The first session we had offered a really useful introduction to key ideas around teaching in art & design in UK HE. It was a great way to connect with colleagues and to start exchanging ideas around our teaching practice. I found this sense of community and learning from peers really encouraging (and also somehow therapeutic!).
The most interesting part of the session for me, as a historian, was when we developed the timeline of the wider UK HE context. Having moved to the UK only in 2014 it gave me a really good understanding of the way historical changes affected the way we are currently experiencing the educational system: the way political decisions, priorities and narratives – that sometimes feel far removed from our everyday teaching experience – are shaping what, why, and how we teach.
It was interesting to see the political discourse around HE change from education being a moral good in the 1960s, with an emphasis on widening access and participation, to a marketisation of education over the last 15 years. This change is keenly felt in our everyday practice: the emphasis on attainment, for example, and employability often clashes with an understanding of education as valuable in and of itself. Therefore, justifying why students should read, write, research rather than make, make, make in the context of a design school is a materialisation of these wider social and political tensions. (I was also thinking of the recent scrutiny of funding bodies and discussions around free speech brought about by the conservative government’s political imperatives). I wish we had more time to work with the timeline in the session. It was quite rushed and I did not get the change to capture it – perhaps it might be good to create a print out with it and with reference to key sources. I find this one of the really core aspects of this unit that we slightly overlooked and that we could have reflected more on.
This was a useful read for some recent changes/challenges/policies:
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9640/