Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education - Volume 19, Issue 2, 2020

This article examines perceptions regarding the purpose and delivery of tutorials in the architectural design studio that can support how students comprehend feedback. It draws on literature on ‘dialogic feedback’ and theoretical accounts of ‘dialogue’, framing the notion of the dialogic as one in which meanings and identities are realized through a multi-voiced state, questioning the extent to which studio-based tutorials can be considered dialogic. The study uses thematic analysis to reflect on 212 accounts of educators and students at a UK-based architecture school. The article highlights that a comprehension-oriented praxis as opposed to an assessment-oriented praxis can better enable dialogic practice, allowing learners to realize, position and comprehend their own voice amongst the divergent views. The article extends the critical body of work dedicated to evaluating feedback delivery in one-off review sessions, to the context of tutorials and their longitudinal implications on the learning experience.

This article describes the development and implementation of Jenny Moon’s ‘Graduated scenarios’ (2004, 2001, 2009) in the disciplinary context of media production. Graduated scenarios have previously been used to model different levels of critical thinking and reflection and have been based on situations and experiences that can be related to by a wide range of people. Our development of them in a specific creative disciplinary context, for use by students within that context, represents an evolution of the process, but we also consider the possible reception of such models in the context of debates around academic literacies and the degree to which they may be seen and used as contributing to an orthodoxy of expression. We acknowledge that this experiment in writing and pedagogy may be perceived as providing ‘exemplars of standards’, but argue that it actually models differing depths of thinking, and also opens up discussion about orthodoxies of academic writing. Our four models of different levels of critical reflective writing are provided as appendices, and may be used or adapted as necessary. The production of such graduated accounts is ‘effortful work’, but the process can help us (academics) to better understand our own, as well as facilitating learners’, concepts of depth and ‘good practice’.

Based on the educative proposal of Dennis Atkinson, this article discusses the written practices of two teachers who lecture for a Ph.D. in art education. The goal is to analyse the process of conceptual appropriation and curricular development over four consecutive years of this experience, in relation to both the pair of teachers and the students. Using a hybrid methodology, which combines autoethnography, self-study and the narratives of the teachers and the students, writing emerges as the main focus of the research, as it is an essential work instrument of the classroom, of the teachers’ personal reflection, and at the same time a spring that provides sources and means for its own analysis. It is through writing that one explores the appropriation of concepts as diverse as pedagogy of the event, real learning, intra-relation and intra-action, which leads to the process in which the teachers end up becoming the teachers yet to come.

Erasing when drawing occurs for a variety of reasons. While the most obvious may be correction of mistakes, at other times erasers are used to create such things as highlights or marks that introduce particular aesthetic elements. When a drawing is made on paper, partial erasure ‘marks’ can provide a useful record of a drawing’s evolution. For the teacher, this historical record can be a catalyst for helpful commentary and criticism. While programmed to simulate an analogue eraser, in a digital environment the erase function can eradicate a drawing’s history with a single click. We studied analogue and digital tool use behaviours (including erasing) to compare the frequency of erasure and the effect of erasing on observational accuracy in adults between the age of 17 and 64 with various levels of drawing experience from less than two years to more than ten years. The study involved participants making one drawing on paper with traditional drawing tools and one drawing on a digital drawing tablet. We then had the drawings rated for accuracy. Among other interesting results, we found that erasing occurs with greater frequency when participants work in a digital environment than in an analogue one and that, while there were significant tool use differences between the environments, those differences did not result in differences in the accuracy of final drawings indicating the adaptability of our participants using different means to achieve the same effect.

This study mainly examines the contribution of the virtual reality environment to architectural education. The primary aim of the study was to investigate the theoretical possibilities of VR technology in an interactive and participatory educational environment that would allow students to examine architectural components and inter-component relationships. A group of 160 volunteers participated in the study, with participants asked to design villas in both natural (non-VR) and virtual reality (VR) environments within a specific period. Designs made in both environments (VR and non-VR) were evaluated by a team of five experts (jurors). For the evaluation, jurors wore eye-tracking devices and were asked to comment on the designs in both environments. In the virtual reality environment designs, the following categories showed significant differences over the drawings in a natural environment: functionality, aesthetics, user perception of space and internal physical quality (light quality), indicating that the virtual reality designs were examined more closely by the jurors than were those in the natural environment. This study will contribute to design discipline if virtual reality systems are adopted in architecture education.

Service design has gained ground in the field of education. This article aims to reveal current approaches of service design applied to higher education pedagogy. The methodological approach is thematic literature review. Great variation in the application of service design can be found through review of selected literature. Three key categories were used for analysis: service, method and value. Four main approaches emerge from the results: service design applied on (1) courses and assignments; (2) pedagogical methods or models; (3) pedagogical applications for specific groups and (4) pedagogy outside formal education. Managers, teachers or researchers can use the results of this study to develop higher education pedagogy with service design approaches. Results also indicate possibilities for further research in the area of participatory design, international and national collaboration or value creation.