Case Study 1: Knowing and responding to your students’ diverse needs. 

Contextual Background

Within the BAACC course, I teach an essay planning seminar supporting dissertations for students specialising in textiles, ceramics, painting, performance, digital, sculpture, woodworking, musical instruments, and horology. The 35 students have individual character and range in neurodiversity and gender identity across the ages of 22 to 76. 

Evaluation:

The challenge is to respond to diverse creative practices of different mediums and industry expectations. Teaching Craft Practices is a new terrain as I usually specialise in Contemporary Art. This meant gaining relevant knowledge of craft workshop practices, specialist skills and techniques, historical and contemporary makers, and industry knowledge. My objective was to enable each student to use diverse visual and theoretical research for developing their dissertations to inform their unique studio and workshop practices. 

Recognising the students’ required initial concept support was key and resulted in delivering research methodologies lectures based on a guide to Visualising Research in Art and Design (Gray and Malins, 2004). Organising 1-2-1 tutorials in their individual workshops, effectively enabled me to analyse their practical projects, understand the different workshop cultures and gauge their individual needs before the seminar. I’ve previously found visual and oral presentations excellent for accommodating diversity with artists, so I applied this to the Craft students, despite it being an unfamiliar format for them. Combining the disciplines across 2 seminars was effective for encouraging transdisciplinary research and the generous group feedback enabled me to create bespoke draft essay plans using resources across the students. These proved so effective the Head of the School requested dissertation presentations alongside written assessments. 

Moving forwards 

By recognising the difference between each student’s unique needs I was able to mobilise their diversity as a resource for each other. Going forward I would like to build on the transdisciplinary exchanges that the combined student groups offered one another in the seminars to establish a network for the students to support each other’s projects. 

Lectures:
Opening my Critical Studies lectures to Craft students will enable them to independently choose subject areas of individual interest for their practical projects and physical exchange with Contemporary art students. While I have included craft examples in some of my art lectures, I intend to include more diverse objects and practitioners in every lecture. 

Workshop introductions:
To encourage cross-pollination of disciplines similar to the Bauhaus I would like to introduce the students to each other’s workshops during Orientation week. This would allow them to gain knowledge of available resources beyond their departments that might trigger initial making ideas and support project development.

Seminars:
In the future, I would like to combine the disciplines during essay planning seminars and presentations. I believe this is possible by arranging with the different Course Leaders allocated sessions scheduled in the individual programmes. 

References 

Gray, C and Malins, J. (2004). Visualising Research: A Guide to Research Processes in Art and Design. Hants, Ashgate Publishing.

The temporary bauhaus-archive museum, available https://www.bauhaus.de/en/ (accessed Feb 7 2024)