The skill of making art on computers: Computational Art skills at the intersection of academic and technical teaching
Contextual Background
On BA Fine Art: Computational Arts, I’m planning on improving how academic and technical learning is interwoven into the curriculum. Contemporary Art Schools including UAL are often staffed with separate academic and technician teams devising their own teaching plans for students. As such, a student can be exposed to two different sets of scheduled activities within the curriculum, and technical learning is often not mandatory, so technical literacy can vary widely within a cohort as some students engage with technical workshops and others less so.
Evaluation
On computational arts we have explored different ways to address this. Our lead technician, James Stringer created a booking system for students to reserve a place on cross-year workshops. These have been timetabled to not clash with academic teaching.
In the previous academic cycle 2023-24, we successfully integrated academic and technical teaching by allocating a member of the academic teaching team to co-deliver the technical workshop on Mondays. First, it encouraged the technician and lecturer to devise a more interwoven lesson plan for the week where technical skills were understood as connected to the themes of the unit and artistic references shared by the lecturer. Second, the approach improved attendance rates and student satisfaction. Due to a reduced staffing budget, we have not been able to implement this approach for the current 2024-25 cycle.
Moving forwards
In Fine Art Pedagogy after Modernism, Houghton (2014) explains how seperate technical teaching in Art schools originates from the pioneering pedagogy taught at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD). To ensure art students could still access technical resources regardless of the module “the pedagogy that was created was one where skills were available à la carte, ideas and process dominated …” (ibid, page 7).
Fine Art courses routinely centre contextual studies and make the teaching of skills optional and open to all students, delivered by technicians. Arguably, this approach is not sufficient to reach the technical literacy increasingly required for creative professions. This resonates with UAL’s Creative Attributes Framework (UAL, 2022) that recommends the development of self-efficacy, resilience, and agility.
I have tried to reintegrate skills-based teaching into the pedagogy of the course, an approach that resonates with the pedagogical views of the previous Programme Director (Chorpening, 2014) who observed a “shift away from the skills of making” on BA Fine Art courses.
My own teaching has been influenced by my experience in computing departments where acquiring technical skills is often mandatory. In Fine Art, I want to pursue an approach that dissolves the demarcation between ‘lecture’ and ‘workshop’ with hybrid activities that may begin with contextual slides and artistic references, followed by teaching skills needed for the type of practice that the lesson is covering. Our lecturers would be more inclined to integrate skills-based learning into their teaching, leaning on their own practices and expertise. The limitation of this approach, however, is that the technical team still operates an open access model as expected by the college, and as such, can often be out of sync with the academic team.
In summary, moving forward I will:
- Continue to advance a pedagogy that dissolves the separation between theory and skills-based teaching, encouraging where possible hybrid teaching activities.
- Work closely with the technical team to ensure that academic and technical teams align their teaching.
- Where possible, create joint-delivery workshops with both a technician and academic present, to encourage collaboration.
- Be attentive to the wider context in which Fine Art education has responded to the need for skills-based teaching, and respond to attributes identified in the CAF report.
References
Houghton, Nicholas. ‘Fine Art Pedagogy after Modernism: A Case Study of Two Pioneering Art Schools’. Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education 13, no. 1 (1 April 2014): 7–18. https://doi.org/10.1386/adch.13.1.7_1.
UAL (2022) Creative attributes framework, UAL. Available at: https://www.arts.ac.uk/about-ual/teaching-and-learning-exchange/careers-and-employability/creative-attributes-framework (Accessed: 22 March 2025).
Chorpening, K., 2014. The problem with making in fine art: A case for the expanded teaching of drawing. Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education, 13(1), pp.93-107.