Excavating the 'critique' : an investigation into disjunctions between the espoused and the practiced within a Fine Art studio practice curriculum

This report presents the findings of a case study excavating the event of the ‘Critique’ (crit), the formative assessment method within a Fine Art Studio Practice curriculum. Arguments informed by critical postmodernism, education theories and contemporary art criticism are utilised to construct a dialectic of higher education, contemporary art and fine art studio practice. An emphasis is placed on the importance of agency, expressed through intentionality and critical thinking, with a recognition of the relationship between ‘the self’ and ‘the other’. Using critical discourse analysis, the disjunctions between the espoused and practiced curriculum are explored. The researcher analyses how the assessment practices of the case studied are influenced by unexamined agentic factors, such as inter-departmental relations, lecturers’ assumptions and prior learning, and structural determinants, such as the medium-specific Bachelor of Fine Art degree structure and prevailing artistic traditions. The research findings indicate that these are underpinned by tensions between two orientations, the espoused curriculum’s discourse-interest informed by critical theory, and the theory-in-use. The latter is shown to have unexamined modernist leanings towards formalism and a master-apprentice relationship between lecturer and students, which encourages reproduction rather than critical, creative thinking. The dominant discourses in the case studied construct a negative dialectic of the artist-student that can be seen to deny student agency and authorial responsibility. Findings suggest that students experience this as alienating, to the extent that to preserve their sense of self, they adopted surface and strategic approaches to learning. An argument is made for lecturers’ critically reflexive engagement with their teaching practice, and thereby to model ethical relationships between ‘self’ and ‘other’ during ‘crits’. In addition, emphasis is placed on how assessment practices should be more aligned with the espoused curriculum, so that the importance of a reflexive relationship between form and content, process and product, intentionality and interpretation is acknowledged

Evaluation of teaching and courses: reframing traditional understandings and practices

This anthology outlines case studies which have emerged from an approach to evaluation which enables individual academics to practice a degree of autonomy in how they determine their own evaluation agendas, methods and approaches. This has enabled individual cases of both rigour and creativity when it comes to the collection of data and generation of feed- back on their teaching and/or courses, particularly in relation to transforming curricula responsively; enabling student voice and increasing student ownership; and creating spaces for practices to be challenged. The purpose of the case studies is pedagogic and to illustrate a range of practices and principles. For the sake of clarity some of the details have been omitted or slightly changed

Broken vessels : the im-possibility of the art of remembrance and re-collection in the work of Anselm Kiefer, Christian Boltanski, William Kentridge and Santu Mofokeng

This thesis is structured around investigating the philosophical and aesthetic problematics, politics, and possibilities of representing the past for the purposes of demythifying the present as well as commemorating the losses of history, as explored in the artworks of Anselm Kiefer, Christian Boltanski, William Kentridge and Santu Mofokeng. The first chapter begins with Theodor Adorno’s philosophical understanding of myth and history: how he is influenced by and then develops Karl Marx’s critique of society, Sigmund Freud’s critique of reason and its subject, and particularly Walter Benjamin’s ideas of history as catastrophe, the role of the historian and his messianic materialism. The second section looks at Theodor Adorno’s dialectic of art and society: immanent criticism in aesthetic practice, mimesis, and the shift in conceptions of allegory from Walter Benjamin’s understanding to that of Jacques Derrida. The last section of the chapter looks at Jacques Derrida’s poststructuralist theories against boundary-fixing, within that the ethical relation to the ‘other’ and the theorist/artist as psychic exile. The second chapter deals with the politics of remembrance and representation — beginning with Theodor Adorno’s historic interpretation of the Mosaic law against the making of images and Jean-Francois Lyotard on the im-possibility of representing the unrepresentable. The chapter is divided in two parts between the post-Holocaust European artists Anselm Kiefer and Christian Boltanski, and the post-apartheid South African artists William Kentridge and Santu Mofokeng. It explores, within these artists’ specific contexts, their formal and philosophical approaches to myth and history, and the problematics of image-making, representing the unrepresentable, and commemorating the immemorial. The thesis concludes by considering different conceptions of melancholia as they relate to these artists: the Freudian psychoanalytic approach, Benjamin’s notions of the artist-genius, and Julia Kristeva’s Lacanian reading of the humanist melancholic, concluding with the mythic-historical Kaballist notion of melancholia as the historical burden or responsibility to commemorate loss

Attempting to break the chain: Reimaging Inclusive Pedagogy and Decolonising the Curriculum within the Academy

Anti-racist education within the Academy holds the potential to truly reflect the cultural hybridity of our diverse, multi-cultural society through the canons of knowledge that educators celebrate, proffer and embody. The centrality of Whiteness as an instrument of power and privilege ensures that particular types of knowledge continue to remain omitted from our curriculums. The monopoly and proliferation of dom- inant White European canons does comprise much of our existing cur- riculum; consequently, this does impact on aspects of engagement, inclusivity and belonging particularly for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) learners. This paper explores the impact of a dominant Eurocentric curriculum and the Decolonising the Curriculum agenda within higher education and its influence upon navigating factors such as BAME attainment, engagement and belonging within the Academy. This paper draws on a Critical Race Theory (CRT) theoretical framework to centralize the marginalized voices of fifteen BAME students and three academics of colour regarding this phenomena. Aspects examined con- sider the impact of a narrow and restrictive curriculum on BAME students and staff and how the omission of diverse histories and multi- cultural knowledge canons facilitates marginalization and discrimin- atory cultures

The problem of authorship : considering the significance of interpretative approaches on the conditions for creativity in undergraduate fine art studio practice

Varying approaches to interpretation, debated in aesthetic and literary criticism since the very beginnings of philosophy, favour the artist’s (author’s) intentionality, the viewer’s (reader’s) interpretation, and/or the artwork (text) itself. The merit of these approaches, in terms of what informs the artwork’s meaning or significance, is not at issue in this research project. Rather this project is concerned with how these different approaches play out within referential frameworks in teaching, learning and assessment interactions in higher education, and their significance for creativity in fine art studio practice. To comprehend the complex interplay of structure, culture and agency, the study draws from qualitative case studies of two art schools, in England and in South Africa, which differed in their espoused approach to assessment and interpretation. In addition, comparative case analysis of five studio practice teachers and their students considers agential approaches to interpretation and their significance for student engagement. Data was collected from course documentation and generated utilising a variety of hybrid methods. This included observations of assessments, questionnaires and interviews with staff; and to generate data from students, an image-based narrative method, focus group interviews and questionnaires. At various points during such researcher-participant interactions, possibilities for reciprocality, transgression and challenge of interpretations were enabled. Utilising critical discourse analysis, each case was analysed individually and then comparatively. Firstly, that which was espoused and practiced by staff was mapped to a framework constructed for the purpose of identifying approaches to interpretation: whether eucharistic, objective, or operative criticism, in relation to the author, text and reader. Secondly, insights from staff and student participants were related to the optimal conditions for creativity in this domain. Schema of the environment, relationships and curricula were then sketched, indicating the significance of interpretative approaches on students’ emotional, critical and reflective engagement with themselves as artist-students, their artmaking processes, and their artworks. This project contributes to research in assessment in fine art studio practice by providing a means to both identify the discipline’s embedded referential frameworks and consider their significance for creativity. The findings from this study revealed that whether or not the interpretative community of assessors were informed by educational development or quality assurances discourses, or utilised explicit criterion-referenced assessment, the more powerful and implicit discourses were those of their professional practice, informed by art criticism. As such, actual intentionality was not given prominence in either institution’s summative assessments. Despite this, its importance for the nominal authenticity of the artist-student emerged. As students’ reflective engagement of assessors’ readings of their artworks against their own meaning-making was unsupported, students evidenced underdeveloped skills of metacognition and critical judgment. However, the study found that those teachers with longer experience, of the particularity of institutional structures and cultures, had developed the capacity to better manage the effects on their students’ formative experiences. Such relationships emerged as having a strong formative influence. Those students, who believed their teacher was concerned with their actual intentionality, experienced less alienation and felt better supported to persevere with or problematize their desires, and to handle uncertainty. An argument is made for the negotiation of interpretation as discursive and inclusive of students’ actual intentionality in assessment practices in fine art studio practice. This turn, to situating the author within interpretation, is towards enabling possibilities of agency and the responsibility of ethics within teaching, learning and assessment of reflexive practitioners. In questioning the significance of interpretation on authorship and the conditions for creativity within the higher education context, of which there has been little in the way of empirical research, this research contributes to contemporary literary and aesthetic criticism

Building solidarity through comparative lived experiences of post/conflict: Reflections on two days of dialogue

Occasions for in-depth dialogue among academics in times of conflict are rare. This piece provides brief insight into the value and challenges of one such occasion, which brought Syrian academics together with international colleagues from contexts undergoing conflict or grappling with post-conflict legacies. Seven dominant themes that emerged from two days of roundtable discussions and workshops are identified and discussed: (1) brokering and relational expertise when under conditions of [post-] conflict, (2) international involvement and expertise, (3) the question of whether it is desirable to depoliticise higher education, (4) issues of academia and academics’ complicity in conflict and division, (5) pathological constructions of conflict, (6) the invisibility and inaccessibility of resources, and (7) how being in exile can create space for dialogue, but also burdens of responsibility for representation. The authors reflect on the rhizomous connections, strategic insights and support shared by contributors at this event, in addition to highlighting the consciousness that was raised around the agency, limitations, complicity and intergenerational legacies borne by academics and the academy in contexts of conflict, crisis and post-conflict development

Editorial: Transformative Learning, Teaching and Action in the Most Challenging Times

This Research Topic invited articles on sustainability-related transformative learning, transformative teaching, and transformative actions or practices in the field of higher education. The focus was based on the proposition that classic models of education have not managed to deal with the complexity of current socio-environmental world problems. Therefore, sustainability education should offer learning settings and promote learning processes that enable learners to critically reflect on their attitudes, values, paradigms, and worldviews, which may lead to conceptual change and thus transformative learning (Sterling, 2011; Balsiger et al., 2017; Rieckmann, 2020).Non peer reviewe