.

David Metcalfe, the student editor of Reinvention, says:

The journal itself represents an addition to a growing number of

undergraduate research publications which have arisen around

the world. The journal team itself is unique in that it reflects true

collaboration between students, academics, and administrative

and technical staff. Students and academics will, for example,

work together as subject editors to elicit submissions and

coordinate peer review within each individual faculty and school.

Indeed, the collaboration theme of Reinvention is reiterated

throughout its multi-disciplinary content and in the fact that its

governance is spread across Oxford Brookes University and the

University of Warwick … It is hoped that, in this way, Reinvention

may also help to promote undergraduate research and that the

experience gained by authors will encourage them to produce

papers for high-impact journals within their own areas of

interest. (www.warwick.ac.uk/go/reinventionjournal)

University of Lincoln

Since 2007, as the Dean of Teaching and Learning at the University

of Lincoln, together with colleagues and students, I have been taking

forward some of these ideas at an institutional level. A new student

journal, Neo, will feature text and visual research, building on

Lincoln’s strengths in the creative arts. It will feature undergraduate

research taking place within the university, including work done as

part of the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Scheme (UROS).

This is a bursary programme allowing undergraduate students to

engage with the research activity of academics; there are 39 research

projects currently underway (www.lincoln.ac.uk/cerd/uros.htm).

While UROS is extracurricular, Lincoln is committed to developing

research and research-like activity and to designing undergraduate

research-based degrees. The distinctive aspect of work at Lincoln is

the awareness that – following Edwards and Usher (2003) – ‘space

and spatiality have become central to any discussions about the

nature of teaching and learning’.

The colours and shapes of the furniture emphasise play in a serious space, recognising that there are ways to learn ethics, values and responsibility through activities that are serious, yet enjoyable and fun.

148 Dialogues in Art & Design: Promoting and Sharing Excellence

Thinking about the spatiality of teaching and learning is

conceptualised as ‘learning landscapes’ where:

the total context for learning experiences, of opportunities

[is] in virtual as well as physical space. Learning happens

anywhere, enabled by network information systems, wireless

access and mobile devices … a network of places for discovery,

learning and discourse between students, faculty staff, and the

wider community. (DEGW, 2006)

This includes redesigning classrooms to encourage collaboration

and engagement between teachers and students, and recognition

and solidarity between groups of students (Contact, 2008).

Websites and mobile technologies are being developed to provide

online environments and to generate capacity for autonomous and

independent forms of student learning (http://learninglab.lincoln.

ac.uk/). The university holds annual campus-wide conferences

based on the learning landscapes theme to engage students and

colleagues across the university on the theme of how to build

a contemporary university that engages with its own academic

community and with the external world (www.lincoln.ac.uk/cerd/).

Lincoln, with other major British universities, is leading a national

project funded by the Higher Education Funding Councils (http://

learninglandscapes.lincoln.ac.uk), looking at innovation in the

design of teaching spaces. The key interest is in decision-making

processes that make innovations in the design of teaching and

learning spaces operational; the ways in which classroom design

reflects contemporary developments in teaching and learning;

and, uniquely, the ways in which the academic voice is included in

these debates. In this context, academic voice means not just the

kind of furniture teachers want in their classrooms, but the ways in

which space and spatiality have been intellectualised and how these

intellectual sensibilities might be reflected in classroom design

(Neary and Thody, 2009).

Conclusion

It is important to reinvent education so that undergraduates can

have a more holistic experience of the academic project. This more

complete experience of academic life offers students a more broadly

integrated sense of their subjects and how they relate to other

disciplines, but also it is key in assisting the academic community

in rethinking how to deal with global emergencies. David Orr has

written about the need for a more holistic curriculum in relation to

environmental issues:

The great ecological issues of our time have to do in one way

or another with our failure to see things in their entirety. That

failure occurs when minds are taught to think in boxes, and [are]

not taught to transcend those boxes or to question overly much

how they fit with other boxes. (David Orr, 2004: 95)

The organising principle that generated the ecological crisis has

now manifested itself as a world-wide financial crisis. Politicians

struggle to avert catastrophe, and they may succeed in the short-

term but the underlying causes of the crisis are not being addressed.

My point, like Orr, is that to avert global catastrophes we need a

fundamental rethinking of the nature of academic enquiry. We can

start by looking at the ways in which we engage with the world,

and, in particular, how we engage with our students. By taking more

progressive risks with our teaching and learning, and by treating

students as responsible members of our academic community we

might be able to create richer learning environments, but also to

invent new approaches to some of the very real emergencies that

are confronting both the university and society.

149

References

Barnett, R. (2005) Reshaping theUniversity: New Relationships Between Research, Scholarship and Teaching. Maidenhead: Open University Press.

Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage.

Benjamin, W. (1934) The author as producer, in M.W. Jennings, H. Eiland and G. Smith, (eds) (2005) Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 2,1927-1934. Harvard: Harvard University Press

Boden, R. and Epstein, D. (2006) Managing the research imagination? Globalisation and research in higher education, Globalisation, Societies and Education, 4(2): 223–236.

Bok, D. (2003) Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialisation of Higher Education. Princeton University Press.

Boyer, E. (1990) Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. Stony Brook, New York: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning.

Boyer Commission (1999) Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America’s Research Universities. Stony Brook, New York: Carnegie Foundation for University Teaching. Brew, A. (2006) Research and Teaching: Beyond the Divide. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Callinicos, A. (2007) Universities in a Neoliberal World. London: Bookmarks Publications.

Contact (2008) In-house magazine,University of Lincoln.

DEGW (2006) Working to learn, learning to work: design in educational transformation. Fourth Annual FoundationLecture.www.degw.com

Edwards, R. and Usher, R. (2003) Space, Curriculum and Learning. Greenwich, CT: IAP.

Evans, M. (2004) Killing Thinking: The Death of the University. London: Continuum.

Kerr, C. (1963)The Uses of the University. Harvard: Harvard University Press.

Lambert, C. (2008) Exploring new learning and teaching spaces, Warwick Interactions Journal, 11(2), University of Warwick.

Lambert, C., Parker, A. and Neary, M. (2007) Entrepreneurialism and critical pedagogy: reinventing the higher education curriculum, Teaching in Higher Education, 12(4):525-537.

Miller, A. (2001) Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time and the Beauty that Causes Havoc. New York: Basic Books.

Neary, M. and Thody. A. (2009) Learning landscapes – the classroom of the future, in L. Bell, M. Neary and H. Stevenson, (eds) The Future of Higher Education: Policy, Pedagogy and the Student Experience. London: Continuum.

Neary, M. and Winn. J. (2009) Student as producer: reinventing the undergraduate curriculum, in L. Bell, M. Neary and H. Stevenson, (eds) The Future of Higher Education: Policy, Pedagogy and the Student Experience. London: Continuum.

Nelson, C. and Watt, S. (2003) OfficeHours: Activism and Change in the Academy. Abingdon and New York: Routlege.

Newman, J.H. (1996) The Idea of a University. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Orr, D. (2004) Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment and the Human Prospect. Washington, DC: Island Press.

Readings, B. (1996) The University in Ruins. The Estate of Bill Readings, USA.

Rowland, S. ( 2006) The Enquiring University: Compliance and Contestation in Higher Education. SRHE and Buckingham: Open University Press.

Scott, P. ( 1984) The Crisis of the University. London: Croom Helm.

Scott, P. (1995) The Meanings of Mass Education. SRHE and Buckingham: OpenUniversity Press.

Scott, P. (ed.) (1998) The Globalisation of Higher Education. SRHE and Buckingham: Open University Press.

Slaughter, S. and Leslie, L. (1997) Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies and the Entrepreneurial University. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.

Temple, P. (2007) Learning spaces for the 21st century: a review of the literature. Higher Education Academy.

2.3Student Centredness

2.3.1The Emotional Studio: Student-Tutor Interactions in Design

150

151

Dr Ben Jonson

Creative Learning in Practice (CLIP) CETL

Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design

University of the Arts London

Abstract

This trigger paper looks at emotion in the context of design education

and the studio experience in particular, from both a practical and

theoretical perspective, including learning theory, learning styles and

emotion studies. The paper also relates to ‘Unspoken Interactions’, a

pedagogic research project funded by The Creative Learning in Practice

Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CLIP-CETL) at the

University of the Arts London (2008). With emphasis on discussion,

the paper is a critical reflection of ideas, views and values in learning

and teaching in creative subjects and draws on the author’s experience

of studio teaching and pedagogic research across a broad spectrum of

design disciplines. It explores the emotional studio, compares face-

to-face interaction in studio education with e-learning, and argues

that the studio approach is the preferred learning style for designers.

It illuminates tutor-student power relationship, refers to Emotional

Intelligence (EI), suggests affirmative actions to improve emotional

competence and concludes with questions for further discussion.

Introduction

Although we know that learning is facilitated or hampered by

emotions (Goleman, 1995), and that emotions drive learning and

memory (Sylvester, 1994), the impact of emotions on learning in

higher education is often overlooked or underestimated (Austerlitz,

2008). So, for example, what may seem an innocent comment or

remark by a tutor may trigger a negative emotional response in the

student. Tutor and student, then, may experience, interpret and

respond differently to the same event, reflecting different aspirations,

beliefs or attitudes of the parties (Desmet, 2008). Emotional issues

in student-tutor interactions, then, need to be discussed seriously.

So what characterises emotions? Paradoxically they are subjective

and yet common human experiences. But while some common

emotions have been identified, such as fear, anger, sadness and

joy, many others are neither innate nor universal but complex

cognitive constructs influenced and mediated by social and cultural

factors (Ekman, 2003). Hard to explain, and without an agreed upon

definition, emotions, then, are complex phenomena of both learned

and innate expressive displays and physical responses that can

be verbal as well as non-verbal, including dress, body postures,

attitudes and paralanguage, for example, hesitation and gesture.

Moreover, emotional responses may vary from total ‘openness’ to

‘concealment’, for example, genuine versus social smiles, which can

make decoding and judging emotion difficult.

The emotional studio

Although late postmodern design agendas are strongly influenced

by virtual environments, it is generally held that the studio remains

central to practice-based design education, an approach to learning

that is personal and social, experiential and situated where students

engage in problem solving activities. In this, the studio embodies

both experiential learning (thinking and doing) and situated learning

(Lave and Wenger, 1990) serving as an educational model that

recognises the need for artistry in professional education (Schön,

1987). The studio experience also resonates with personalised

learning, or constructivism, a learning theory advanced by J. Piaget

(1969) whereby learning is understood as a very personal endeavour

actively constructed by the learner. Studio education, moreover,

reflects Vygotsky’s (1962) understanding of learning, also known as

activity theory, as something that occurs through social interaction

and language, where the role of the teacher is that of providing

scaffolding to assist student learning.

Compared with the generic lecture model (instructivism), where

emotion might be seen as a disruptive concept, the studio model

offers substantial pedagogic freedom, including improvisation

and play, providing rich and authentic emotional experiences.

In this, the studio experience reflects how followers in art and

152 Dialogues in Art & Design: Promoting and Sharing Excellence

design education have ‘an intensely personal relationship with

their subject’ (Micklethwaite, 2005: 92). The personal relationship

highlights the interplay between learning and emotion whereby

students experience both pleasant and unpleasant emotions,

including adversarial interpersonal episodes with tutors, such as

fear of failure. The studio model, then, accepts the natural steps of

making mistakes (‘trial and error’) by ‘inviting and taking risks with

emotional interactions’ (Sagan, 2008: 51). Risk taking, however,

implies uncomfortable or unsettling questions so tutors need to

be aware of learners’ fears (Sappington, 1984). In the studio, then,

emotion cannot be separated from learning and, ultimately, becomes

embedded in creative outcomes, hence ‘the emotional studio’.

Creative subjects, then, are affective both in process and outcome.

Learning and teaching styles: studio-based learning versus

e-learning

The relocation of art and design education to the university sector has

introduced technology-based learning and teaching, or e-learning

to creative subjects. E-learning, however, seems at odds with

studio education because e-learning reflects instructivism whereby

knowledge exists independently of the learner and is transferred

from the teacher to the student (teacher-centred education). In

contrast, in studio education students seek out, in negotiations with

their tutors, learning opportunities through self-initiated and self-

directed projects (student-centred education).

Studio education and instructivism, however, are not necessarily

mutually exclusive, for example, studio-based learning includes

instructional modes (‘need to know’), or online feedback (‘blended

learning’). Yet e-learning suffers from a tendency to mechanistic

application: follow these instructions and you will have a successful

piece of learning. Such claims, however, are open to questioning.

For example, the review of the 2005 HEFCE Strategy for e-Learning

criticised the lack of evidence for evaluating the effectiveness of

e-learning (HEFCE, 2008).

Moreover, e-learning tends to regard the learner as an ‘empty vessel’

into which knowledge is poured. What this can result in is dry, abstract

and unengaging learning based on bits of information or logical

structures where the links between learning and emotional processes

appear weak. Affective experience with technology, however, is being

explored, for example, affective computing research (Picard, 1997),

including models for affective e-learning (Shen et al., 2009). Yet

there are limitations to e-learners’ interaction with sensory data, as

illuminated by the Visual-Auditory-Kinesthetic learning model, VAK.

The VAK model

The VAK model emphasises individual learning preferences and

relates to experiential learning theory (Kolb, 1984). It has three

learning styles:

1. Visual (seeing and reading), which involves the use of seen

and observed things (for example, pictures, video and

demonstrations)

2. Auditory (listening and speaking), which involves listening (words,

music and sounds)

3. Kinesthetic (touching and doing), which involves physical

experience (making, touching and moving)

But whereas both studio-based learning and e-learning include

visual and auditory learning styles, the studio model adds the

third: kinesthetic. It is kinesthetic learning, then, and notably the

‘hands-on’ and ‘touchy-feely’ qualities (learning by doing), that sets

the studio experience apart from e-learning: ‘the screen doesn’t

get dirty’. Kinesthetic learning, moreover, is a working style for

designers supporting the argument that the studio-based learning

is designers’ preferred approach to learning.

Tutor-student power relationship

Although words alone can be inadequate to describe emotion in creative

subjects (Greenhalgh, 2008), words are the most common means of

human communication. Yet reflecting on human interaction through

language, Hospers asserts: ‘We don’t so much give information, or

receive it from what others say, as express our feelings and attitudes

153

and try, through our language, to work on people’s feelings and

attitudes in order to change or control them’ (Hospers, 1990: 33).

‘Change’ and ‘control’, then, seem key words in student-tutor

interactions. But whereas change in creative practice suggests

positive transformation and pleasant emotions, control is more likely

to elicit negative emotions because control reveals the asymmetry

of knowledge and power in student-tutor interactions where tutors

hold sway by virtue of their expertise and authority (Munger, 1996).

The asymmetry is apparent in the critique (‘the crit’), or similar forms

of task-, portfolio-, project- or performance-based assessments

where tutors have the power to pass or fail students.

Where there is an asymmetrical student-tutor relationship,

Munger (1996) highlights the effect of questions and how they

help or hinder the interaction because questions are often

prompted by feelings of uncertainty or ambiguity that reveal power

relationships between novice and expert. A student voice illustrates

this point: ‘I was not alone in experiencing rudeness, sarcasm and

unprofessional behaviour from some tutors and technicians. I am

a confident person, but even I felt intimidated and would often

withhold questions’ (Finnigan, 2008). To reduce imbalance in tutor-

student power relationships, Munger (1996) suggests that rather

than presenting themselves as ‘expert’ and working in didactic

and controlling ways with students, tutors speak with a personal,

rather than a teacher’s voice. Another student voice exemplifies this

approach: ‘It was refreshing to have a tutor who was adept at the

art of listening and who acknowledged subtler cultural differences’

(Finnigan, 2008).

To emphasise change rather than control in student-tutor

interactions aligns with the strategic context for technology in

education that emphasises outcome (transformation) rather than

process (e-learning) (HEFCE, 2009). Focusing on change is also

congruent with the view that tutors develop a conceptual change/

student-focused approach, rather than an information transmission/

teacher-focused approach (Trigwell and Prosser, 1996). The

conceptual change approach, furthermore, highlights the studio

as a social and practice-based learning environment resembling a

‘community of practice’ (Wenger, 1998). As a community of practice,

then, the studio provides opportunities to develop interpersonal

(social) and intrapersonal (self-reflection) skills, skills that, moreover,

are embedded in the notion of Emotional Intelligence.

Emotional Intelligence

The term Emotional Intelligence (EI) is described as the ability to

perceive, understand, manage and use emotions to facilitate thinking

(Salovey and Mayer, 1990). EI also relates to ‘multiple intelligence’

(Gardner, 1983), and other behavioural and psychological theories.

What constitutes intelligence, however, is controversial and emotion

is not universally accepted as being an element of intelligence.

‘The benefits of EI appear to reside mainly in raising awareness of

emotional issues and motivating educators and managers to take

emotional issues seriously’ (Matthews et al., 2002: 543).

Goleman (1995), however, argues that emotional competencies

are linked to Emotional Intelligence, and draws on Gardner’s (1983)

seven intelligence types:

1. linguistic

2. logical-mathematical

3. musical

4. bodily-kinesthetic

5. spatial-visual

6. interpersonal

7. intrapersonal

Of these, Goleman (1995) emphasises the interpersonal (or co-

operation and teamwork) and the intrapersonal (or self-reflection

and self-discovery), also relating the two types to preferred working

and learning styles. Elaborating the interpersonal and intrapersonal

aspects of intelligence, Goleman identifies five ‘domains’ of

Emotional Intelligence:

1. knowing your emotions

2. managing your own emotions

As a community of practice, then, the studio provides opportunities to develop interpersonal (social) and intrapersonal (self-reflection) skills, skills that, moreover, are embedded in the notion of Emotional Intelligence.

154 Dialogues in Art & Design: Promoting and Sharing Excellence

3. motivating yourself

4. recognising and understanding other people’s emotions

5. managing relationships, that is, managing the emotions of others

These domains suggest affirmative actions for enhancing

emotional competence in student-tutor interactions.

So for example:

Self-awareness

Knowing your emotions is key to Emotional Intelligence – a capacity

to recognise your feelings as they occur.

Affirmative action: Develop your emotional awareness through extra-

curricular activities such as music, drama or competitive games.

Management

Managing your emotions is the ability to handle your emotional

reactions, control impulse and to recover from life’s upsets.

Affirmative action: Keep track of your emotions in the form of, say,

a reflective studio diary to help manage emotional demands in

different design situations, and under various conditions.

Self-motivation

Motivating yourself is the skill of using your emotions in the service

of a goal, staying hopeful despite set-backs.

Affirmative action: When stuck, get in touch with your feelings and

remind yourself why you wanted to learn/teach creative subjects in

the first place.

Empathy

Emotional sensitivity to others; recognising and understanding

other people’s emotions, a talent for tuning into others’ feelings, and

reading their unspoken messages.

Affirmative action: Dare to discuss emotional issues openly and

honestly in student-tutor interactions.

Relationships

Grace in dealing with others – strong social skills are key to

popularity, leadership and interpersonal effectiveness.

Affirmative action: Develop an authentic, unconstrained

conversational style in student-tutor interactions.

Discussion

Recent years have seen considerable increases in young people

studying creative subjects for more rewarding careers and

opportunities. Growing student numbers, however, have not been

matched with resources, resulting in fragmentation of the traditional

studio experience.

But in the face of fragmentation, accelerated by the use of portable

personal devices (mobile phones, etc.) and Web 2.0 technologies,

what happens to emotion in student-tutor interactions? Does the

studio approach to teaching and learning translate to a virtual

environment? (Gaimster, 2008).

Could socio-technological factors change power dynamics in

traditional student-tutor (i.e. novice-expert) interactions, particularly

as students’ prior knowledge and experience tend to be closer to

technological change and therefore challenge tutors’ expertise and

authority?

Does studio-based learning better prepare students for

entrepreneurship and employability (interpersonal skills)?

Does lack of awareness of emotional intelligence and/or fear

of emotional issues hamper levelling in student-tutor power

relationships? If so, should emotional issues be made more explicit

in teacher professional development?

155

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Trigwell, K. and Prosser, M. (1996) Changing approaches to teaching: a relational perspective, Studies in Higher Education, 37: 275-84.

Vygotsky, L. (1962) Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T.

Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

2.3Student Centredness

2.3.2When the Buck Stops: The Level of Professionalism of Student-Led Activities and Their Potential Value to Teaching and Learning

156

157

Tom Hamilton, Jon Rimmer and Diane Brewster

InQbate: CETL in Creativity

University of Sussex

Abstract

This paper considers the value of student-initiated and student-led

activities in the development of lifelong professional skills. Based on

a case study of a student-led exhibition at the InQbate Creativity Zone

at the University of Sussex, it explores the anecdotal observation of the

InQbate facilitation team that events run solely by students have felt

easier to manage than those led by tutors as part of formal taught courses.

This appears to be largely due to the professional attitude adopted

by the students, most notably the degree of individual responsibility

taken and the frequency and clarity of their communication – both with

the team and between themselves. This paper offers emerging insights

from an ongoing programme of research into the role of ownership in

learning, and considers how it might be practically applied to support

deeper levels of learning and professional development in preparing

students for their careers beyond higher education (HE).

Introduction

The InQbate project is committed to a constructivist – particularly a

social constructivist – approach to teaching and learning. As a result,

the design of the Sussex Creativity Zone (www.inqbate.co.uk) drew

on an active exploration of arts education models, such as the studio

approach, which are inherently aligned to this policy (Hamilton et al.,

2007). In the studio model students are ‘given’ an area of learning

space to inhabit over the academic year; an area within which to

‘live’ inside their background research and test their emerging

designs as a way of developing their practice, and, ultimately,

their own, unique ‘voice’. Implicit within this design choice was the

assumption that a similar level of ownership of the learning space

might generate increased student engagement with – and ownership

of – the learning process in other disciplines.

A second perceived value was the opportunity, made possible

by an open, studio environment, for learners to observe different

approaches taken by their peers to solve the same tasks. It was felt

that this would introduce students to different strategic approaches

in learning tasks and promote more collaborative interaction

between learners.

Drawing on this studio model, the Creativity Zone was explicitly

designed to support exhibition, installation and performance as

part of learning events. This has made it ideal for end-of-year shows

for formal taught programmes in making/performance subjects,

such as drama, media and product design. However, there has also

been steady demand from students to use the space to display or

perform completely self-motivated work – either related to their

course of study, such as the War, Representation and Documentary

conference, or their interests, such as the Sussex University Drama

Society’s performance of The House of Bernarda Alba.

One example of an event initiated by tutors but then fully managed

and realised by the students was the ‘Denis Healey: Furniture of the

Mind’ exhibition. This was entirely designed, produced and curated

by an interdisciplinary team of students from history, art history

and media in their own time over the summer holiday after an initial

introduction to Lord Healey by the Vice Chancellor of the University

of Sussex, Professor Michael Farthing.

Throughout the development and eventual delivery of this event,

the InQbate team was struck by the level of professionalism and

organisation shown by the students involved.

I was hugely impressed by the way which they devolved

responsibility to each other and supported each other. (InQbate

participant 2)

As an operational team, overseeing the delivery of a range of

events within the space on a daily basis, it is our observation that this

also appears to be the case with other student initiated or student-

led events. There appears to be a qualitative difference between

events ‘owned’ by the students (even where these are facilitated

158 Dialogues in Art & Design: Promoting and Sharing Excellence

by tutors and other professionals) and those run as part of a taught

course. In order to investigate this, we are undertaking a qualitative

investigation of the phenomenological experience of ownership

across a range of student-delivered events. This is still underway and

a full analysis will be published at a later date. In the meantime, it

is hoped that some comments expressed by the students involved

in the Healey project, and by the InQbate team, will illustrate the

potential for the space to support engagement and ownership, and

stimulate discussion on the possible value of this in the development

of professional project management skills such as time and resource

management, clear communication and effective team-working.

In practice, the distinction between the two categories of events,

identified above, is not always quite so clear and is probably better

described as a continuum; from tutor-initiated, tutor-led events,

through tutor-initiated but learner-led events, on to fully learner-

initiated, learner-led events.

As a project with an explicit commitment to generating ownership

within learners, we are keen to understand whether there are any

differences in the student experience or tutor observation in each

case and, if there are, whether these have an impact on their longer-

term attitude to learning and professional development. Our final

objective, if learner ownership is demonstrated to have positive

impact, will be to investigate whether there are any practical

approaches we can take to maximise the level of learner ownership.

The initial study in this programme, described here, centres on the

experience of the ‘Denis Healey: Furniture of the Mind’ exhibition in

the summer of 2008. Here a small mix of second year history, history

of art, and media undergraduate students were offered the chance

by a small grant from the Alumni Office to curate an exhibition of

photographs recently donated to the university by Lord Healey.

Although tutors from each discipline and the InQbate team were

available throughout the process to provide advice if wanted, the

choice to proceed, the direction of all media production and the

actual curation of the final exhibition were completely in the hands

of the students.

After extensive research into his life and career and the contextual

factors surrounding key events, the students divided the original

photographs into political portraits (Figure 1a), landscapes and

people. They then augmented these with areas illustrating his

public profile, his photographic influences (Figure 1c), the pervasive

presence of nature within his work, and the importance of his family,

before arranging these into three zones representing his public,

private and personal lives.

To give the visitor the richest experience possible, the students

decided to take an interactive approach to the exhibition, layering

information within multimedia artefacts. This included an interactive

timeline (Figure 1b), which enabled visitors to discover background

information through photos of Lord Healey’s life, and an interactive

chair (Figure 2b), which, when sat in, triggered the accompanying

radio to switch from Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony to an

interview with Lord Healey’s wife, Edna, all within an immersive

projected environment.

The show was successfully opened to public admission October

2008 (Figure 3a) with national media interest (Figure 3b), and used

for teaching across a range of subjects, both the original ‘host’

subjects but also subjects such as product design and pervasive

computing (Figure 4).

To investigate the student experience and possible impact, a

researcher, uninvolved with the original project, was commissioned

to conduct a series of individual semi-structured interviews with

students, tutors and members of the InQbate operational team. This

was undertaken at the end of the academic year following the event,

giving the students time to reflect upon the impact of the project on

their final year of study.

Tutor initiated

Tutor led

Tutor initiated

Learner led

Learner initiated

Learner led

159

Figure 1

The ‘Denis Healey: Furniture of the Mind’ exhibition

Figure 2

Areas of the exhibition representing his garden, his

library and the impact of nature on his work

1a 2a

1b 2b

2c1c

160 Dialogues in Art & Design: Promoting and Sharing Excellence

Findings

It is clear from our discussions with their tutors that the project had

a significant effect, not just on the students themselves, but also

on how they have interacted with their course and fellow students

since. Some quotes are given below to illustrate some of the key

themes emerging from the student interviews.

Regarding their perception of their own level of ownership of

the event:

…it was completely student-led. They let us know that – right

from the beginning – that even though there were tutors

there, they just basically went: ‘It’s your project, you decide

everything from the theme to the colours of the flyers,

absolutely. (Student participant 3)

…it was our exhibition … it was our project … It wasn’t the tutor

going ‘It would be better to do this’ or ‘it would be really nice if

you had that’ … It was us that made the decisions. We did all the

research. We found out that he was on Spitting Image or This Is

Your Life. It was us who phoned up those companies and got

it. It wasn’t tutors saying you should get this. They didn’t do it.

They were just reference points for us. (Student participant 3)

Definitely – it was definitely our project – yeah, we were

definitely the executive body… (Student participant 1)

Regarding their motivation, given that it was not part of any

accredited course module:

We kind of knew it was going to get a lot of publicity. So I think

that probably made us strive even harder. We really, really

wanted it. We didn’t want … Denis [to] come around and go

[away] disappointed. (Student participant 4)

I mean the summer for goodness. We were all getting up at like

8 o’clock in the morning in the summer! We could have gone to

the beach but we were rather coming here. It was like that – it

was like less pressure because we had total autonomy with it…

(Student participant 3)

I think the fact that we were students made us want to say, Look,

this is a really good exhibition done by students, but we’ve done

this all ourselves with no sort of extra help. Although we had the

support behind the scenes … it was definitely just student-led.

We just did it because that’s what we would want to see in an

exhibition. (Student participant 2)

Regarding the impact of the project on their skills portfolio, their

CV and their career ambitions:

…but it has [helped her CV]… it put me forward because it

actually created the degree show running upstairs as well. I was

the coordinator for that. It’s actually made me want to go into

events planning now. So it’s changed my whole career path.

(Student participant 2)

Learning to work with different people, my group skills have

definitely improved; being able to listen more to other people,

and not just views of my own, and then be able to sort of

incorporate everyone’s ideas together. Learned to budget – I

was in charge of expenses and budget and everything … Also

communication with the press office and Denis Healey himself.

(Student participant 2)

…I think what it did do is make everything seem more

manageable and you learn not to panic as much, which is very

useful. (Student participant 1)

Regarding the impact on their approach towards their learning as

a result of the project:

No, no. Funny thing is I found it [her course] more interesting

161

3a 4a

4b

3b

3c

Figure 3

Lord Healey meeting the students at the

opening and a comment from his daughter

Figure 4

Teaching using the Healey exhibition

162 Dialogues in Art & Design: Promoting and Sharing Excellence

because … I think from doing the Healey thing, my mind has

become trained to spot peripheral things more and draw them out

and find something significant in them. (Student participant 1)

Yeah. A million per cent. Like I said it’s like the confidence, I got

a lot of faith in myself, the capabilities of me (by) producing a

creative space. It’s like I breezed through third year when I came

to it … I know I could take on any project that was thrown at me.

(Student participant 3)

Regarding the overall experience of being involved in the project:

It’s one of the highlights of my three years in Sussex – just that

sense of achievement. But just out of pure passion rather than

going to get a mark for … this is what I did with my summer

and it’s probably one of the best summers ever… (Student

participant 3)

Conclusion

It seems that all user groups, students and tutors alike, appear to

‘perform up’ to the space, putting in extra time and effort to ensure

that the event is a success and that their work is shown to best

advantage. It is our belief that this ‘stepping up’ within the space

may be associated with the aesthetic and perceived value of the

space – and thus their perception around the expectations upon and

confidence in them as soon-to-be professionals.

However, while all students undertaking event management –

whether tutor or student-led – within the space acquire valuable

professional skills, students in student-initiated and managed

events appear to develop more solid management skills, such as

communication, collaboration within teams and effective time and

resource management.

This may be a function of the greater level of investment involved

in taking on the full responsibility for the event. Initial research

indicates that students in student-initiated and managed events

develop a deeper relationship with the InQbate facilitator team,

draw on their skills and expertise more effectively and experience

greater levels of satisfaction with the process and ultimate event.

Although the study is still incomplete, the perception of the

InQbate team is that students running events within taught

courses have a tendency to ‘sit back’ and rely on the tutor to spot

emerging problems and issues. This may mean that they do not

develop professional skills around presentation, project and event

management to the same extent.

Questions

1. Most ADM courses result in end-of-year shows. To what extent are

these student-led?

2. Are there any mechanisms that could increase the level of student

ownership of the process?

3. Is there any argument for students being allowed to be involved

in setting the metrics for their own assessment, particularly in

end-of-course assignments? Might this lead to greater student

ownership?

4. Does ownership extend beyond the space to the creation,

management and delivery of learning programmes and materials?

Including assessment?

163

References

Hamilton, T., Morris, R. and Childs, P.(2007) Learning from higher arts education in designing constructivist learning spaces: a case study of InQbate: The Centre of Excellence in Teaching and Learning in Creativity, in A. Boddington and D. Clews, (eds) Third ELIA Teachers’ Academy Papers, pp. 105-108. Cambridge: Burlington Press.

2.4Communities of Practice

2.4.1Something for Nothing or Nothing for Something? Intellectual ‘Property’ and the Idea of ‘Free’ Education

164

165

Alan Clarke

Collaborating for Creativity (C4C) CETL

York St John University

Abstract

‘Openness, Peering, Sharing and Acting Globally’ are the stated

principles of ‘Wikinomics’ (Tapscott and Williams, 2006); the unofficial

motto of the digital activist organisation, the Electronic Frontier

Foundation (EFF) is ‘information wants to be free’. If you put these

two together within the context of global education you get the

OpenCourseWare (OCW) movement. This paper examines the motives

and principles of the Open Educational Resource movement, as it is

also known, and will pose some important but rarely asked questions:

1. What are our wider responsibilities as institutions of higher

education in a global community?

2. What is our relationship to knowledge?

3. What do we mean by ‘student’?

In considering the practice of giving away educational resources,

the paper will also consider the concepts of ‘the public domain’,

‘intellectual property’ and the thoughts of Thomas Jefferson, Woody

Guthrie and others.

Introduction

The semi-apocryphal story of the purchase of Manhattan Island

from the local Indian population in 1626 may or may not be the most

immediately obvious place to start thinking about ideas of a digital

free education, the Internet and the ownership of thought. The story

goes that Dutch settlers, wanting to buy the land from the Native

Americans, offered them $24. The Native Americans laughed at this

– not because the amount was derisory (even today you can’t buy an

island in the virtual world Second Life for less than $1,000, but the

Native Americans probably didn’t know this and would have to wait

nearly 400 years like the rest of us to find out), but because the idea

itself was mad. How can anybody own the ground they stand on, the

Native Americans are supposed to have thought? It’s impossible –

like owning air or water or what’s inside your head.

In various cultures and at various times, the idea of ‘owning’ ideas

has been seen as weird, perverse, sinister, laughable, impossible and

even immoral. We seem to be in a culture and a time now characterised

by an extraordinary greed, suspicion and uncertainty, where the idea of

owning anything (the sky, the thoughts of humans, the polar ice caps,

the moon and the stars, the DNA of living things) has become a technical

possibility and consequently an obsession. Yet there are some signs in

some parts of our global culture that this might be changing. There are

a number of examples of this new collaborative, cooperative spirit, all

of them facilitated an/or encouraged by the Internet and particularly its

Web 2.0 incarnation, from the Open Source movement of computer code

exchange and peer-to-peer file- sharing, the extraordinary phenomenon

of YouTube, Facebook, Flickr and MySpace, the eccentric contemporary

hitchhiking movement of CouchSurfing and the collaborative projects of

Wikipedia, Amazon user-comments and any number of others. The fact

that these examples are all made possible through and by the Internet

is, depending on who you talk to, significant but perhaps not the whole

story; the technology is perhaps simply facilitating a new mood or

belief in the idea of sharing, an idea that itself should be shared and

copyrighted, but not necessarily in that order.

Wikinomics, intellectual property and Woody Guthrie

‘Wikinomics’ is an idea popularised by Tapscott and Williams (2006)

to explain how companies that encourage genuine cooperation with

their employees (sometimes known as ‘crowdsourcing’) can overcome

problems, initiate more efficient processes, develop new products

and become very successful. The ‘founding principles’ of Wikinomics

are, according to its authors, ‘Openness, Peering, Sharing and Acting

Globally’ – a set of claims that can, should be and increasingly are

employed by all manner of social and cultural institutions as a kind of

mission statement. This is beginning to have implications for the idea

of ‘intellectual property’, an idea that is itself a fairly recent addition

166 Dialogues in Art & Design: Promoting and Sharing Excellence

to the history of ideas. There are those who believe that this type of

ownership is not only impractical and increasingly unworkable (if one

takes into account recent high-profile legal cases such as the judgment

against Pirate Bay regarding music file-sharing), but is also unhealthy

and unfair; the Free Culture movement, the Electronic Frontier

Foundation (EFF), the ‘Copyleft’ movement, which was supported by

UNESCO and where the rights of the author were reduced to a moral

right, and the Creative Commons are just a few of the movements

dedicated to the free exchange of ideas, creativity and expression.

Woody Guthrie – hobo, anti-fascist, folk singer, chronicler of the

poor and dispossessed of the American dust bowl – had this to say

about the idea of ‘owning’ creative product:

This song is copyrighted in the US under seal of copyright 154085

for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singing it without

our permission will be a good friend of ourn [sic] because we

don’t give a dern [sic]. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Yodel it. We

wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do. (www.woodyguthrie.de/)

OpenCourseWare, Barack Obama and Thomas Jefferson

The free exchange of ideas and every kind of artistic stuff certainly

got Woody’s vote. A more recent champion of giving things away is

Lawrence Lessig (2005), law professor at Stanford University, board

member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (whose unofficial

motto is ‘information wants to be free’) and an activist dedicated to

the free use of educational and other intellectual materials, amongst

which are what are now commonly know as OpenCourseWare (OCW)

or Open Educational Resources (OER). He is also one of Barack

Obama’s most senior consultants on communications and the law.

Two hundred years and forty-one presidents earlier, the third

President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, had similar ideas.

Jefferson believed in the idea of the ‘fair use’ of intellectual materials,

and the concept of ‘fair use’ is now one of the four ‘principles’ of the

EFF, along with ‘Free Speech’, ‘Innovation’ and ‘Privacy’. Jefferson

also pushed the idea of the ‘public library’ – not just the physical

buildings for the borrowing of books but, literally, the ‘idea’ or the

concept of educational and creative matter being in the ‘commons’

and commonly available to all. Jefferson said:

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself

without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine,

receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely

spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and

mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition,

seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by

nature. (Mayor and Binde, 2001: 300)

The idea of the ‘commons’ – areas that were owned by nobody,

owned by everybody – is a very powerful one and one that has on

occasion caused blood to be spilt in defence of it. The fairly modern

idea of ‘the public domain’, a conceptual, virtual place where,

amongst other extraordinary things, anybody can place, access or,

in the jargon, ‘repurpose’ intellectual or creative product, is the

conceptual equivalent of this.

One of the extraordinary things taking place in these virtual

commons at the moment is the placing of free educational materials,

known as OpenCourseWare (OCW), for, well, anybody who wants

to learn about, well, anything you can think of; anything that has

been taught in some kind of institution of higher education almost

anywhere in the world. The pioneer of this was the Massachusetts

Institute of Technology, which decided in the late 1990s to make all

of their under- and post-graduate courses available for anybody to

download, read, study and rewrite. Crucially, however, you can’t get

accreditation – a degree or any other qualification – through OCW,

and you can’t get access to any teaching staff – but you can access

a bewildering variety of carefully designed degree and post-degree

level courses in almost any subject you might be interested in; the

point being, in the words of one of the prime funding bodies – the

William and Flora Hewlett Foundation – ‘…to advance education and

empower people worldwide’ (www. ocwconsortium.org).

OCW or OERs have been defined as ‘…teaching, learning and

research resources that reside in the public domain or have been

167

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature.(Thomas Jefferson)

168 Dialogues in Art & Design: Promoting and Sharing Excellence

released under an intellectual property licence that permits their use

or repurposing by others. OERs include full courses, course materials,

modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software and any other

tools, materials or techniques used to support access to knowledge

(Hewlett Foundation, 2008). The quality of some of these materials

can be patchy, however. They range from entire, intelligently designed

courses with linked readings and viewings, topics for consideration

and further enquiry to short, badly recorded podcasts or unreadable

lecture notes. Some of these offerings seem to be there mainly for

show and to cynically raise the global profile of the institution.

Doing the right thing

‘Access to knowledge’, ‘advancing education’ and ‘empowering

people’ globally are clearly Good Things To Be Doing. And a part of

the beauty of this is that none of it affects the actual ‘business’ of

education in its more commercial aspects; it appears to be a Win-Win

situation, and everybody’s happy. Universities do, and are seen to be

doing, Good Things in the World and, at the same time, more and

more people are eager to pay real money for a university education.

Recent analyses of social trends (Lessig, 2005; Anderson, 2006;

Tapscott and Williams, 2006; Shirky, 2009) suggest that giving stuff

away (apart from being, y’know, really nice) actually gets returns. The

accessing of OCW worldwide by anyone with access to a computer

has become a phenomenon whilst enrolment in universities by

paying ‘customers’ has never been higher (UNESCO, 2009). (Whether

we want to embrace the rather unpleasant practice of the naming of

our students as ‘customers’, with the all the attendant, inevitable

and reductionist baggage of a financial vocabulary, is another matter

entirely – or is it? Maybe some other time…) Nevertheless, OCW

has become very popular. The OpenCourseWare Consortium (www.

ocwconsortium.org) is the global coordinator of more than 300

universities in more than 30 countries from Afghanistan to Vietnam

(Zambia and Zimbabwe are, hopefully, still considering their options).

There are, however, issues to be addressed. The OCW/OER

movements should be supported and applauded and their funding

increased. Many universities have agendas of lifelong learning,

widening participation and distance learning and any materials

produced explicitly or not for an OCW/OER agenda can be and are used

to fulfil and further these initiatives. The global financial meltdown

will likely have consequences that have yet to be considered and

may be felt for a long time to come (some forecasters are indicating

that it will determine the global financial landscape for the next ten

years). Therefore, the fact of freely available educational resources

(we’ll leave aside the issue of computer ownership and access for the

moment) must be a good thing for those who can’t immediately afford

to go to university, those with time on their hands and those who wish

to re-skill, train or just learn. Universities surely have a responsibility

and a duty to make educational materials available; it costs very little

to do this and the really important stuff – experienced academic staff

and the time they spend with students – are not on offer.

Conclusion

While the idea of giving away educational and research resources

might make us reconsider what it actually means to be a student

and what our relationship to knowledge really is, significant aspects

(arguably the most important ones) are not, and probably never will

be, part of the deal. That is spending sustained, quality time with

a teacher as you engage with a process of education; and, at the

completion of that process, proof that you have done so – and a

measure of the success. The teaching materials are free, the education

isn’t, and the distinction between the two is being renegotiated all

the time with the advent of new technologies and new economic

and political circumstances. The current government agenda of

dramatically increasing domestic broadband Internet access as well

as shifting patterns of employment and leisure resulting from the

recent global economic crisis might be factors in this renegotiation

of terms and ideologies. As far as intellectual and creative ‘property’

goes, much will depend upon some well-publicised test cases as

well as how these are articulated and reported through the media,

the law courts and the academy itself. How this affects learning at all

stages of education remains to be seen.

We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.

169

References

Anderson, C. (2006) The Long Tail:How Endless Choice is Creating Unlimited Demand. London: Random House.

Boyle, J. (2009) The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. Yale University Press.

Hewlett Foundation (2008) William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. www.hewlett.org/oer (accessed 26.06.09).

Lessig, L. (2005) Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity. Penguin Books.

Mayor, F. and Binde, J. (2001) The World Ahead: Our Future in the Making. Unesco Publishing.

Shirky, C. (2009) Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together. Penguin Books.

Tapscott, D. and Williams, A. (2006) Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Portfolio Books.

UNESCO (2009) Launch of three reports on higher education. http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=45964&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201. United Nations Economic, Scientific and Cultural Organization (accessed 26/06/09).

2.4Communities of Practice

2.4.2Supporting an Art and Design Community of Practice Across an HE in FE Network

170

171

Mark Stone, Rebecca Turner, Harriet Dismore and Chris Groucutt

Higher Education Learning Partnership (HELP) CETL

University of Plymouth

Abstract

The aim is to share development experiences and challenges, plus

stimulate debate and unearth related ideas and good practice from

elsewhere. The paper will outline how the HELP-CETL programme

relates to the art and design community within the University of

Plymouth Colleges context. It will relate the work undertaken to key

community of practice theory.

A number of community of practice facilitation interventions made

or supported by the CETL are outlined below along with the key

lessons learned and challenges clarified.

The paper goes on to outline our questions and issues regarding

how we take this work further for the benefit of staff and students.

Finally, some key questions and issues will be proposed for

further discussion.

Introduction

The paper will outline how the Higher Education Learning

Partnerships (HELP) Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning

(CETL) programme supports the art and design community within

the University of Plymouth Colleges (UPC) network. It will relate the

work undertaken to key community of practice theory including the

work of Lave and Wenger.

The aim of this paper is to share some of HELP-CETL community

of practice (CoP) development experiences and challenges, plus

stimulate debate and unearth related ideas and good practice from

event participants. A number of CoP development interventions

made or supported by the CETL are outlined below along with the

key lessons learned and challenges encountered. The paper goes on

to outline our questions and issues regarding how we take this work

further for the benefit of staff and students.

How the HELP-CETL programme relates to the UPC art and

design community

The HELP-CETL aims to enhance the experience of students within

UPC network and the wider HE in FE community. Work to achieve this

has been undertaken with both individuals and groups. The table

below illustrates the relationship of the HELP-CETL to the UPC art

and design community.

Table 1 How the HELP-CETL programme relates to the UPC art

and design community

HELP-CETL areas of focus Relationship to UPC art and design community

i) Establish recognition and reward strategies for staff to further their personal and professional development

i) Twenty-one members of the community have become HELP-CETL award holders. As award holders they have undertaken continuing professional development activities and/or conducted research into discipline-based or generic teaching and learning issues

ii) Establish coherent and functioning communities of practice (CoPs) including interaction with the wider HE in FE community

ii) The CETL has supported both the whole art and design community and a number of smaller specific groups

iii) Investigate the viability of virtually supporting individuals and CoPs with video conferencing and Knowledge Management tools

iii) A number of art and design online communities have been created, monitored and are being evaluated

iv) To take forward the strategic priorities of UPC through a range of Development Activities (DA) that provide research/scholarly activity opportunities along with opportunities for groups of staff to come together from different disciplines and locations

iv) Nine development activities have been undertaken either within the community or involving community members

v) To identify, and in some cases provide, the infrastructure facilities necessary to support the delivery of HE in FE

v) College-based capital investment was made to support art and design provision, e.g. purchase of state-of-the-art equipment (laser fabric cutter) that could not normally be afforded to assist with benefits for student employability and employer engagement

172 Dialogues in Art & Design: Promoting and Sharing Excellence

Communities of practice literature and theory

Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern

or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as

they interact regularly’ (Wenger, 2007). A CoP is formed by people

who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared area of

interest and requires the following characteristics: the domain; the

community; the practice. The domain is the area of interest; the

community is formed by the relationships (conversations, discussions,

etc.) between members; and the practice is what community

members do with learning derived from their interaction.

When Lave and Wenger (1991) first introduced the concept of CoP

they described it as ‘…a set of relations amongst persons, activity and

world, over time and in relation with other tangential and overlapping

CoPs’. The proposition is that we are already involved in a number of

CoPs, whether at work or in our local community or leisure interests.

In some we may be core members; in others we can locate ourselves

at the margins. Members are involved in a set of relationships over

time and communities develop around things that matter to people.

When people work together they invariably form many informal

networks of relationships that go beyond organisational structures.

However, a great deal of the work that assists the operation of many

organisations is carried out through these informal connections.

CoPs can offer something that a single organisation, workplace or

localised team can never provide, e.g. access to a diverse pool of

knowledge, expertise and motivated individuals. CoPs tend to be

less formal and controlled than many regular workspaces but more

structured and integrated than groups, teams or networks. However,

as they are developed and sustained by their members they can

never fully replace organisational systems of communication or

professional development (McDermott et al., 2006).

Successful communities – as well as influencing and changing the

organisations within and across which they operate – also influence

and change the way that members view their own identity both

within and external to the community.

For a CoP to function it needs to generate and appropriate a shared

repertoire of ideas, commitments and memories. It also needs to

develop various resources such as tools, documents, routines,

vocabulary and symbols that carry the accumulated knowledge of

the community. In other words, a CoP involves practice: ways of

doing and approaching things that are shared to a significant extent

amongst members (McDermott et al., 2006).

Relevance to UPC and art and design

The art and design community within UPC has a long history. Prior

to the launch of the HELP-CETL there was institutional recognition

of and support for this way of working. Most significant was the

establishment, in 2003, of an art and design subject forum (along

with forums for other disciplines) with a full-time funded subject

forum chair role to provide leadership and coordination for quality

assurance and enhancement activity. This work formed part of the

evidence base for the HELP-CETL bid claim for existing excellence

allied to the potential to take the work further.

Outlined in the table opposite are some impacts, lessons learnt

and challenges from specific CoP working interventions within the

UPC art and design community.

One overall lesson is that there needs to be an effective interplay

between reward and recognition strategies. Unconnected individual

interventions do not lead to CoP ways of thinking and working.

Conclusion/questions and long-term challenges

When seeking to organise and fund CoP support, one of the greatest

challenges is to demonstrate the value of community support and

operation. Analysing types and levels of community engagement is

in itself challenging; harder still is to determine how much community

working is enough or appropriate. Within the CETL we have taken a

community-led stance. In practice this means we try to encourage

community working where we see opportunities for further sharing

or collaboration. Therefore, we have not tried to create communities,

instead we let new or emerging communities know we are willing to

assist with their development or operation and ask how we might help.

As part of the CETL community of practice work we have developed

resources and run or participated in events to publicise and promote

173

CoP interventions and rationale Example activity, impacts, lessons learnt and challenges

Support for individual staff within the UPC networkCETL funding has allowed work with a greater emphasis on individual development to be supported and evaluated.

Through the CETL award holder scheme, individuals within the art and design subject forum have received funding to support their continuing professional development. This has enabled practitioners to undertake professional updating activities, industrial placements and attend conferences. Research projects have been conducted into aspects of teaching and learning art and design in an HE in FE context. The focus of the projects has been wide ranging, including exploring the use of video conferencing by media students, graduate employability and establishing HE communities within an FE college.

However, the secret of success of the scheme for CoP development has been that award holders are supported beyond their initial project funding; they are invited to further disseminate their work, encouraged and supported to bid externally for further funds and connected to colleagues with similar interests within UPC and beyond.

Support for individuals working beyond the UPC network While the CETL bid highlighted talent within UPC, external exposure and collaborations were limited

A college-based project funded jointly by the HEA ADM subject centre and CETL investigated the experience of students undertaking enterprise education. This helped to inform the value of an enterprise module and in particular, the experience gained of the design industry.

UPC and the CETL supported a recent National Teaching Fellowship application. The confidence for staff to write about their development as well as the value of their practice has come from long-term interaction with multiple support structures and the mutual trust and respect this develops.

Support for groups of staff CETL funding allowed groups to explore how they might take their work forward.

Two examples are:

Critical and contextual studies staff within colleges and the university used a private online community within the CETL-developed Knowledge Exchange Network (Stone et al., 2006) to peer review their curriculum and the assessment of student work.

CETL support was also provided to facilitate the establishment of a higher education art CoP at a college. This has led to ongoing, college-wide discussion of the art curricula, a culture of sharing practice and research and development collaborations not previously envisaged. Significantly, this work led to new lines of communication between community members and college managers focused on art and design issues. The forum has benefited from regular events hosted at the college. However, while the CoP members have benefited from this work, such developments are often initially overly reliant on the initial leader to drive activity and remain fragile entities until they reach a critical mass of members that have together formalised their way of working. The challenge for the CETL has been to capture what has been learnt through operating as a CoP, especially approaches that can be deployed elsewhere in UPC. Members and leaders easily get caught up in the opportunities to focus on their discipline and can lose track of writing up the meta-level CoP learning. However, some initial insights concern a lack of research skills (especially data handling) and publication experience. In addition discussion has been initiated within the wider art and design forum about staff dyslexia.

Sharing practiceTo generate value added benefits by exposing more students/staff to the outputs of innovation/development

The CETL has found it effective to bring the outputs from its funded activity to the attention of relevant CoPs through communities’ own events. For generic teaching and learning issues events, UPC-wide events (bringing together multiple CoPs) have also proved to be a popular approach.

Multiple channels of dissemination and celebrationTo encourage staff from multiple organisations/roles to collaborate and know of each other as colleague professionals

Individuals or groups who have undertaken continuing professional development (CPD) activities or research projects within the forum are also encouraged to write short articles for their newsletter or CETL circulars.

The drive to establish the forum newsletter was an outcome of discussions aimed at initiating a UPC art and design research group. The format allows for the flagging up of small scale and large developments. It helps to show that research and development is a widespread CoP activity. Usefully research processes including calling for assistance or participation can be disseminated rather than just the final outputs. A great added benefit has been to distribute the newsletter to external examiners, which has led to CoP member links beyond UPC.

The CETL circulars help to highlight the range of CoP activity across UPC.

Table 2 Community of practice example activity, impacts, lessons learnt and challenges

174 Dialogues in Art & Design: Promoting and Sharing Excellence

the value and opportunity of community working (both physical and

online). However, we have stressed that the take-up of opportunities

is voluntary (McDermott et al., 2006). This is manifested in our

support for autonomous, self-regulated groups of professionals that

work within one organisation or across organisational boundaries.

We have found that, especially in the online arena, having

a designated community leader has been useful in terms of

building community membership and encouraging or facilitating

participation. Initially we have found that there was a predominance

of university staff leading community activity. This was mostly a

product of history in that university staff (funded or encouraged

by UPC) have been involved for some time in convening UPC staff

groups or events, e.g. the librarian’s community. However we have

maintained the principle that the leadership, focus and operational

practice of a community is the province of the community. Guidance

on the role of community leader has been developed by the CETL to

assist new CoPs in particular (McDermott et al., 2007).

There are many confusing factors when looking at the impact and

seeking to advise on the sustainability of community of practice

support work. One is that members of cross-UPC communities are

doing this work within a rapidly moving environment or multiple

collaborations and connections, and it is sometimes hard to judge

the effect of your intervention (Witt et al., 2008). One of the most

positive aspects of the CoP work has been that the term ‘community’

has become pervasive within UPC.

When we have asked questions relating to the lower than hoped

for levels of online community activity, members have said that

satisfying or effective face-to- face or direct contact are preferred

and will be used in preference while they are available. This is

especially true for CETL award holders. While they operate as an

effective and recognisable CoP, members would prefer to work

with or via CETL team members or programme participants directly,

rather than work online. However, feedback has been received that

online CoP support tools may come into their own when the CETL

finishes, but only then if what we have learnt regarding the support

for community working is not embedded in UPC. It is also likely that

online community working will remain focused on developmental

work and therefore a relatively marginal activity until mainstream

faculty processes (e.g. programme development and approval) are

also undertaken using similar tools, methods and approaches.

Specifically for art and design within UPC, a key issue is how much

‘community’ work can be carried out across the whole discipline

and how much is more appropriately facilitated or supported within

more focused groupings.

175

References

Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991) SituatedLearning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

McDermott, A., Witt, N. and Stone, M. (2006) Communities of Practice in the University of Plymouth Colleges Context. HELP-CETL Information Series No. 3.

McDermott, A., Witt, N., Stone, M. and Peters, M. (2007) Knowledge Exchange Network Community Leader Guide [Version 2.0]. Higher Education Learning Partnerships, University of Plymouth.

Stone, M., Witt, N. and McDermott, A. (2006) What is the UPC Knowledge Exchange Network? HELP-CETL Information Series No. 2.

Wenger, E. (2007) Communities of practice. www.ewenger.com/theory/index.htm (accessed 05/01/07).

Witt, N., McDermott, A., Peters, M. and Stone, M. (2008) Community experience success factors for communities of practice. Online Educa, 14th International Conference on Technology Supported Learning & Training, Berlin, 03-05/12/08.

2.5Crossing Disciplines

2.5.1‘To Embed or Not to Embed’, That is the Question…

176

177

Patricia Cooper, Jean Dyson, Megan Lawton

and Lindsey Marshall

Critical Interventions for Enhanced Learning (CIEL) CETL

University of Wolverhampton

Abstract

For the last three years the School of Art and Design (SAD) at

University of Wolverhampton has run a large, core, school-wide level

1 model with an academic literacies approach to developing research

and writing skills assessed by ePortfolio. This module was designed

and delivered by a team of subject and study skills specialists. As the

module has matured, ownership has moved from central specialist

tutors, increasingly towards subject areas. There is clear evidence of

better student achievement when subject staff have engaged with

and supported the module. However, subject staff and students

must see a value and benefit in giving and receiving academic

writing ‘skills’.

The question now is whether to fully embed this work in subject

curricula or keep a discrete contextualised strand across all courses

that would start with a study skills type module at level 1. In the

process, what might students gain or lose?

Introduction

Our Centre of Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL): Critical

Interventions for Enhanced Learning (CIEL) is based on the first-year

student experience and is multi-disciplinary. It identifies excellent

practice in four areas: art and design; applied sciences; humanities,

languages and social sciences; and education. These practices

comprise critical interventions for the enhancement of achievement,

progression and retention.

CIEL identifies pedagogies, support systems, activities and

initiatives that in a variety of ways offer critical interventions that

help a student along his/her journey towards successfully achieving

their goals.

At the start of their studies in the SAD students use individual

learning profiles (ILP) – self-evaluation questionnaires that allow

you to audit your current knowledge, skills and abilities – to identify

their own learning needs. The Centre for Learner Development (CLD)

in SAD follows up on what students have identified in these ILPs

with group and individual support. The CLD was set up with funding

from CIEL as a one-stop-shop for student support with specialist

contextualised academic support for study skills and dyslexia.

Since the academic year 2006/07, at level 1 these activities and

support have been delivered via a semester-one core, school-wide

module, ‘AD1007 – Introduction to Research and Study Skills’. The

assessment for this module is via an ePortfolio where students can

reflect on their experiences, undertake formative assessments, gain

both peer and tutor feedback, evidence achievement and stitch

together and present their journey for summative assessment. The

module adopted an academic literacies approach that draws on the

work of Mary Lea (2004). The development of the module brought

together a team of people from the academic school and the CETL.

Lea comments:

Supporting the relationship between writing and learning is not

generally regarded as the remit of course designers. As subject

specialists they are usually primarily concerned with course

content and, therefore, often overlook the ways in which writing

and textual practices more generally are central to the process

of learning.

Having run this module for three years and seen a significant

move towards subject ‘ownership’ of the learning, we are now asking

whether to fully embed this learning and support in subject modules

or not, instead keeping a discrete school-wide contextual strand to all

courses starting with a learning skills module at level 1. This could be

facilitated by specialist contextualised academic study support tutors.

178 Dialogues in Art & Design: Promoting and Sharing Excellence

What we found meaningful from an academic literacies approach

Through debate, discussion and examination of the relevant

literature, CIEL and subject staff felt that an academic literacies

approach would give a framework and ethos for the delivery of

research and study skills that would be meaningful and positive.

Of particular interest was the prospect of:

Understanding different settings, gaining a repertoire of practice,

and how to apply this knowledge

All our courses are modular. As such, students need to gain a

repertoire of skills to produce work that meets different expectations

for different subjects, modules or even lecturers.

Moving away from a deficit study skills model towards reading

and writing in a particular discipline

With an academic literacies approach we might reasonably expect

that students are unaware of academic writing conventions in a

given subject in higher education, but this does not mean that they

can’t read and write.

Understanding staff expectations

Members of staff may not always clearly articulate their expectations

of academic writing in their discipline. To do this staff need to identify

clearly what those expectations are and the reasons for them.

Formative feedback

We need to make sure that students are developing their academic

writing skills. Formative feedback needs to be used to help them

achieve this.

Active writing – little and often

We found that it was important to get students writing and then to

give feedback to develop their repertoire of skills. Writing a little and

often also reinforced the expectation that students in the modular

scheme needed to work over the whole period of the semester.

The elements of an academic literacies approach together with the

use of an ePortfolio system to support PDP (Personal Development

Planning) processes can be found within the level 1 taught curriculum

via the use of scaffolded web folio templates. An unexpected

outcome of this approach is the early identification of risk.

Case study: The School of Art and Design

SAD is one of four lead academic areas in CIEL, based on its work

on the design and development of an ILP (Salter and Peacock,

2001, 2002; Salter, Peacock and Ives, 2003). The ILP was originally

a paper-based self-assessment document that asked a student to

rate their own confidence in their skills for learning. The ILP led

to the development of the Profile tool in the PebblePad software.

The ‘learning profile’ as the ILP became, could be used as a stand-

alone entity or as something that could be used and linked to other

applications such as action plans or web folios. In SAD they linked the

ILP to a web folio and set it as an early task for students to complete

and publish electronically. Prior to the academic year 2006/07,

the use of the ILP sat outside the taught curriculum, introduced to

students in Welcome Week and followed up by Personal Academic

Tutors (PATs) who were, if possible, staff within the subject(s) that

students were studying.

Increased student support

An outcome of embedding this task in a module as the first piece

of formative self-assessment was an increase in students asking for

support. In 2006, before the use of a scaffolded web folio template

with formative activities, 44 students came forward for additional

support. In 2007 (after the introduction of the web folio) 198

students came forward, rising in 2008 to 253 asking for help. Of the

students being helped by the CLD in 2008, 94 per cent progressed

successfully on their course. This is a higher percentage than the

school average. Of particular note is a culture shift in both staff and

students that now sees asking for help not as a stigma or a sign of

inadequacy but as a sensible thing to do in order to understand the

expectations of studying in HE and improve your own learning.

179

Highlighting issues

By using short formative activities, as well as the CLD, subject

teaching staff and personal tutors were able to make contact with

their students to enable the identification of support needs and

any non-academic issues that might be affecting student learning.

Issues highlighted included: the fact that IT facilities had been

stopped through non-payment of fees; non-attendance of the taught

sessions; some misunderstanding of the instructions given and

basic ITC skills, which were hampering student engagement with the

e-learning opportunities offered by the university. All issues raised

were addressed before it was too late for the students to complete

their work.

Support for dyslexia

The use of the scaffolded template has knitted together the student

activities, academic literacies and subject content and created

a space for meaningful dialogue and early identification of risk

with appropriate action being taken. Like many schools of art and

design ours has a disproportionately large number of students with

dyslexia compared to other subject areas. The module team has now

developed podcasts (Dyson and Rhodes, 2008) to support the needs

of this group of students.

Work submission

An unexpected outcome of the use of the ePortfolio is that there has

been an increase in the submission of work. This school-wide, core

level 1 module has an average of 440 students. It is taught in four

iterations by subject and specialist study skills tutors. The following

is a summary of the 2007/08 academic year:

• Week 1: students downloaded and personalised a scaffolded

ePortfolio template provided by their tutors. This included

elements that a student must personalise, and formative tasks

that, when completed, would form the summative assessment.

• Weeks2and3:studentswereexpected topersonaliseanduse

the ILP in their ePortfolio, submitting it to their tutor.

• Week3:210ePortfoliosweresubmitted.

• Week4: studentswere reminded that ePortfoliosneeded tobe

submitted for formative feedback.

• Week 5: 330 students had submitted at this point. The 140

students who had not submitted were contacted by their tutor or a

member of support department staff (electronically initially).

• Week 6: 110 studentswere identified as potentially ‘at risk’, as

after repeated reminders they still had not submitted any work.

• Week12:allbut20ePortfolioswerereceivedforassessment.

Personal development planning

The approach the team took was to develop the students’ activities

and their learning both within the class contact time and student-

directed learning activities, putting the student experience at the

heart of the module. The students’ own personal development

planning was at the core of this. They would be given student-

directed learning tasks that would be used for peer and formative

assessment. The summative assessment would require certain

minimum pieces of evidence including: an individual action plan

with targets; an essay project plan; and a short essay based on the

plan that had already been submitted.

In the academic year 2006/07 the learning was led and directed

by the CLD supported by CIEL with some subject input. A three

hour teaching session was broken down: the first hour was

delivered by the CLD, concentrating on introducing the why and

how of academic writing; the next two hours looked at subject

specific issues and practical application. These taught sessions

were reinforced by student-directed learning in the ePortfolio. In

the academic year 2008/09 this has now shifted with the subject

specific staff being supported by the CLD staff to deliver the

module learning outcomes.

Conclusions and issues raised

1. Understanding staff expectations

Members of staff may not always clearly articulate their expectations

of academic writing in their discipline to their students. To do this

Of particular note is a culture shift in both staff and students that now sees asking for help not as a stigma or a sign of inadequacy but as a sensible thing to do in order to understand the expectations of studying in HE.

180 Dialogues in Art & Design: Promoting and Sharing Excellence

staff need to identify clearly what those expectations are and the

reasons for them. The learning and teaching culture within art and

design disciplines can mean that this is perceived as theoretical

territory, which has nothing to do with practical application or skills.

The latter is often seen as more legitimate and desirable by both

staff and students. This can be exacerbated by the use of visiting

lecturers and fractional posts.

2. Delivery and assessment via ePortfolio

The central, specialist teaching team provided one-to-one and group

support to try to engage students early on and build confidence

with using the software. The second time this module was taught,

seminars were also held each week where students could complete

activities within an IT lab environment. Subject staff were encouraged

to join these sessions. This helped to develop confidence and

highlight issues students and staff may have had with accessing and

using the software.

In the finding of a recent evaluation of the impact of PDP and the

use of an ePortfolio (Lawton and Purnell, 2009), ePDP activities

can be onerous for staff (particularly with large group sizes). They

are often perceived as ‘add on’ to discipline content. Students can

sometimes see this as onerous too, unless they can see the value

and benefit and how it fits with the bigger picture of their learning in

HE and their chosen career path.

3. Not perceived as a subject module

Despite trying to avoid a ‘generic’ study skills approach, some students

felt that the module was not adequately subject specific. Familiarity

with more traditional, practice-based teaching meant that some

students found it difficult to relate the research and study skills to the

rest of their course. There is, however, clear evidence of success in the

difference in student grades between subject areas where staff have

engaged with this module and those where this has not happened.

Students who have been encouraged to engage with this module and

made to see the relevance to their other modules have achieved, on

average, grade points higher than those who have not.

4. How do you give meaning and relevance?

Students perceived that this module has a far greater workload

than others. However, this module reflects the amount of hours

that students should be studying: 150 hours of both directed and

self- directed learning for a 15-credit module. Ironically, reflection

and personal development planning when identified as a written

activity was sometimes seen as tiresome and worthless. However,

sketching and working up ideas, critiques and showcases linked to

creative and practical activities were not seen in the same way. It can

be argued that creative activities develop the same critical thinking

skills though not the academic writing skills.

Question

So, should the learning in this module be fully embedded in subject

curriculum or stay part of a central but contextualised strand? And in

the process, what might students gain or lose?

181

References

Cowan, J. (1998) On Becoming anInnovative University Teacher. The Society for Research into Higher Education. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Dyson, J. and Rhodes, J. (2008) Supported learning with podcasts – the key to the future. CLTAD Fourth International Conference Enhancing Curricula: Using Research and Enquiry to Inform Student Learning in the Disciplines, Lycée Francais, New York, 3-4/04/08.

Lawton, M. and Purnell, E. (2009) An evaluation of the impact of pedagogic processes for personal development planning (PDP) and ePortfolio development at the University of Wolverhampton. University of Wolverhampton.

Lea, M. (2004) Academic literacies: a pedagogy for course design, Studies in Higher Education, 29(6): 739-756.

Lea, M. and Street, B. (1998) Student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach, Studies in Higher Education, 23(2): 157-172.

Salter, P. and Peacock, D. (2001) An ‘Individual Learning Profile’ (ILP). http://wlv.openrepository.com/wlv/handle/2436/5933 (accessed 16/02/09).

Salter, P. and Peacock, D. (2002) Identifying and addressing the needs of art and design students at risk of underachievement in their incoming year of study. http://wlv.openrepository.com/wlv/handle/2436/3794 (accessed 16/02/09).

Salter, P., Peacock, D. and Ives, J. (2003) Identifying, monitoring and addressing the needs of art and design students at risk of underachievement in their incoming year of study. http://wlv.openrepository.com/wlv/handle/2436/5243 (accessed 16/02/09).

2.5Crossing Disciplines

2.5.2Making Space to Create

182

183

Angela Rogers and Steve Kilgallon

InQbate: CETL in Creativity

University of Brighton

Abstract

Findings from the CETL in Creativity at the University of Brighton

emphasise the role of clear, open and flexible spaces in facilitating

student-centred learning, in particular strategies that involve working

with groups and creative thinking. This paper discusses a workshop

that used the above criteria to engage fine art students in a dialogue

aimed to help them make better use of their shared studio space.

The workshop instigated a complete transformation in their attitude

to their studio. They started to come in, make and show work in the

space and gather together to talk. We believe that this experience

raises important questions about the capacity of higher education

institutions to support open and flexible spaces for creative practice.

Combined with observations of first and second year product design

undergraduates, it has made us question the ability of recent school

leavers to fully realise the benefits of such spaces.

Introduction

Findings from the CETL in Creativity at the University of Brighton

emphasise the role of clear, open and flexible spaces in facilitating

student-centred learning, in particular strategies that involve working

with groups and creative thinking (Martin and Rogers, 2009; Morris

et al., 2008). The centre has a remit to make an impact on creative

learning across the university, and the bulk of the work takes place

either in the centre itself or in supporting specific teacher-initiated

projects. There have also been instances of centre staff making

minor interventions, and the following discusses a workshop run to

help fine art students make better use of their shared studio space.

Tensions in creative arts education

If we assume that one of the aims of creative arts courses in higher

education is to encourage and support students to be creative, for

example, take risks, embark on open-ended explorations, push

boundaries, tolerate ambiguity, make mistakes and move on from

them, reflect on and refine their work (Banaji and Burn, 2006), we

should also assume that universities have a responsibility to provide

the necessary resources and facilities. Technical equipment will of

course change with time, darkrooms and printing presses are less

in evidence while digital imaging suites abound. If HE is to accept

the creativity remit then spaces for students to immerse themselves

in processes that are not immediately related to learning outcomes

are essential. Ironically the rhetoric of creativity as an economic

imperative and the drive to make institutions more entrepreneurial

has often resulted in more corporate environments where studio-

based courses are anomalies.

This paper is not intended to be an argument for studio space

per se but by looking at a single example it raises questions about

the current position of the studio in creative arts education. It

is possible that for today’s students, with a schooling driven by

standards and inspections, fragmented into modules and multiple

choice, sustaining self-directed activity in loosely designated spaces

is problematic. The expansion of contemporary arts practices means

that studio spaces in education need to serve a different purpose

than they have done traditionally, especially with the shift to more

collaborative and social projects. Arguably for reasons of expediency,

department or faculty wide resources, such as computer suites, hot-

desks, seminar rooms in libraries and wireless networks in cafes,

are offered as suitable replacements for studio space. Although

these facilities contribute to peer group and non-classroom learning

(Temple, 2007; JISC, 2006), there are tensions between these social

learning spaces and environments that allow for the unpredictability

of individual creative activity.

For example, if students work experimentally with materials

they will make a mess and produce rubbish; large bins will need

to be conveniently located and emptied regularly. If this does not

happen, as was the case at Brighton, will students hold back on

experimenting or will it be hard to differentiate mess from work in

184 Dialogues in Art & Design: Promoting and Sharing Excellence

progress? If students are to make open-ended explorations and

tolerate ambiguity they will need to spend time sitting with work in

progress. In this case an open space that supports group work can

be inhibiting as it is easy for work that is publicly visible to be judged

too early. This is especially important in terms of students needing

to make mistakes and learn from experiments that fail or are not

immediately successful. Reflecting and refining work takes time and

maybe not a lot of action; especially if students are not present it is

easy for onlookers to assume that no progress is being made and

appropriate the space for meetings and seminars.

The studio

On the whole, second year students on the BA Critical Fine Art

Practice were disenchanted with their studio space. They were not

coming in very often, the majority were not using it to make work

and the atmosphere was uninspiring and not dynamic. There was a

lot of furniture and miscellaneous stuff in the room but little evidence

of any work being produced. Students, lecturers and cleaners could

not always distinguish between the rubbish and pieces of work in

progress. According to the students the open plan space, which is part

of a room shared by third years, had to serve as a studio, seminar room

and social space. This caused problems – work had been damaged by

a lecturer during a joint seminar and it was difficult for anyone who

wanted to carry on working when the other activities were taking place.

It also meant the layout and amount of furniture kept changing: at one

point just before the workshop we counted 34 chairs for a student

cohort of 17. There were institutional factors they did not understand,

for instance, why the waste bins appeared and disappeared, why

wood was being stored at the back of the room and why there was no

Internet access. The second year tutor thought there was also an issue

about students finding it a problem to locate their practice. Where did

they belong? Possibly as a default strategy, without any lead from the

teaching staff, most students seemed to think critical fine art practice

was limited to digital and lens-based media.

After a session exploring the rooms in the Creativity Centre,

students began to reflect on particular features of a working

environment and reassess their studio in a more positive light. There

was an impetus to change things. Although there were institutional

issues that we could not address, we knew we could offer a session

that would identify some of the emotions underlying the students’

behaviour and clarify how the studio or their use of it needed to

change. Centre staff visited the studio, talked to students and

devised a workshop in response.

The workshop

We planned a combination of exploratory collage, small group work,

large group feedback and action planning. Although we anticipated

some reluctance about collage, we saw it as a dynamic method to

elicit thoughts and feeling. We thought that it was likely that students

had not previously used it as a tool for reflection and reframing a

problem (Moon, 2004). The action planning was intended to be

specific, i.e. to name what, who, when and how much, rather than

just identify broad aims.

Conversations with students in the week before the workshop

made it clear they wanted to see some changes and take action

during the session; they had discussed the problem enough.

Building on findings from the Creativity Centre (Martin and Rogers,

2009; Morris et al., 2008) regarding the positive impact of an open

and flexible space on moving groups forward, we decided to give

them a new experience of the studio space by starting the session

with an, albeit small, clean and clear area in which to come together

as a group. On a more esoteric level the session was underpinned

by the notion of the space between people as a place of creative

encounter and collaborative inquiry, a place where something new

can be generated. Conscious of the limits of our intervention, we

hoped that the workshop would leave students more empowered

and motivated.

The students took up the challenge straightaway. Rubbish was

collected, furniture sorted and stacked and an empty space was

made in the centre of the studio. The following images describe how

the workshop unfolded. The action planning was simplified to a list

of tasks that pairs of students volunteered to take on, e.g. making

If students are to make open-ended explorations and tolerate ambiguity they will need to spend time sitting with work in progress.

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186 Dialogues in Art & Design: Promoting and Sharing Excellence

1

3

2

4

Figure 1

First impressions

Figure 2 – 4

All the furniture was shifted to clear a space to think and discuss

Figure 5

We asked students how they felt about their studio…

Figure 6

What they did not want in the space…

Figure 7

How the studio could work well for them…

Figure 8

We left them rearranging the furniture…

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The session was underpinned by the notion of the space between people as a place of creative encounter and collaborative inquiry, a place where something new can be generated.

5

7

6

8

188 Dialogues in Art & Design: Promoting and Sharing Excellence

inquiries about bringing in an Internet link from the computer room

next door and storing the wooden degree show panelling elsewhere.

At the end they were beginning to rearrange the furniture and

deciding how many chairs they really needed. Overall the group was

motivated and energetic with a sense of community and commitment.

The results

Following the workshop the initial feedback from their tutor was

very positive:

First of all, thank you to both of you for the work you did with

the second years. It completely transformed their attitude to

their studio and they have been coming in, talking a lot round

the table and using the studio – as a studio! Work has gone up

on the walls and there is a much better sense of it being their

space. There are other consequences too concerning the other

year groups which it would be good to talk through with them

and with myself sometime.

The central table area was important in discussing and planning

the second year exhibition. For the first time students felt at home in

their own studio. The workshop galvanised the students into taking

positive action on existing ideas about issues that were within their

control. Space is always contested in art and design environments.

Previously, because students had not demonstrated a strong sense

of ownership, lecturers had treated it as a flexible space and made

use of it. As students became more adamant that it was their studio,

the attitudes of lecturers began to shift, for example, seminars are

now held in a different room. There were, however, ramifications.

Some students began to feel territorial and protective over the

improved space and there were tensions with third year students.

On reflection, the tutor said she would have made the whole room

the subject of the workshop and included the third year students in

order to come to some agreements about the whole space.

Conclusion

The students were a highly motivated group, demonstrated by an

almost full attendance. They were clear about the problems with the

space, but for some reason these problems had been lived with or

worked around (mainly by staying away), rather than confronted.

Through the intervention of an external agency students took control

and realised that with their commitment many of the issues were

resolvable. Exhibitions have so far prevented us from reflecting on

the workshop with students, though their comments to their tutor

have been enthusiastic. We will, however, visit the studio and follow

up at the start of their third year. To reiterate, we believe that this

experience raises important questions about whether the current

higher education culture can support spaces for the creative practice

of individuals and groups. Furthermore, are undergraduates, who have

recently left school, and the constraints of the national curriculum,

able to fully realise the benefits of such unstructured environments?

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References

Banaji, S. and Burn, A. (2006)The Rhetorics of Creativity: A Review of the Literature. London: Arts Council England and Creative Partnerships.

Martin, P. and Rogers, A. (2009) Brighton Creativity Centre 18 month report. University of Brighton.

JISC (2006) Designing Spaces for Effective Learning, A Guide to 21st-Century Learning Space Design. Bristol: JISC.

Moon, J. (2004) A Handbook of Reflective and Experiential Learning: Theory and Practice. London: RoutledgeFalmer.

Morris, R., Martin, P., Rogers, A. and Kilgallon, S. (2008) Lessons in Creative Spaces. Society for Research in Higher Education.

Temple, P. (2007) Learning Spaces for the 21st Century: a Review of the Literature. London: Institute of Education and Higher Education Academy.

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Notes

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