I have been reflecting on how the ‘object’ is centred in arts education.
This can mean the object of creation, i.e. the inherent ‘materiality’ of our practice as creatives.
“The work and its development in art and design is present and central to an exchange of views. The material dimension carries the significance of the work and its meaning to be apprehended by the viewer and/ or the user. This dimension is significant because everything in our manufactured and commercialised world is designed and accessed through experience.”
P.94 Orr, S. (2019) Art and Design Pedagogy in Higher Education: Knowledge, Values and Ambiguity in the Creative Curriculum. 1st edition. New York: Routledge.
This can also mean artificially inserted objects — provocations supplied by the educator, or objects sourced by students, all of which aim to support, facilitate and focus discussion and learning.
During the opening of our first PGCert session, in small groups, we were supplied with a pile of ‘art postcards’. Each person was prompted to introduce themselves, and to pick a postcard and talk about why they chose it.
This was a great conversation starter, and felt surprisingly effortless, when these forced ice breakers can so often be otherwise. Centring this exercise around a tangible, visual focus point worked well for us as a group of visually minded creatives, but I imagine would be rewarding with many other groups of learners too.
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I try and constantly encourage the act of ‘seeing’ and reflecting in my students. As I teach predominantly on User Experience Design, this is particularly important, as it is easy to overlook just what is an ‘experience’ and what has been ‘designed’ — by centring an object (and reflecting on its history, the systems it works with and which bought it into being, its use and its future), it is possible to invite students to a deeper understanding of what kinds of work might fall within their remit, and what kind of changes they might be able to make to the world and its systems in their future work.
This also tied in with what I learned from fellow Pg Cert-er Campbell Muir, and his assigned reading, which focussed on object-based learning activities. (Willcocks, J. and Mahon, K. (2023) ‘The potential of online object-based learning activities to support the teaching of intersectional environmentalism in art and design higher education’, Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education, 22, pp. 187–207. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1386/adch_00074_1.)
He shared how the authors of the article were teaching online during the pandemic, and used ‘object based learning’, to confront the challenges of screen fatigue, low participation and engagement that can occur in these spaces (as well as to deliver their subject matter in an inspiring way). They reflected that having a visual point of focus for these online sessions (aka the ‘object’) worked well to combat these issues. They also discussed how effective it was to get students to go out find their own object in their own local area — a tangible, non screen based, real world experience, and a great opportunity for participation and sharing.
This was particularly helpful in reminding that an object, in an online learning context, need not necessarily be physical. (Our postcards at the start of the session were physical but they could have been digital!)
I am excited to reflect further on how I can bring more object focus and materiality into my pedagogy.