Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education - Current Issue

This reflective piece considers the question ‘What do you learn when you study creative subjects?’. The author draws on pedagogical theory and practice to explore how centring a curriculum around the act of ‘making something new’ informs student expectations and experiences within a creative arts education. It concludes by arguing that educators should embrace the restless tension between the neatness of an aligned curriculum and the messiness of learning to create opportunities for students to try the possibilities of things. In doing so, they can help students make connections during their education and navigate a complex, changing and uncertain world beyond their studies.

This systematic literature review explores the intersection of knowledge-building principles and design-thinking methodologies in the context of education. Design thinking, a cognitive approach to problem-solving, often encounters challenges in generating innovative ideas during its implementation in educational settings. This review examines how integrating knowledge-building principles into design thinking can address these challenges. Knowledge-building, centred on collaborative knowledge enhancement and community responsibility, offers a framework that aligns well with the iterative, creative and collaborative aspects of design thinking. The review analyses studies that discuss obstacles in idea generation, compares knowledge-building and design-thinking methodologies and explores the potential of knowledge-building to enhance design-thinking outcomes. The findings suggest that intertwining knowledge-building principles with design-thinking practices can empower students to develop and refine ideas more effectively. The review contributes to modern pedagogy by offering insights into leveraging knowledge-building principles to enrich the design-thinking process and facilitate more productive ideation. It provides a comprehensive understanding of how these two approaches can be combined to enhance students’ problem-solving and creative-thinking abilities.

The emphasis on doctoral education in Europe calls for analyses of how bachelor’s and master’s studies in creative and practical disciplines enable graduates to carry on to Ph.D. level. This study offers a methodological framework to analyse the social and situational character of students’ dispositions to research. We investigate largely practical journalism programmes that also aim to provide all students with premises to research work. Sixteen students were interviewed at the culmination of their studies at two universities in Finland. Through Wenger’s theory of a community of practice and the method of situational analysis, we analysed researcher identities and discourses on research in the students’ speech, situations and social relations in which the participation in research practice occurred, and development trends of participation. The results suggest that journalism practice is socially and situationally prioritized over journalism research in the programmes, which undermines the efforts to engage students in research.

This article examines the precarity of Black bodies in institutional spaces, particularly the detrimental impact on the career of the Black arts practitioner. Ongoing systemic discrimination within institutional sites, as experienced by Black artists, scholars and curators, can be traced to the problematic historical relationship of the Black body to the exhibitionary complex. The continued performative spectacularization of Blackness in institutional settings, as in the cases of Artists Space in 1979 and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 2021, highlights the difficulty for Black professionals invested in decolonial work to unsettle this misrepresentation without the risk of repercussions. In each case study, institutional responses to claims of racial discrimination illuminate their negation of the Black experience and the consequence to Black practitioners of questioning and activating against systemic inequities within these sites. To address the topic in an honest and scholarly manner, this article includes references to histories of colonial violence, as well as examples of harmful racial slurs exacted in response to the concerns of Black practitioners. In so doing, this article is an act of decentring imperialist research methods’ and engages an alternative method for exploring deeply sensitive narratives in a rigid institutional structure.

The prime purpose of design education is to nurture young people and develop their artistic and scientific personalities, skills and talents. By its very nature, professional training in design is fully committed to the education and training of the creative workforce required by creative industries. It is crucial for design educators to devise and formulate relevant, responsive and quality programmes with an emphasis on sustainability at all levels of design education. It is notable that the world economy has become increasingly sophisticated. Design is a value-added component in various sectors. Design students equipped with multiple skills and capable of managing simultaneous tasks are crucial to the creative industries in this challenging world economy. This research is going to trigger further discussion and reflection among design curriculum developers, academics and policy-makers. It can also discuss the use of a total curriculum and participatory curriculum development approach to design education to provide our new design generations with a broader curriculum and learning approach for the knowledge-based economy.