A1 Evaluation of teaching practice: Designing & Planning for Learning
Teaching second-year BA Fine Art students at the Camberwell School of Art. One of my responsibilities as a lecturer is to prepare students for a ‘professional’ life as practising artists. The pedagogy of putting up a group exhibition in collaboration with their peers. In this case study I explore the pedagogy of art exhibition to build a public-facing presentation. Students learn valuable skills in presenting and engaging with new audiences, internally in the school and externally in galleries and communities. I support students with exhibition activities throughout different moments in the course. The learning is to develop new skills, practice, planning, logistics, social, creativity and collaboration. The exhibition involves making work, curating, and promoting the exhibition, and basics such as filling holes and painting walls. It is a fun and social experience, building relationships outside the school. The weakness of working with exhibitions is that shy or quiet students avoid participating in the collaborative and social process and experiences, often those students deliver their work to be hung.
In a.n (Artist Information Company) research paper, Professional practice in art schools: preparing students for life after graduation, Sarah Rowles (2016), “students set up projects – exhibitions, screenings, community projects, whatever – and develop professional aptitudes in doing that. The important thing is that the learning of those ‘professional’ aptitudes is powered by the work. In pedagogic terms, this would be ‘situated learning’. Its value is that it is quicker, and it sticks”.
In an article from Art, from Design & Communication in Higher Education Volume 14, Number 2, The bookbinding workshop: Making as a collaborative, pedagogic practice by Elizabeth Kealy-Morris, she notes in her article Polanyi, M. (1967) argued that the educator and the student need both explicit and tacit knowledge to understand a new experience and set of skills. Explicit knowledge can be critically analysed through writing, whereas tacit knowledge is unarticulated and unformulated, and thus, more basic, and embodied – what we know but cannot say. And showed associations between student engagement and improvements in identified desired outcomes, including cognitive development, critical thinking skills, practical competence, and skills transferability. They found that interacting with the staff has been shown to have a powerful impact on learning, especially when it takes place outside the classroom and responds to individual student needs. Polanyi’s account of tacit knowledge adds to our understanding of experiential knowledge. It refers to embodied knowledge or ‘skill’ developed and applied through practice and experience and is understood instinctively.
The exhibition experience is outside the setting of the assessment, it brings engagement with students, peers and staff, working towards one aim. Rowles. S (2016) paper outlines, Fine arts programmes around the country’s opinions vary on ‘professionalising’ fine art students. Fine art graduates carve out a huge variety of jobs for themselves. And UKPSF’s ‘professional values’ are embedded in Fine Art courses. Skills such as exhibitions, writing funding applications, artist statements, CV, and presentation skills developed in crits and collaboration projects.