module specification

This module supports your developing cross-disciplinary practice in the studio through practical workshops, seminars, technical demonstrations, and tutorials. Centred on thinking-through-doing and learning, you will focus on the ways that making art can be understood as a space of active learning. While the module takes place in the studio and expects students to make the most of that environment as a space of practical experiment and as a social space, you will also explore the ways in which different audiences and contexts (social, political, historical, architectural) impact upon your work.

The module requires you to develop your ideas independently and/or collaboratively and encourages you to understand how they might intersect with issues related to social justice and environmental concerns.

The module aims to support you to realise your own practice and to develop an understanding of technical knowledge as well as a development of being both socially and professionally-minded to support a diverse range of interests and abilities. It furthermore aims to enable you to work collaboratively and independently on group work, understanding the ethical values of shared space and independent learning.

Completion of 120 credits at Level 4 or equivalent

Emphasis will be placed on exploring the material and process-related potential of student’s work through making strong links with practical workshops. In addition, all areas of delivery will underline the importance of critically reflecting upon material reality in student’s artwork.
(LO1)

All areas of delivery will seek to situate artwork within networks of theoretical and practical research, and as such students will regularly engage with the idea that contextual research provides spaces of support, rigorous reflection and aspiration.
(LO2, LO3, LO4)

Workshops will provide spaces where we require students to engage in activities that might be intuitive or spontaneous because of time-based or material constraints. In such cases those activities will be critically reflected upon at a later point. Similarly, during tutorials we will help students to negotiate the relative value of different approaches to art-making, intuitive, reflective, systematic, spontaneous and otherwise.
(LO1, LO4)

Throughout the module, group crits, seminars and workshops will provide opportunities for the student to share their work in progress and learn to present verbally in front of peers, whilst also gaining feedback from said peer group and staff alike, on a week-by-week basis. (LO5)

The module is primarily delivered through individual and group tutorials. In this way we ensure that feedback remains focused on physical outcomes, i.e., artwork. Both group and individual tutorials offer space for horizontal discursive exchange that centres on practical work, employing a conversational mode which requires participants to articulate key ideas in relation to materials, techniques and related contextual research.

Dedicated workshops introduce students in a hands-on manner to specific areas of thinking and making. Prioritising workshops above other modes of learning generates spaces of embodied learning, and helps to demonstrate the importance of thinking-through-doing, learning from and through materials, and taking risks in a way that’s internalised rather than simply observed.
Specific workshops will for example require student’s practices to actively explore questions of site-specificity, or to experiment with a diverse set of approaches to methods of display.

Both group tutorials and collaborative workshops foreground the value of interdependent support and knowledge-sharing in an environment of horizontal learning where students can insert their own learning methodologies and learn from those that others employ. These modes of delivery help to develop independence and self-sufficiency whilst also fostering a very valuable sense of community support and nurturing. Throughout the module, students build a body of work, including reflections on progress and achievement, this through a combination of directed and independent study.

In addition, we will also deliver short dialogic sessions to introduce a specific area of knowledge, e.g. a historical movement, a specific school of thought, a seminal exhibition, or a certain term.

Learning Outcomes:

1. Incorporate technical knowledge within studio practice and recognise how that knowledge impacts upon ideas and intentions within your work.
2. Critically engage with contextual material in order to advance your studio practice and situate it within contemporary and historical fields of art-making and critical debate. 
3. Understand how your work may be affected by a variety of different contexts (social, physical, political).
4. To create a body of work that demonstrates a critically reflective approach to practice
5. to present in progress work through peer-to-peer presentation

Semester 1 Summative Assessment:

10-minute live presentation of studio practice to staff and peers.
The presentation will be made via PDF or Power Point file and should show documentation of the work’s technical development, and offer clear insight into the ways in which the work has benefitted from critical engagement with contextual material.

The module intends to develop the student’s skills in articulating the key interests and intentions of their work. These interests and critical intentions are developed in relation to choices about techniques used, and light of insights gained through engagement with contextual material. This assessment component functions both as an effective mode of assessing the students’ ability to articulate the practical and critical development of their work, and as a learning exercise during which students learn from their own successes and failures, and those of their peers.
 
Semester 2 Summative Assessment:

Presentation of physical work in the studio
Original work, documentation, sketchbooks and online links should provide evidence of the work that has been made during the year. The in-studio presentation will demonstrate technical advances and critical engagement with contextual material.
 
All Learning Outcomes are assessed within each assessment component.

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