Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2004

When art colleges moved into the university sector in the last quarter of the twentieth century the response of many art and design departments was to gain acceptance in the academy. Since writing was/is privileged as a means to analyse and explicate criticality, degrees were created that required extensive writing in traditional academic genres. This positioned writing (and in some cases theory) in a way that was viewed as restrictive by many in art and design. The current development and expansion of practice-based research degrees and the repositioning of art and design in the last RAE has led to a re-questioning of the role of writing in art and design education and a rejection in some quarters that writing should be constrained by academic conventions that arise from other disciplines/epistemologies. These developments create a space which enables us to explore afresh, textual and visual interfaces in art and design education.

This article describes continuing research into the role of dialogue journals within graphic design education. The application of dialogue journals described was developed as part of a seminar series on the history of graphic design and was designed to meet the needs of undergraduate graphic design majors at a state-funded university in the south-eastern United States. Identified student needs, based on studio observations and on the students’ completion of a brief questionnaire, included a need to expand students’ conception of graphic design beyond a preoccupation with computer software; a need for students to understand design activity within a broader cultural context than their own studio or personal life experiences; and a need for students to be verbally as well as visually literate within the discipline of graphic design. In this article I discuss the theoretical rationale for using dialogue journals, an example of journal application within design education, a brief report of preliminary results, and suggestions for further study.

Why do students undertaking practice-based Art and Design (A&D) degree courses have to write? What kind of writing would support them best in their practice? How do we mark student writing that challenges our current writing criteria? The ‘Writing Purposefully in Art and Design’ (Writing PAD) project seeks to encourage debates around writing in A&D. This article details the first year of the project and lays out the various debates that have developed. The project was initiated to focus specifically on disseminating current good practice for students with visual-spatial learning styles and dyslexia, international students, and mature students. This article presents the spectrum of views that have arisen from our discussions over the year. The issues presented are followed by the implications for change that have emerged from the various Writing PAD activities.

Personal development planning (PDP) is being promoted to enable students to examine their practices, beliefs, behaviours and achievements in the fullest context of their learning. This article will summarize developments to date with progress files, consider what PDP is, including the tension between its external, sociocultural role (the demonstration of skills and assets to others) and capacity to enhance internal, individual understanding. The special contribution made by creative arts education in shaping PDP will be explored. Ambivalence in the sector as to both PDP and writing will be considered in the light of experiments with alternative writing practices. In particular, these will relate to the emergence of personal narrative and authorial voice, detectable in both the visual product and the learning process. Drawing on my research into autobiography and PDP I will propose a two-tier narrative framework for PDP that can be both motivating for the learner and productive as a metacognitive tool.

The article seeks to show how an emphasis on the visual within the Intranet site MADD (Matters around Art and Design Dissertation) brings the dissertation process a little closer to the A&D students’ practice, and how the interplay between visual and verbal is part of an expressive idiom that is motivating and dynamic. The account is set within the context of the national writing project, ‘Writing Purposefully in Art and Design’ (Writing PAD) that is, ‘designed to promote the adoption of models of good practice that encourage inclusive approaches to the purposes and possibilities of writing’. After highlighting some significant characteristics of the Writing PAD case studies, the article will focus on the ‘English for Academic Purposes’ background and highlight approaches relevant to the construction of the MADD site. This will lead into a discussion of the uses of the visuals employed by the six students in the dissertations that they contributed to MADD. The article will end with implications for further developments.