Abstract :
This paper presents a personal perspective on
some of the ideas and issues that currently
surround learning and teaching in art and design
within higher education. It aims to stimulate
debate and to raise questions about the direction
in which an increasingly monolithic educational
culture is moving. It identifies a number of beliefs
and values that the author considers to be particularly
important to the development of a radical
pedagogy and argues that the sector needs to
counter the drift towards a technocratic and
overly deterministic approach to education.
While being intentionally wide-ranging and
polemical the paper seeks to bring together a
number of disparate ideas into a useful and
coherent interaction. The continuing relevance
of education as an emancipatory and transformative
project is affirmed, while certain features
of modernism inscribed into current educational
practices are questioned (for instance, exclusivity,
subjectivism and absolutism). Changes in the
ways in which knowledge is viewed are discussed
in relation to assessment, learning, research and
the construction of the ‘self’. A re-orientation of
learning and teaching is suggested around a
process-based pedagogy that places particular
emphasis on indeterminacy, pluralism, revisibility
and dialogue.
