On the 31st of July 2023 I will actually retire. I stopped adding to my pedagogy posts a while ago, because I was far more interested in thinking about how drawing could still be a vital and live tool for contemporary students. Therefore have spent the last few years trying to work on active issues rather than looking back at the past. However on reading some of these old posts I'm glad I did put them together as they do archive some moments from a time when art education was very different. I was teaching in those days on a Foundation course in art and design, but it did seem a fundamental aspect of a four year student experience. My more recent experience is that Foundation courses are very different, on the one hand fewer and fewer students now undertake them, and on the other hand they seem more fixed on getting students to quickly specialise in fine art or design and making a portfolio, rather than giving them a set of experiences that allowed them to see what sort of people they were. In the past you chose a direction much later in the year and that meant everything could be kept more open and general. Students now chose a pathway before Christmas, so there is very little time for play.
So if you are looking to see what my current thoughts are do visit my Drawing Blog, http://fineartdrawinglca.blogspot.com/ and a couple of other left over blogs, such as http://contextualandtheoreticalstudies.blogspot.com/ which as a blog I kept for Digital film games and animation students for a couple of years when I taught them contextual studies. This was when I was head of contextual studies and most of my time was spent giving dissertation support for BA students. However the Digital film games and.animation students had been apparently very hard to teach and their tutor left, so I decided to step in myself and see if a change of tack might help. The blog was an attempt to keep students interested who tended to stay up very late game playing. I think it worked and for the first time some of these students managed to get a first for their dissertations.
