This dichotomy is something else that I have been puzzling over in these sessions and in my teaching practice more broadly. In one exercise in a TPP class, we had to respond to a series of quotes on padlet, all of them seemed to be concerned with the relative importance of experience and taught content in the classroom.
This elicited a debate. I questioned the primacy of experience in the context of arts education. While I agree with hooks’ analysis of how experience can elucidate in transformative ways in the academic setting, in art and design teaching, which I understood as practice based the theory seemed less applicable.
I come from an academic background and am quite new to arts education relative to my colleagues. Something I found surprising when I began teaching at UAL was how art and design courses have assumed all the trappings of traditionally academic subjects. The language that is adopted- often mystifying, abstract to those unfamiliar with it, the dwindling references to practical skills and how practioners had become ‘academics.’
This process has become particularly apparent in the last year in the courses I teach on. At a meeting before the start of term we were instructed to integrate the learning outcomes (often worded in quite nebulous terms) into the curriculum. It was agreed that the references to practical skills and techniques (printmaking, typography etc) in the course handbook complicated this process- and should therefore be removed.
Having read about the history of arts education, I now understand this gradual shift towards the academic and the disappearance of taught skill as part of a larger trend of ‘deskilling’ in UK arts education which began with the substitution of the National Diploma in Design (NDD) with a degree. The Coldstream Report, often credited with initiating this shift surmised that “We do not believe that studies in fine art can be adequately defined in terms of chief studies related to media. We believe that studies in fine art derive from an attitude which may be expressed in many ways.”
The lack of definition expressed reminds me of the vague terming of assessment criteria- something that tutors would interpret individually as it left so much to the imagination.
On BA illustration, I could see academic writing being wielded as a money saving tool right before my eyes.
I think bell hooks would not have wanted to have her theory applied to any form of teaching, regardless of context. Arts education is specific, the removal of craft and skill and the drift towards the academic politically and economically expedient: if arts students are treated like academic students, they will not require more space or resources.