Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education - Volume 21, Issue 1, 2022

This article presents the findings of the research into improving design professional training by means of project activities alongside art and multimedia technologies (MTs). It discusses the role of artistic skills in the success of project activities, in particular, the skills of visual representation of the environment via MTs. It was confirmed that the development of media significantly changed the technological potential of design, as well as its artistic value. Therefore, professional training content became the primary focus of attention, since it appeared vital to involve new forms of creating artistic design projects with such modern methods as media fusion and motion graphics. The development of digital technologies promoted changes in teaching methods, adjustments in curricula according to the demands of modern design and those of introducing creative approaches in project activity teaching. The experimental part of the study demonstrates the dynamics of forming professional project skills on the authors’ special course ‘Multimedia Technologies’.

Higher education professionals in art history agree that the downward trend of funding and enrolment will continue if changes to art history curriculum are not made that bring to light how relevant and helpful art history can be to students of all demographic populations and academic majors. This study seeks to explore student perspectives of how art history is currently being taught and their opinions on what outcomes art history class offers that they value. Current art history students completed a survey that assessed student perspectives about their art history class. Findings indicate that students value art history knowledge (AHKO) and find lecture to be efficient. However, they would also appreciate other instructional methods such as in-class activities, which they believe would help them learn critical thinking (CTO), and discussion and homework projects, which they believe would help them learn creativity. Students of all majors find AHKO, CTO, creativity to be valuable skills that are taught in art history.

This study investigated the exploratory potentials of sketch modelling in the introductory architectural design studio. It focused on the course ‘ARCH 102 Architectural Design Studio I’, in which sketch modelling was deployed as a creative problem-solving practice, triggering an exploratory process through thinking and doing. The study adopted the case-study method. Hence, the principal sources of data are student projects and studio tutors’ first-hand observations and reflections. The findings reveal that, along with its iterative and communicative functions, the exploratory nature of sketch modelling helps first-year students overcome design issues in the making of design. The findings lay the groundwork for more systematic studies on reflective learning practices in design education.

At universities and academies, teaching and learning occur in a range of environments as art students continue to develop their skills. The aims of the study were to determine how art students evaluate the role of their learning environments in achieving their learning goals, and what kind of feedback they consider important for their artistic development. Therefore, ten university students were interviewed. They were advanced art students who had successfully completed different courses in sculpting. The findings indicate that during studio learning the students addressed technical or formal problems related to their artworks, as well as how to implement their artistic intentions, with the help of feedback from lecturers and fellow students. All participants referred to experimentation and trying out different materials, forms or motifs as central to their artistic development and said that exhibiting their own artworks in public as part of university projects motivated them to continue.

The curation of four ‘teaching exhibitions’ of pedagogic research outputs in a specialist arts university is presented as a case study of distributed leadership practice, with the leadership in question being positioned as a feminized mode of leading educational or academic development from a middle-out position. Scholarship of teaching and learning focused upon the development of academic micro-cultures within universities is collided with thinking around arts-informed approaches to leadership. Through reflexively evaluating her nascent curatorial practice, the author reconsiders what academic development leadership in the specific organizational culture of the arts university can look like when arts modalities are brought into play.

As the faculties of literacy and numeracy are universally recognized as worthy of pedagogical nurturing, so this article champions an older, graphic articulacy: visualcy. An articulacy with the language of drawing that distinguishes the visual arts from other disciplines. Its nurturing has been compromised by the shift away from teaching drawing in UK secondary schools and HE art schools, even before COVID. We argue that this shift is in part a consequence – perhaps unintended – of the neo-liberal values permeating the UK education sector. The article presents a critique of the those values seen as a significant obstacle to drawing’s educational benefits, and offers an optimistic basis for its place in the curriculum.

Although ‘learning by doing’ is nowadays a standard practice in design education, there is not much reflexivity about what designers actually do with a ‘learning by doing’ approach. Based on my ethnographic research in a design school in Milan, I examine designers’ performance of practical learning by looking at their use of participant observation, a method borrowed from social sciences and applied to an early stage of the students’ design research projects. I detail how, in the exercises with participant observation, ‘practice’ emerges as an aesthetic effect that is performed to simulate the openness of the research, a process I refer to as a ‘dramatization of practice’.