Professor Susan Orr is Dean of Learning, Teaching and Enhancement, Chair of Creative Practice Pedagogy at UAL and a National Teaching Fellow.

In universities today, ‘new and innovative’ teaching and learning approaches are being theorised that would be viewed as ‘traditional’ approaches in art and design. For example, the recent emergence of Enquiry Based Learning (Hutchings 2007) is a re-packaging of the project centered learning that has been a mainstay of art and design education for many years. To date, there has been a dearth of literature that explores and disseminates the practices of HE studio based teaching so knowledge about art and design teaching remains within the art and design community, often at a very tacit level (Orr 2010). If the art and design community are going to celebrate, disseminate and lead an educational agenda in HE we need to extend the application of research to our teaching practices.

In this lecture I offer an argument that art and design lecturers have particular sets of skills, knowledge and practices that make them excellent pedagogic researchers.

Making is at the heart of creative practice. Making is also at the heart of teaching. Art and design lecturers are learning makers as well as creative makers. Susan will draw a number of parallels between arts practice and educational practice. For example, we might usefully view teaching as the curation of the learning space for students. Lecturers make the learning environment. Approaching pedagogic research through this lens allows us to map and align creative practice and pedagogic research expertise (Orr and McDougall in press).

In recent years there has been a blurring of boundaries between artistic and educational scholarship. There are two exchanges. The first exchange is between arts researchers who are increasingly using social science methodological approaches to research creative practice, and the second exchange is between social sciences researchers who are borrowing artistic and creative research approaches. This is fruitful territory for those of us who are committed to the development of pedagogic research in UAL.

Susan will conclude this lecture by discussing the ways we can shape a pedagogic research agenda at UAL. This part of the lecture might be best described as ‘why it is great to be back!’.

For more information please visit the London College of Fashion website. Please RSVP ASAP to the Pedagogic Hub Coordinator Alison James.