I’ve really enjoyed reading parts of this book. It was recommended to me in my OB2 from from my tutor Santanu. The majority of my role is studio teaching alongside planning and organisation. Seeing studio teaching captured so accurately reminds me I belong to a community of art tutors. In the book one case study speaks about her experience of studio teaching as exhausting:
Lecture-based teaching can be tiring, but studio teaching can be exhausting. When I am not responding to one student, I am working to draw out another one, maintaining sustained attention on all parts of the classroom as I do so. There is little distance between me and my students, so their actions and reactions to what happens in class affect me, in my perception, more than they would in my non-studio classes. In the studio, I inhabit a position of co-responsibility for problem solving together with my students, but I have to assess their progress and their products separately from my own input. This requires me to monitor myself all the time I am teaching, as well as when I am assessing my students’ performance. Have I modelled and demonstrated design thinking to scaffold their development, or have I usurped their position in our partnership? The right balance is different for every student at every stage, so this equation has to be re-figured continuously. The students surprise me constantly. When I do not structure their actions in advance they go further and faster than I was used to in pre-studio versions of this course. Unlike a course in which my interactions with students are tied to defined milestones achieved through prescribed actions, the in-class interactions previously described are never routine. I find studio teaching to be exhilarating as well, however. With practice, I have built confidence in my ability to respond to whatever comes up without having to respond with a solution. In fact, while it requires great effort, I do relax into the reactive nature of this form of teaching and experience the effort as a positive flow of action.
Orr, Susan, and Alison Shreeve. Art and Design Pedagogy in Higher Education : Knowledge, Values and Ambiguity in the Creative Curriculum, Taylor & Francis Group, 2017.
I completely identify with this!