A morning on foundation (2012)

I returned to my foundation roots this morning to cover for a member of staff having to take a course. Really strange going into a staffroom where I had previously spent so many hours. Things have changed so much though. The conversation was all about how a new computer system had been introduced and that this made assessments far more difficult and how they were going to get around this by getting students to digitally sign in and out at certain times. With such large numbers and vast amounts of paperwork, how any of the deeper issues of art or design thinking are addressed beggars belief. It was a pretty basic session I had been asked to cover, something I have done many times over the years. Going somewhere (in this case the City Art Gallery) so that students can use the experience to learn how to record and select useful information in their notebooks. The biggest change to a similar session in let's say 1979, is working to a brief. Outcomes are listed and 15 different things to do outlined, and over the few days of the brief students have to cover each one. There are well over 30 students to one member of staff, so getting round them is difficult and time available to give to each student short. On the one hand I can see why things are written down, because students could easily get lost in such a large group and staff might not be able to keep everyone focused, but on the other hand the brief quickly starts to get in the way. Typically, one student with an interest in architecture has done an interesting drawing that implies that she is very interested in how the space in a building shapes the way that its users move through it. Great, a fantastic moment of awareness, I then proceed to draw a series of approaches to this problem (I have taken drawing paper with me as I always try to give actual examples), each drawing approaching the problem in a different way, but each drawing having a central narrative about an understanding of the use of architectural space and how the observer can be directed to enter a drawing in a similar way to how a building can itself direct it's users around it. However it soon becomes clear that although the student is excited by the potential of doing this, she has to get through all the 'exercises'. So I went through what each 'exercise' was designed to focus on. It was clear (and I did this with all 20 students I spoke to and drew alongside) she was not aware of why they were being asked to do things, just that 14 different approaches had to be followed. As I went amongst the students there were some interested in fine art, some in textile design, some in spacial design, product design, photography etc etc. Not one had twigged that drawing and selection was (by its very nature) selective in terms of conceptual approach. The photographers needed to think about how the shape of a lens influences selection, but not only that, how focus is used as part of that selection process, colour and tonal values and therefore how a scene might be lit to enhance the textural or emotional qualities. Fine Art students in particular seemed lost as they had no way into converting the 'exercises' into a questioning  or conceptual platform from which to derive ideas. A typical conversation. This with a student that professes to be interested in taking on the fine art pathway. "What are you interested in in relation to this drawing?"  I don't know, I'm just doing the 'exercises'. "OK but at least one of them is more interesting to you than others" Not really. "So what are you interested in?" After a little while it becomes apparent that the student is interested in colour and upon being pressed decides it is emotional reactions to colour. So we look at the environment. All the colour has been taken out of it, white walls predominate, why? The student is bright and without having to read 'The White Cube' starts to articulate that the Gallery environment is constructed to be 'neutral'. Now we have an interesting starting point. Fast selection and focus can still be made but with an idea in mind. All the issues about wide ranging mark qualities, composition and selection can start to fit together as a meaningful whole and it can lead to ideas. For instance making all the artwork neutral but the exhibition environment 'hot'. Each mark used now being selected in relation to its potential to carry emotive qualities and composition and selection employed to heighten an awareness of the 'White Cube' space. Just selecting swatches of observed cool neutral colour and working hard to render them on paper would take a day of hard looking and mixing for instance, but there are the 14 exercises to do, so the student will skimp over these issues in order to meet the looming module deadline. (I also found out in conversation that the course doesn't cover colour theory any more, no time to fit it in.) Perhaps they would be better to drop all those assessment points then if there is no time.

It is a diagnostic programme and as always students will reveal their interests more through doing than logical analysis of potential future course structures. However this does involve serious dialogue between experienced staff who can point out how for instance a 3D thinker reveals what they are through their approach to problem solving and not just relying on students' awareness of design and fine art disciplines via a knowledge of the products associated with them. This seems harsh and the course is only 2 months in (they start in August) but my feeling was that too many decisions are based on how to get the students through a timetable and not how to pedagogically develop them via the educational process. 

So what is the key difference between when I felt foundation worked really well, to how it is now? I think it's the lack of wonder. By having a series of things to do it reduces decision making to "which one on the list do I do next". The hard part of decision making is coming to terms with what sort of decisions to make and why. Selection is a weird and wonderful process and not something that can be made easy by going through a list. I'm very aware students in the 1970s and 80s were often lost and didn't know what was happening, but the issues that were put to them (I thought) were put in such ways that it appeared that at every juncture a whole world of possibilities was available and if you found yourself going off on a moment of discovery it hopefully was supported and you were able to follow the implications. I'm sure that still happens but I'm also sure staff have far less time to have those necessary conversations, whereby they direct students attention to how they are solving problems and how they seem to be developing and demonstrating different sensibilities.  Above all there seems to be no room within the brief format for poetry. Its very structure of rigid predictable hierarchies impelling answers of an equal predictability. This is of course not just a problem with the foundation course, it is something that pervades all through the educational infrastructure. The typed brief is not the same as the voiced idea. The voice's own rhetoric structures and flexibility shapes ideas (Yates, "I made it out of a mouth-full of air"), the climate of awareness that needs to be cultivated, needs to be one of engineering, mixed with poetry, mixed with a materials sensibility that sees meaning in dust as much as diamonds. A cry of burn the briefs should be raised and all educational measurers and learning outcome writers thrown into jail for the disservice they have done. 

I did enjoy the experience though and had several engaging conversations, hopefully ones that did not result in students failing the module outcomes, but conversations that helped them come to some sort of awareness of themselves and their relationship with the world. Above all I'm aware that a couple of hours teaching with a group I had not met before can be a very thin piece of information on which to make any sort of real judgement but as this blog is a very subjective mode of communication these are my blunt unreflected thoughts on the matter.