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

This guest-edited edition continues to explore the themes that were addressed in Volume 3 Number 2 by focusing on textual and visual interfaces in art and design education. Students studying in an art and design curriculum create, design and write. They are assessed via the textual and the visual. Because of the scale and quality of the response to the call for papers we have brought to you two editions that address this theme. The authors in this edition – Volume 3 Number 3 – are introduced to readers in the editorial in Volume 3 Number 2.

Art and design creative techniques are increasingly used in educational and social sciences research as means to complement narrative qualitative research methodologies. Less known is the means by which art and design students may use collage, concept mapping or other artful visual tools to understand narrative in qualitative research. This article aims to demonstrate how artful methods can be combined with more traditional qualitative methodologies to uncover meaning in research texts during data analysis. The authors aim to show how both the phenomenon used and the method applied to data analysis offers a creative way to allow for meaning to emerge, while situating the research firmly in a phenomenological perspective of lived experience of the researcher through a collaborative conversation.

In this article, we look at data based on the work of EAP (English for Academic Purposes) practitioners at Goldsmiths College, University of London in the 1990s collected for the purposes of identifying the generic characteristics of two contexts in contemporary fine art study; the tutorial and the postgraduate dissertation. The rhetorical moves on the part of the tutor in the intercultural tutorials and a micro-analysis of the language used in the introductory sections of selected, positively evaluated MA student dissertations form the basis of our analysis and interpretation. We see the aim of both of those genres as facilitating development, both with regard to the individual student’s development of practice, and in respect of integrating theoretical perspectives into assessed writing. While the spoken mode of the tutorial primarily mediates reflection on, critique of, and thence development of practice, the written mode promotes an engagement with theory that is reflected back in the writing. We further suggest that development in both cases is dialectical, and that the language work and visual work in tandem have synergistic effects. In conclusion, we reiterate the synergy between the visual and the verbal and suggest that this synergy can be re-enacted in collaborative strategies between art tutors and language tutors in the wider development of students’ communicative practice.

Traditionally, art and design education in many higher education institutions has been characterized by a split between the teaching of theory and practice. This article argues that this split ignores the possible common ground between the two, largely to the detriment of students. In particular, it will illustrate how and why many art and design students feel alienated by the methods employed in the primarily classroom-based teaching of theory. The article further argues that there exists common ground between theory and practice in the form of research and that this common ground provides opportunities to integrate the two. Students will therefore be able to learn about theory through practice, which corresponds much more closely to students’ needs and abilities. The Context programme of the BA Graphic Design at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design provides an example where such an integration has taken place successfully.

This article will outline a non-linear method of writing that I have been developing since 1990. It assumes that academic writing is a productive way to explore and guide the practice of design, and that this is important for environmental and other reasons. Today’s designers play a key role in helping us to attain the kind of lifestyle to which all societies are now encouraged to aspire. Enabling them to deepen the way they think would have positive long-term benefits. The auto-didactic potential of writing is well known, but I believe it can also be applied to help designers to become more self-reflexively in touch with their entrepreneurial and professional roles in the world.

This article investigates the role of writing in a Master’s programme of Fine Arts Practice. Utilizing a single case approach, the study describes the contextualized progression of a student’s writing from the initiation of a journal to her final extended essay. Her journal, in which she writes and her supervisor responds, forms a written conversation, through which she moves from an initial position of compelled writing to an ‘auto-ethnographic’ exploration of the issues that are central to her art. Through this Bakhtinian dialogue, she constructs an internally persuasive voice and develops an expressive form for her writing.

Teaching Academic Writing -: A Toolkit for Higher Education, Caroline Coffin, Mary Jane Curry, Sharon Goodman, Ann Hewings, Theresa M. Lillis and Joan Swann (2002), London: Routledge, 192 pp., ISBN 0415261368, Paperback, £16.99

A Short Guide to Writing about Art, Sylvan Barnet, (2003), 7th edition. New York: Longman, 317pp., ISBN 0-321-10144-8, Paperback.

This page shows a reference list of all the articles that have appeared in this volume of the journal.