10 workshops delivered by 10 facilitators at 10 collaborating institutions
Different workshop processes from the 10by10 workshop series.
“the artist teacher identity is one in which three worlds must be straddled or interrelated: the world of art; the world of education; and the world of art education. These worlds have their own practices, histories, cultures and literature to be negotiated and assimilated..”
Alan Thornton, 2005
10by10 has drawn on the numerous partnership projects exploring collaboration between teaching and creative practice [see Resources]. However most government funded arts and education schemes have a primary/secondary education and institutional partnership focus [Creative Partnerships for example], with little attention given to further/higher educators. Is the research, investment and approach in primary and secondary education transferable, relevant, or applicable to the higher and further education sectors, where the teacher-practitioner is the dominant model? With such a strong focus on the benefits of partnership, it needs to be recognised that the teacher-practitioner bridges and creates exchanges across these same educational and industry contexts.
10by10 has been established in the belief that the teacher-practitioner role within arts education remains poorly articulated, that there may be a lack of support for teachers who are also working creative professionals, and a lack of recognition of the mutual benefit of teacher-practitioners to both creative industry and arts education
The model(s) of the teacher-practitioner [TP] informed the development of the master-apprentice, expert-novice, industry-led academy of art and design education. so that the relationship between practice and teaching underpins the development of the disciplines within arts education. Individual teacher-practitioners enable the complex relationship through not just teaching ‘about’ but teaching ‘from’ experience and through practice. Historically, in some disciplines such as Art, Design, Music and Theatre, the curriculum, the institution, and its delivery were mostly run by and for industry with the dichotomy of academia and industry being a relatively recent development. The teacher-practitioner [TP] is a common model of curriculum delivery in arts education, with a high number of teaching staff employed part time in further and education contexts. The part-time lecturer, the visiting lecturer, the one off master class, the visiting critic, are all individuals employed with an expectation that their industry based or professional experience brings a contemporaneous expertise which benefits the teaching and learning community. These individuals are recruited presumably precisely because they bring something different, from outside HE, that full time teachers may not. In other words higher arts education deliberately employs creative practitioners as teachers to work along side full time teachers.
However the teacher-practitioner role or model within arts education remains poorly articulated. This may be in part because of the culture around the Arts, the historic notion of tacit knowledge, the complexity of creativity, a pre-dominant ’safe guarding’ of the artistic process and a possible resistance to rationalising and exploring a pedagogy ‘informed by creative practice. 10by10 does not aim to position arts practice as research, but values ‘practice as practice’, with a view to situating the whole person in the creative context of professional practice and its teaching.
Rationale for 10by10
The inquiry into the teacher-practitioner role and the relationship between teaching and practice, developed from some key observations.
The HE-Industry Interface
ARTSWORK’s agenda is to work at the interface of HE and creative industry, through engaging industry with HE curriculum content, design, and delivery, within industry standard contexts [work based learning, employer-led, real life brief and professional learning]. These models are reliant on teacher-practitioners as bridges between arts education and creative practice.
Implicit in the teaching practice of Teacher-Practitioners, is that their professional experience enables them to:
The Entrepreneurial Educator
The ‘entrepreneurial educator’ can be defined as an individual who “develops a community of practice across education, industry and organisational boundaries [... ] capitalising on their own skills and knowledge, and that of other professionals, to create educational ‘venture’ [Walker 2007], This view highlights teacher-practitioners as individuals able to create and exploit opportunities for learning capital, because of the ‘facing-out’ nature of their role, as situated in ‘other’ communities of practice.
Implicit in the experience of many Teacher-Practitioners, is that they work across different fields of practice:
A staff development event at Bath Spa, designed by the 10by10 project leader, ‘The Teacher Practitioner - Preparation for Discovery’, highlighted issues around the academisation of practice but also the tendency of teacher-practitioners to discuss and approach their roles within HE from a ‘teacherly’ perspective. The event also indicated that an important aspect of the teacher-practitioners’ role relates to being innovative.
The Teacher Practitioner as Role Model
Learning in the Arts, a longitudinal ARTSWORK research project, has revealed that the majority of creative students, across ten subjects areas, both on entry and on graduation, find freelancing the most appealing working environment. This raises further questions about how students’ courses and teachers can support their development as professional practitioners. Teacher-practitioners bring an aspect of authenticity to the curriculum that perhaps full time teachers are not able to. If the employability of creative industries students is to be developed through encouraging students to be entrepreneurial [as an approach to learning, not a business model] then their teachers need to be able to be entrepreneurial about their teaching.
‘Students recognise and value the contributions made by in-curriculum support, in particular, the significant number of creative industries professionals working as teachers. However, they questioned how well this resource is harnessed, in particular whether part-time teachers who also work in creative industries do bring new industry-based knowledge and effective practice to the curriculum. Some questioned whether teachers employed on this basis have an “established track record as entrepreneurs” and also whether these teachers “were that different” to the full-time teachers as they appear to also focus on academic values rather than ‘real-world’ aspects of projects. In effect students were suggesting that creative industry professionals behave like academics when in the academic environment’
‘Creating Entreprenuership’ [ADM HEA 2007, pg10]
Should practitioners ‘act’ as teachers, in their behaviors and approach [minimising poor teaching] - or should teacher-practitioners be challenging academic conventions and reflecting their ‘difference’ or ‘outsider’ status?
The Freelance Faculty
The Learning and the Arts and the10by10 projects are linked through the concept of the freelance faculty. If students aspire to be freelance and a high proportion of teaching staff are engaged in freelance practice, and if students’ employability can be enhanced through entrepreneurial qualities, which many of their teachers may have adapted, is this highly valued aspect of teacher-practitioner’ professional experience impacting on curriculum design and delivery?
Implicit in the practice of many Teacher-Practitioners, is:
10by10, an ARTSWORK project from Bath Spa University, explores the relationship between creative practice [including the visual, creative and performing arts disciplines], and teaching, through teacher-practitioners – individuals who both teach [at HE/FE level] and work in creative practice ”originating ideas of ‘expressive value’ which they commercialise”. [The Work Foundation ‘Staying Ahead’ 2007 definition of the creative industries].
10by10 is part of Stepping-Out, an initiative comprising five pilot projects jointly funded by ADM-HEA, the Arts Council England, the Centre for Excellence in Learning through Design (CETLD), the Council for Higher Education in Art and Design (CHEAD), the Design Council, the Higher Education Funding Council (HEFCE) and Skillset. Stepping-Out accompanies Looking-Out, ADM HEA national research into engagements between creative and cultural businesses, organisations and individuals and colleges, departments, students and teachers in art, design and media education, commissioned by the DCMS.
10by10 aims to establish:
10 facilitators will deliver 10 workshops at 10 institutions, engaging over 200 teacher-practitioners in the inquiry. The project leader co-facilitates/designs the workshop series along side each facilitator, so that each workshop is a collaborative production between facilitators and participants. The workshops are focused on the experience of the participants in the session, but also on producing and documenting material [including process] to gain insight into the teacher-practitioner role and relationship. See 10by10Series for more information.
This web-site is part of the research process and aims to make the progress of the project transparent, and create opportunities for others to interpret the visual material and contribute to the project. Please make use of the comment opportunities in the Gallery and in CommentSpace.
“artists who work in the formal and/or informal education sectors also need the opportunities to acquire habits of reflecting not only, as they are bound to do, on their own art-making, but also on their role as co-workers, mentors, teachers and facilitators”..[.]. teaching the arts should engender reflection as a habitual trait, the fact that it doesn’t always do this points to the possibility that much arts teaching may not result in authentic artistic learning”. Hennessey, 2006.
10by10 the project, was completed in July 2010. If you are interested in the 10by10 research metholodology, the approach to professional development, findings about the relationship between teaching and creative practice or using the materials please contact Antonia Clews, the 10by10 project leader.
The key project materials are available to download:
The 10by10 Final Report with a summary of key findings and recommendations to support teacher-practitioners.
The 10by10 Picture Pack, a selection of some key practitioner visual representations of the relationship between creative practice and teaching.
A Visual Typology: The Teacher Practitioner with analysis of over 150 of the diagrams and which establishes a framework of six types of relationship between creative practice and teaching.
An article exploring some of the issues raised on the teacher-practitioner role: Clews.A (2009) The Teacher-Practitioner:Teaching with Practice’ in ‘Dialogues in Art and Design: Promoting and Sharing Excellence’ GLAD/ADM HEA.
An article evaluating the use of mixed media methods in educational research: Clews. A., (2010), ‘A multi-media approach to educational research in the creative disciplines’. Media Education Research Journal. Vol 1(1).
Pdfs presentations about the project:
The Teacher-Practitioner: Perspectives on Professional Development‘ Higher Education and the Creative Economy’, University of Southampton.
‘The Researcher-Facilitator‘ (on the 10by10 research methodology) ‘International Visual Research Methods’ , University of Leeds.
The Teacher-Practitioner: Unproblematic or Unproblematised? ‘From Practice as Research to Practising for Learning’, University of Winchester.
Please visit Stepping Out and Looking Out for further national research on industry engagament with higher education, carried out by a range of individuals and institutions with different perspectives and approaches, but with common findings and recommendations.
Use the search box below to search the 10by10 site: