Shreeve, Alison and Ashwin, Paul (2008) Transitions : variation in tutors’ experience of practice and teaching relations in art and design. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.
Abstract
In art and design education creative practice, being an artist or designer, is seen as central to what and how students learn. The use of practitioners to teach is viewed as an indicator of a quality experience on one hand and a source of anxiety on the other. Doubts have been expressed about whether practitioners actually enable students to learn about practice. However, very little is known about how transitions between practice and teaching are made. This study sets out to explore the experience of this relationship from practitioner tutor’s perspectives. A phenomenographic enquiry approach is used to construe variation in experiencing practice/ teaching relations. This is extended by case studies representing the phenomenographic categories, where activity theory is used as a heuristic device to examine the different relations experienced by practitioner tutors. These relations can be experienced as symmetrical, asymmetrical or holistic, and practice knowledge is experienced in different ways in teaching: transferring, using, exchanging or eliding knowledge between practice and teaching. Thus there are different ways that practitioner tutors report making knowledge available to students, leading to different kinds of learning experience. The contextual factors, including individual histories of development and the experience of the two worlds of practice and teaching may also hinder development of tutors by institutions. Although art and design as a broad discipline is the focus of this study there may be differences within it, but also resonance for other practice based discipline subjects.