International Journal of Art & Design Education

2009 - Volume 28: Number 3

Paint and Pedagogy: Anton Ehrenzweig and the Aesthetics of Art Education

BETH WILLIAMSON

Volume 28.3

Anton Ehrenzweig's work training art teachers at Goldsmiths College in London was groundbreaking in its field. The work of the studio fed back into Ehrenzweig's writings through his reflections on teaching and the work produced in end of year shows. In The Hidden Order of Art (1967), he theorised the creative process in psychoanalytic terms and elsewhere likened the task of the art teacher to that of a psychotherapist. In this article I argue that, by taking psychoanalytic art theory into the teaching studio, Ehrenzweig provided a psychic space within which students were freed from convention and encouraged to pursue their own practice.

Contextualising Craft: Pedagogical Models for Craft Education

SINIKKA PÖLLÄNEN

Volume 28.3

Craft education in Finland is, in many aspects, in a state of change. This concerns the independent position of craft as a school subject, the content of the compulsory craft courses containing textiles and technical work, the implementation of the new concept of a holistic craft process in the National Core Curriculum and so on. This bears relevance to the question of how craft should be taught at school.

This article explores the ways in which teachers can strengthen the relevance and meaningfulness of craft education at school. Teachers are challenged to provide more authentic instructional contexts and activities beyond the traditional curriculum in order to address successful living in today's society. One solution is to contextualise this teaching with the help of pedagogical models that realise the concept of holistic craft. The pedagogical models discussed in this article are based on curriculum publications, materials in print and research by other scholars.

Old World Teaching Meets the New Digital Cultural Creatives

ELIZABETH DELACRUZ

Volume 28.3

This article sets forth a conceptual, philosophical and social agenda for art and design education in the twenty-first century, considering how a set of beliefs articulated within US art education discourse interfaces with conceptualisations about emerging global digital media and technologies. Discussion highlights selected writings in the USA primarily, writings about art education technology orientations; and then describes the professional experiences and insights of the writer as she embraced, implemented and made sense of technology in terms of her own multicultural educational orientation in a US university. Based on these insights, this writer proposes that technology pedagogy is not actually about digital technologies per se, but about what we intend to do with new technologies in the twenty-first century. Old notions of art as an embodiment of things that matter and a testament to the human condition are now connected to contemporary ideas about citizenship, caring and public engagement. In this trajectory, citizenship education is then posed as central to a future vision of art education in the digitally connected classroom. Caveats and limitations of the educational and transformative power of new global electronic media being set forth in this article are also noted, including paradoxical self-contradictions within the orientation itself.

Artful Language: Academic Writing for the Art Student

LINDA APPS AND CAROLYN MAMCHUR

Volume 28.3

The task of writing about the process of making and contextualising art can be overwhelming for some graduate students. While the challenge may be due in part to limited time and attention to the practice of writing, in a practice-based arts thesis there is a deeper issue: how the visual and written components are attended to in a manner that neither is subjugated and both are fully realised. Helping students to revision art and writing as similar creative processes that can be structured around a framework designed to address both processes can override the conception that writing and art are polarising forces.

This article describes one such framework that was found to be effective from both the perspective of the professor and the student in fleshing out the heart of both artistic processes and finding an integrating structure that moves a thesis to fruition.

Continuing the Journey—the Artist-Teacher MA as a Catalyst for Critical Reflection

TERRY PARKER

Volume 28.3

This article discusses the personal experience of reading an Artist-Teacher MA, both as a way of engaging with a course of study aimed specifically at art teachers and also as an attempt to explore and possibly reconcile the pedagogic issues related to the area of critical and contextual studies that had arisen within my own practice. Critical and contextual studies has grown to become an essential component of art education in schools, yet there would appear to be limited pedagogic approaches amongst art teachers or enthusiasm for alternative curriculum models other than those inferred from exemplar material provided by examination boards for assessment purposes. As a consequence of engaging with the Artist-Teacher MA, I confronted my pedagogic practice and reconsidered my personal position within the continuum of the role of teacher and that of artist. In turn this has led me to consider the notion of the pupil-artist and to question the implications of this for my continuing classroom practice.

Graduate Design Education: The Case for an Accretive Model

JILLIAN WALLISS AND JOAN GREIG

Volume 28.3

In 2008 the University of Melbourne began implementation of the Melbourne Model, its new vision for higher education in Australia. Six broad undergraduate university degrees have been introduced and graduate schools created. Students may now progress from an undergraduate generalist degree, with major, to a professional Masters. Alternatively, graduate lateral entry is available for students to pursue a professional qualification without prior preparation. This acceleration has significant implications for design studio teaching. Students with no design background but with an undergraduate degree are now able to study architecture or landscape architecture in just three years, compared to the previous four-to six-year undergraduate degrees.

This article reviews and analyses the outcomes of an 'accretive' design studio (Christie 2002) devised for beginning Masters students which attempts to translate a new mandate of 'acceleration' into design pedagogy. Analysis of student focus groups, together with the work produced, revealed not only the value of the accretive model in delivering a cohesive understanding of the design process and a student engagement that exceeds the outcomes of traditional design studio but also highlights the value of an immediate immersion into a community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991). We argue that immersion, as distinct from conventional educational models which position education as 'training' for a future participation in a discipline, is central to any acceleration model, serving to position students as active definers of the discipline rather than passive observers and thereby increasing ownership of their learning experience.

Border Crossing

FELICITY ALLEN

Volume 28.3

This paper describes a programme I have led on behalf of Tate Britain over the last five years, and sets out some initial thoughts about the impact on it of a range of different, sometimes conflicting, influences and pressures. The programme is Nahnou-Together, which translates from the Arabic as 'we together' and, in this context, implies mutual learning. It is a partnership between Tate Britain, the British Council, the Adham Ismail Centre of Plastic Arts in Damascus and Darat-al-Funun, and the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Art in Amman, with support from the Jordan Ministry of Education.

Colouring in the Blanks: Memory Drawings of the 1990 Kuwait Invasion

YVONNE PEPIN-WAKEFIELD

Volume 28.3

This study used drawing tasks to examine the similarities and differences between females and males who shared a collective traumatic event in early childhood. Could these childhood memories be recorded, measured, and compared for gender differences in drawings by young adults who had shared a similar experience as children? Exploration of this question drove this qualitative research project to examine drawings by young Kuwaiti men and women, who were residents in Kuwait during the 1990 Saddam-Hussein-led Iraqi invasion of their country. Visual results from this study show colour, image and symbol (CIS) patterns, and differences in gender images in drawings which represent a select population's response to the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.