Learning to Be: The Modelling of Art and Design Practice in University Art and Design Teaching

Learning to be an artist or designer is a complex process of becoming. Much of the early phase of ‘learning to be’ occurs during the time emerging artists and designers are students in university art/design programmes, both undergraduate and postgraduate. Recent research reveals that a critical role in assisting students in their maturing identities as artists and designers is played by artist/designer‐academics teaching in university art and design programmes. By maintaining active art/design practices and drawing from these in their teaching, artist/designer‐academics model professional practice to students. Witnessing and interacting with such modelling is part of the process of students learning the shared discourses, views and practices of the art or design worlds to which they aspire to belong. The modelling of professional practice is critical to an artist or designer's ‘learning to be’ experience because it enables students to access the tacit and nuanced behaviours, languages and cultures that constitute contemporary art or design practice. This article outlines findings from a recent Australian study revealing the role of professional practice modelling in university art/design teaching. It highlights the centrality of professional practice modelling to artist/designer‐academics in their beliefs and approaches to teaching their academic disciplines. In critically exploring the research data and findings this article describes the role that modelling of practice plays and how it comprises a core part of the value that artist/designer‐academic participants contribute to the teaching of art/design education.     

A Cross‐Cultural and Interdisciplinary Collaboration in a Joint Design Studio

A design studio is a critical venue for design students, as they are educated to develop design thinking and other skills through studio courses. This article introduces a design studio project in which Korean and Malaysian students worked jointly for one semester to design affordable urban housing. The Korean students were interior design majors and the Malaysian students were architecture majors; thus it was thought that the students' areas of expertise were likely to differ. It was also anticipated that the students would display cultural differences in terms of housing and planning practices. The motive for starting the joint design studio was the idea that a cross‐cultural collaborative working setting could redefine students' thinking styles and stimulate students to obtain non‐routine perspectives on the design of buildings and spaces. Through observation and interviews, we explored how students tackled affordable housing problems within the context of cross‐cultural and interdisciplinary design education. Collaborative learning in a joint studio situation supplemented students' expertise, re‐orienting approaches to design and opening up a holistic approach to the design issues of affordability, sustainability and community. Overall, the practical learning in the joint studio project validated the importance of exploring alternative solutions based on varied levels of information, and input of those from different educational and cultural backgrounds. The cross‐cultural and interdisciplinary collaboration allowed for a previously unavailable enhancement of design education by encouraging students to obtain divergent thinking for innovative design ideas.     

The Importance of Conceptual and Concrete Modelling in Architectural Design Education

The design studio is the heart of architectural education. It is where future architects are moulded and the main forum for creative exploration, interaction and assimilation. This article argues for a ‘studio‐based learning’ approach in terms of the impact of design tools, especially sketching and concrete modelling, on the creativity or problem‐solving capabilities of a student. The implementation of a ‘vertical design studio’ model at Gazi University Department of Architecture is reported with examples of students’ works.     

Measuring Students' Self‐Efficacy for Communication

Design students are asked to regularly communicate their ideas to a diverse audience. Students' abilities may be affected by their perceived self‐efficacy, the perception of abilities to perform a task. Because self‐efficacy is conceived of as context‐specific, it is vital to consider self‐efficacy as it specifically relates to design studios and the communication within that context, rather than to look at generalised self‐efficacy for communication. To that end, this article explains the development and validation of measures of students' perceived self‐efficacy for communicating in both formal (critique) and informal (studio working time) design circumstances. Using data from students at two institutions, the measures were found to be reliable; these results were further supported through their relationship to previously validated measures. The development of these measures and the results from pilot data provide insight into students' perceptions of their communication abilities that may be beneficial to educators seeking to help design students communicate competently.     

Deferred creativity: Exploring the impact of an undergraduate learning experience on professional practice

This paper explores the impact of an art-based learning experience on former Education students' professional practice. Feedback from trainee teachers indicated that the true value of the creative process was only realised after they had graduated – what I have come to term ‘deferred creativity’. The findings suggest that focusing on the development of their own creative characteristics, skills and attitudes helped students to become more creative practitioners. By drawing on the reflections of our alumni, we can help future students to develop the key creative competencies and skills required for 21st century life.     

Self‐monitoring and its relationship with educational level and task importance

To investigate students' self‐monitoring practice and effects of educational level and task importance on self‐monitoring, 510 students, varying in educational level from elementary through graduate school, reported the self‐monitoring strategies they employed in three learning situations with different levels of task importance. The study identified six self‐monitoring strategies used by students but found a low involvement in self‐monitoring at all educational levels. It was found that older students used more complex self‐monitoring strategies more frequently than younger students. The study also showed that students' self‐monitoring increased with task importance. The self‐monitoring deficiencies that students experienced in difficult learning tasks were attributed to the lack of a system of self‐monitoring. Educational applications of teaching self‐monitoring strategies and developing self‐monitoring systems for difficult learning tasks were discussed.     

The rise of the embedded designer in the creative industries

Work practices in the creative industries have changed significantly since the turn of the twenty-first century. The design profession in particular has been influenced by rapidly emerging digital media practices and processes. While the design sector remains a significant source of employment, in recent years, there has been considerable growth in the number of designers working – or ‘embedded’ – in other sectors of the economy. The extent to which tertiary curricula cater for this shift in work practices and employment types is not well known. In this article, we report on original research on the preferred work destinations of a cohort of design students. This research was supplemented by a set of interviews with a small group of embedded designers in order to gain insights into the characteristics of embedded positions. Our research reveals that an embedded design position, while not well understood by undergraduate students, is a significant career path and one that should receive greater attention in undergraduate design curricula. We conclude that greater emphasis should be placed on assisting embedded designers to maintain creative networks that support them in what is a relatively isolated creative role.     

Thornburn Junior High Helps Pupils to Choose Their Clubs

Too often, students reach college without the learning, critical thinking, and literacy skills they need to succeed in higher education. Recent educational trends that promote teaching to the test, short reading and writing assignments, group work, and technological resources contribute to students' difficulties transitioning to college-level work. Instead, students need practice in sustaining attention to longer readings and writing exercises, researching through more traditional library methods, learning from a variety of teaching styles, and working individually to show subject mastery and creativity. These five Do's and Don'ts of preparing students for college represent a college professor's wish-list of secondary classroom experiences to help students make a smooth transition to higher education.     

School Students' Responses to Architecture:a practical studio project

This paper focuses on a built environment project with a mixed ability group of learners from year seven attending Deacon's School in Peterborough, England. The School caters for students aged between eleven and eighteen, from a wide range of ethnic and cultural backgrounds (including a substantial minority from the Indian Sub‐Continent); it is an active participant within the University of Cambridge Post Graduate Certificate in Education partnership and is a ‘beacon school’. In practical studio terms, the project was concerned with school students making ‘pop‐up cards’ based on first hand observation of local architecture under the guidance of the Head of Art. [1] The focus for students' learning was on their critical responses to their built environment, in and around the City of Peterborough. In particular, students were encouraged to make full use of their sketchbooks and to engage in active oral work. The approach taken builds upon that advocated by Wolff and Geahigan [2] by emphasising the relationship between students' personal engagement with art and design and their personal response to it through their own art; students were encouraged to learn about art and design objects through the process of reacting, researching, responding and reflecting. [3]     

Formative Assessment in EFL Writing: An Exploratory Case Study

In second‐language writing, assessment has traditionally focused on the written products and how well (or badly) students perform in writing. Teachers dominate the assessment process as testers, while students remain passive testees. Assessment is something teachers ‘do to’ rather than ‘with’ students, mainly for administrative and reporting purposes (i.e. summative). Such assessment, being more retrospective than prospective, holds little value for teaching and learning. In recent years, with a major paradigm shift in assessment and evaluation in English language teaching, writing assessment informed primarily by a product and summative orientation, is considered increasingly inadequate. Such assessment, which focuses on measurement – i.e. marking, monitoring and checking, fails to capture the formative potential of assessment for promoting learning. A formative approach to assessment, on the other hand, focuses more on inquiry – i.e. discovering, diagnosing and understanding, as well as the opportunities assessment provides for improving teaching and learning. To harness the potential of formative assessment in the writing classroom, it is axiomatic that classroom assessment practices be geared towards maximizing student learning. This provides the impetus for my study, which investigates an EFL teacher's attempt to implement formative assessment in her writing classroom and its impact on her classroom practice and students' beliefs and attitudes to writing.     

Transforming practice in Design and Technology: evidence from a classroom-based research study of students' responses to an intervention on inclusive design

This article offers evidence from a classroom-based research study in English secondary schools which developed an innovative approach to teaching in Design and Technology based on inclusive design (also known as universal design). The research evidence highlights how creative, problem-solving approaches in Design and Technology can be used to provide authentic, engaging learning experiences for students. This study, entitled ‘Designing our Tomorrows', introduced secondary school teachers and students to the principles and practices of inclusive design through an intervention using specially designed resources. In this article, findings from the study's qualitative pre- and post-intervention interviews are presented to illustrate how this type of approach can stimulate students' creativity and understanding of design.     

Active Learning and Teaching through Digital Technology and Live Performance: ‘Choreographic Thinking’ as Art Practice in the Tertiary Sector

This article is an interdisciplinary reflective response to an intensive studio learning and teaching experience involving artists, academics and postgraduate students. The authors of this article teach, research and practise in coding, digital design, dance, and virtual and live performance. As lecturers and students we reflect upon and propose future approaches to art practice in tertiary education informed by live performance, performance capture and studio‐based responses to digital and virtual platforms. We reflect on an innovative contribution to the field of research–teaching nexus as informed by digital and virtual data capture identifying the key element of immediacy in live performance and choreographic improvisation with systems. We reflect on practice‐based inquiry via the Choreographic Coding Lab (CCL) model – a dialogical negotiation between capture technology and interdisciplinary artists in industry and academia. How can we encourage potential studio inquiry as an adapted model in tertiary learning and teaching? Our interdisciplinary voices, presented as authors’ reflections, provide suggestions for future studio‐based, active learning contexts.     

Teachers' learning to facilitate high‐level student thinking: Impact of a video‐based professional development

Attaining the vision for science teaching and learning emphasized in the Framework for K‐12 Science Education and the next generation science standards (NGSS) will require major shifts in teaching practices in many science classrooms. As NGSS‐inspired cognitively demanding tasks begin to appear in more and more science classrooms, facilitating students' engagement in high‐level thinking as they work on these tasks will become an increasingly important instructional challenge to address. This study reports findings from a video‐based professional development effort (i.e., professional development [PD] that use video‐clips of instruction as the main artifact of practice to support teacher learning) to support teachers' learning to select cognitively demanding tasks and to support students' learning during the enactment of these tasks in ways that are aligned with the NGSS vision. Particularly, we focused on the NGSS's charge to get students to make sense of and deeply think about scientific ideas as students try to explain phenomena. Analyses of teachers' pre‐ and post‐PD instruction indicate that PD‐participants began to adopt instructional practices associated with facilitating these kinds of student thinking in their own classrooms. The study has implications for the design of video‐based professional development for science teachers who are learning to facilitate the NGSS vision in science classrooms.     

Improving Student Engagement in Commercial Art and Design Programmes

The continued viability of art and design programmes depends on our ability to produce graduates able to contribute successfully and confidently to the future of the creative industries. This in turn depends on our ability to lead students to develop both the ability and the motivation to learn. A significant proportion of our students however, are not adequately prepared or inclined to engage with the learning environment. Based on a review of the literature on student engagement, this article attempts to identify the origins and examine the impact of the perceptions and attitudes (the ‘mental pictures’) that currently limit our students' ability and inclination to engage as well as those factors (including the features of our programmes) through which these ‘mental pictures’ may be inadvertently reinforced. It then proposes a number of practical suggestions to make more effective use of the learning outcomes of art and design programmes in order to mitigate their influence and thereby improve both our graduates' capacity and inclination to become more competent professionals, as well as self‐directed learners.     

The Education of Instructional Designers: Reflections on the Tripp Paper

In a recent issue of this journal, Steven D. Tripp proposed some innovations in the education of instructional designers based on his analysis of education practices in other design professions. His principal proposals were that students should analyze great instructional designs of the past and that instructional design studios should form part of the educational preparation of students entering the profession. This paper proposes some extensions and modifications to Tripp's original ideas. These include extending his concept of the analysis of great lessons of the past to the analysis of current examples of expert work, the use of an expanded jury system to incorporate peer and practitioner evaluation of students' work, and the criticality of students developing solutions to actual performance problems during the instructional design studio experience. Finally, it is proposed that opportunities for critical reflection on the process of instructional design be built into the studio experience.     

A research‐based teaching sequence for teaching the concept of modelling to seventh‐grade students

The purpose of this study was to construct and study the impact of a research‐based sequence for teaching the concept of modelling to seventh‐grade science students. We identified students' notions of models and the aspects of school science to be addressed regarding the model concept, which were then taken into account when we planned the learning sequence. The idea of modelling in science was taught while the students were learning about the change of states of matter in seventh‐grade physics. A pre‐interview revealed that the students' notions of models were very limited, while a post‐interview showed that this improved in the course of the series of lessons. There was also a statistically significant difference in the students' understanding of modelling between our target group and a control group consisting of ninth‐grade students who had received only the normal teaching. However, a delayed post‐questionnaire completed a few months after the teaching sequence showed that the stability of learning results were dependent on whether models and modelling were used in the normal teaching conducted after the teaching sequence. Implications for teaching, teacher education and research are also addressed in this paper.     

Transforming Feedback: An Application Framework for Group Feedback Videos in Design

This article presents the development and application of group feedback videos (GFVs) in design education. A case study shows how visually‐rich GFVs were developed in a practice‐based design studio subject where learners were required to work in teams and independently calibrate an ability to form judgements on the qualities of their own work. Breaking away from traditional models of individual written feedback, students were instead provided with holistic reviews of project outcomes in a GFV format. Assessment examples were presented from across the cohort with the goal of encouraging open discussion and self‐reflection on studio practice. GFVs supported learning processes through three key characteristics: information richness, group learning and sharing, and formative engagement. What differentiated this approach from previous studies was the focus on audio‐visual group delivery to enhance feedback's richness. By replicating an in‐class group critique session, GFVs allowed commonly summative assessment stages to be seen as formative. This study contributes to existing literature through an application framework that may be used by design educators who are seeking to implement GFV methods within their own studio teaching practice.     

Graduate Design Education: The Case for an Accretive Model

In 2008 the University of Melbourne began implementation of the Melbourne Model, its new vision for higher education in Australia. Six broad undergraduate university degrees have been introduced and graduate schools created. Students may now progress from an undergraduate generalist degree, with major, to a professional Masters. Alternatively, graduate lateral entry is available for students to pursue a professional qualification without prior preparation. This acceleration has significant implications for design studio teaching. Students with no design background but with an undergraduate degree are now able to study architecture or landscape architecture in just three years, compared to the previous four‐to six‐year undergraduate degrees. This article reviews and analyses the outcomes of an ‘accretive’ design studio (Christie 2002) devised for beginning Masters students which attempts to translate a new mandate of ‘acceleration’ into design pedagogy. Analysis of student focus groups, together with the work produced, revealed not only the value of the accretive model in delivering a cohesive understanding of the design process and a student engagement that exceeds the outcomes of traditional design studio but also highlights the value of an immediate immersion into a community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991). We argue that immersion, as distinct from conventional educational models which position education as ‘training’ for a future participation in a discipline, is central to any acceleration model, serving to position students as active definers of the discipline rather than passive observers and thereby increasing ownership of their learning experience.     

任务驱动教学在经济学专业课程中的应用

任务驱动教学法以"学生为中心",在完成任务的过程中,培养学生分析和解决问题的能力.结合学生实际,将任务驱动教学法应用到高校经济学专业课程,正好满足了这类课程实践性强、知识更新快的特点.通过教学实践,既巩固了学生对课本知识的学习,更重要的是培养和提高了学生分析解决实际问题的能力,为学生进入到实际工作领域打下了良好的基础,实现了学校和社会的有效衔接.