Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2007

This article argues for an approach to student support for learning based within the course rather than being solely the responsibility of separate study support units. Although recognizing the importance of such specialist support for individual students, within the current climate in UK education with more students from diverse educational experiences, the responsibility for facilitating study must lie with all tutors. This, it is argued, can be achieved through providing more inclusive participation in learning activities where students are encouraged to undertake responsibilities with the tutors acting as facilitators or guides. Such activities as writing project briefs, organizing learning activities and assessing are normally undertaken by tutors and many students fail to develop an understanding about the work they are required to do in art and design. By viewing learning activities as a community of practice, where more experienced practitioner tutors enable students to participate, they are more likely to develop an identity of belonging, with an associated sense of the meaning of activities within the community of practice in education. This is illustrated through a case study where students organized a project to participate in an international textiles trade fair. The case study is analysed through Wenger's (1998) ideas about the identity of participation.

The terms creativity and engagement are used broadly throughout the literature and are in common usage in our education and design language. Students, however, understand these terms in unexpected ways and this can sometimes cause a disjunction between the teacher's intention for the learning activity and the ways in which the student may go about it.

In this article we tease out the relationships between engagement and creativity for student learning in design. Our data suggest that engagement relies on certain conditions and attributes that have to be met before a student makes a personally meaningful commitment to study. Engagement here means some form of interlocking between the student and the task, or some form of attentiveness facilitated by the teacher or the environment. By creativity we mean the meshing between person, process and product which is then appreciated by the broader design community. We suggest that understanding creativity as a complex attribute contributes to the nature and quality of student engagement with their learning and the profession.

Globalization is dramatically increasing numbers of international students in UK art and design institutions. Education as a primary source of enculturation can play an important part in bridging cultural differences; however, without awareness of the different learning cultures of Western and Confucian Heritage Cultures there is a danger of stereotype, prejudice and barriers to learning. There is a lack of research into intercultural communication in the creative fields; this article considers whether art and design institutions can adopt and adapt best practice from other fields of education in order to provide intercultural learning cultures that recognize both differences and common ideas of education and creativity.

Designers, students and educators of design use graphs and diagrams to illustrate the process of product analysis and synthesis. The available visual aids in the toolbox of designers are extremely limited. This article introduces a new pictorial representation tool that helps designers encode the process of composing and classifying the forms of generated designs. The proposed tool is based on a cross-cultural reproduction of finite state automata from the field of formal languages to represent the form derivation process in architectural design. Exercises on some applications of the new tool are constructed to illustrate an incremental process of form generation in design. The proposed tool implementation as suggested by the exercises can be used to train students to think logically and analytically about the design process. However, within the scope of this article, the tool is not tested in real design studio settings. The tool is developed to form a basis for further transformations from mathematical formalisms into computerized models that may be used to automatically derive, analyse and recognize stylistic features of formal compositions, and may be further developed into an E-learning design program.

Improving Teaching and Learning: A Whole Institution Approach, Vaneeta-Marie D'Andrea and David Gosling (2005) Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press, 245 pp., ISBN 13-978-0335-21068-8 (pbk), 978-0335-21069-5 (hbk), No cover price given

Effective Postgraduate Supervision: Improving the Student/Supervisor Relationship, Adrian R. Eley and Roy Jennings (2005) Maidenhead: Open University Press, 184 pp., ISBN 13-978-0335-217076 (pbk), 19.99; 978-0335-217083 (hbk), 60.00