Teaching to the line: how do visual arts technicians in higher education conceive of their pedagogies?
Savage, Tim (2024) Teaching to the line: how do visual arts technicians in higher education conceive of their pedagogies? PhD thesis, University for the Creative Arts.
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Technician pedagogies have increased in volume, significance, and sophistication across the higher education sector since the turn of the millennium, particularly in the creative arts, in what can be described as a ‘technical turn’. A mature corpus of literature exists concerning academic teaching, but virtually nothing is known about the learning and teaching activities of technicians. Calls for empirical research from scholars and policymakers have intensified as skills and employability agendas have advanced, and blended roles, such as technical demonstrator/instructor/tutor, have proliferated. Prior to this research, it has been problematic to identify, quantify, or plan for quality assurance or enhancement concerning arts-based technical teaching, meaning that despite increasing reliance on technicians as educators, there is no framework for understanding or developing their pedagogies.
Accordingly, they cannot be optimally managed, deployed, or integrated with the curriculum, and the opportunities and risks associated with their contribution to learning and teaching remain uncertain, colloquial, and unclear.
This thesis responds to this gap in knowledge by exploring how visual arts technicians working in UK higher education conceive of their pedagogies. It examines what they teach, how they teach it, and the philosophical underpinnings and values that inform their approaches to teaching. The methodology used, phenomenography, explores the qualitatively different ways in which a phenomenon may be experienced and seeks maximum variation in sources of evidence. Seven research sites were selected to ensure a diverse range of institutions and characteristics. In total, twenty-three semi-structured interviews were completed, providing a rich basis for insights into the work of visual arts technicians. Additionally, twelve participants consented to be photographed in their teaching spaces. The images do not directly respond to the research questions but contribute to establishing the embodied identity of the participants while also illustrating the study.
Interview data were analysed using phenomenographic techniques to establish categories of description and an ‘outcome space’ that logically structures the five qualitatively distinct ways participants conceived of their pedagogies: Demonstrator, Instructor, Consultant, Collaborator, and Transformer. These conceptions span a continuum from teachercentred/subject-oriented to student-centred/transformation-oriented approaches. These outcomes challenge and disrupt existing frameworks of knowledge within creative arts education, contributing to a fundamental reassessment of how technician pedagogies can be understood and integrated with academic pedagogies and the curriculum. These insights will be of particular use to researchers of practice-based pedagogies, government, policymakers, and HE stakeholders within the creative arts and beyond in adjacent practical fields (e.g., physical sciences, engineering, pharmaceutical, computing, legal, and medicine).
Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy (PhD).
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