A System for Quality Improvement in Higher Education

Effectiveness and correct procedure have come into focus at institutions of higher education. Quality becomes a strategic factor for competition and cooperation among universities. A quality-aware organization is not created spontaneously—it requires a committed, visible leadership that promotes the relevant issues. It is important to engage the staff in work on quality evaluation. Furthermore, the top management of the university should be evaluated against university objectives. The quality status of universities must be evaluated on an ongoing basis, but the evaluation perspectives needs to be changed.

Interest from the superiors' point of view should focus on whether and how departments follow up their quality. A workable model for this type of assessment can be based on three (or rather four) dimensions. In the first one the rector can expect departments to report on how they are implementing measures to ensure the quality of their work. The second dimension is to investigate to what extent departments have actually applied those approaches in daily routine; this is known as deployment. The third dimension implies that each department is held accountable for the results of this application. The relevant question here is what trends or levels can be presented relative to internal goals or external benchmarks. From the results, it is necessary to go back and assess in the first dimension again. The question in this (fourth) phase is how the people responsible for the evaluation will validate the relevance of their approach and deployment.     

Art Education for Understanding: Goodman,Arts PROPEL,and DBAE

‘What is art for?’ This provocative question was the motto of the 31st Annual Convention of the National Art Education Association (NAEA) held in Atlanta, Georgia, 1991. As a visiting scholar for a semester at Harvard Project Zero, I had rich opportunities to study art education programmes in higher education and public schools all over the United States. As a consequence, I felt complelled to reformulate the NAEA question, and ask ‘What is art education for?’ This essay argues for the importance of understanding and meaning-making in art education. It starts with a review of some common rationales for the teaching of art that stress both the alleged ability of the arts to promote ‘good’– i.e. creative, harmonious, and civilised – characters and the instrumental value of the arts as a means of communication. These rationales are then evaluated within the context of Nelson Goodman's philosophy, which emphasises the primary role of curiosity in the arts. The following two sections discuss the rationales, contributions and limitations of two art programmes that are currently being carried out in the United States: Arts PROPEL and Discipline-Based Art Education (DBAE). Arts PROPEL has introduced long-term, open-ended projects that integrate production (making) with perception (learning to ‘read’ art works and observe the world closely) and reflection (thinking about one's work and the works of others). The DBAE curricula are sequentially organised and integrate content from the disciplines of art creation, art criticism (learning what to look for and how to interpret), art history (studying contexts and alternatives of taste and style), and aesthetics (building a personal philosophy of art). In the final section, Arts PROPEL and DBAE are compared. In the context of previous rationales for the teaching of art, the similarity in aims of these programmes stand out as more important than the differences in approach. Neither do these programmes overstate the humanising power of art, nor do they focus on visual literacy per se. Instead, both programmes emphasise the role of reflection, interpretation, and understanding in art. Productive and analytic art activities are used as important vehicles in making sense of the world and of ourselves. It is concluded that Arts PROPEL and DBAE offer promising and supplementary approaches to promote curiosity and to teach art for the sake of understanding.