Rationale for introducing professional readiness in the crit session
In my recent experience of the composition of cohorts, with regards to socio-economic background, I felt that familiarity with industry provided an advantage for some more privileged students.
The Sutton Report ‘A Class Act’ (2024) investigates this phenomenon, and its key findings communicate that creative education in the UK remains skewed towards the privileged: students from upper-middle-class and privately educated backgrounds are disproportionately represented in art and related creative degrees.
For further context, I’d like to use two I’d like to use two examples from the classroom:
Student A, whose parents set up a famous fashion brand, had connections to magazines and the opportunity by the second year of the BA to start photographing for established publications. Student B, who came from an artistic home, had connections to a range of galleries and the possibility to exhibit their work publicly well before the final year showcase.
What both students had in common was the fact that these steps into the professional worlds came essentially from privilege and because of this they had the opportunity to inherently develop communicative industry skills, relative to students with fewer socio-economic advantages. Social justice is the foundation of one of the planned interventions discussed in this paper.
‘The White Paper’ (2003) provided rigorous guidance with regards to the work that should be achieved regarding inclusive practice in HE:
‘Education must be a force for opportunity and social justice, not for the entrenchment of privilege’
(DFES, 2003)
The professional mindset for all
This intervention has been informed by the concept of ‘Signature Pedagogies’ (Schulman, 2005), ‘which enable students to learn to think and act as a professional would’ (Orr & Shreeve, 2018). By introducing this approach, the crit session can serve as a vehicle for encouraging students to draw direct connections between their practice and industry, bridging academic and professional spaces.
Schen & Sanders (2023) examine such ‘identity discovery’ using small learning interventions. The content links Scandinavian participatory approaches with the importance of design students locating their identities to provide professional readiness and navigation within industry:
‘Design students need to establish and recognize their own self-identities [as professionals] to see where they belong and to be ready to navigate the complex identities and responsibilities of modern designers.’
(Shen & Sanders, 2023)
There seems to be crossover between the kind of ‘role-play’ proposed by Shen & Sanders and the concept of ‘Signature Pedagogies’ by Schulman. Both promote the approach of ‘the student-practitioner mindset’ and professional self-activation in the academic setting.
This industry readiness and the ‘practitioner mindset’ is an element which I sense that under-privileged students are lacking as opposed to more privileged peers. Through applying the intervention, I am aiming to inculcate some of those skills in all students.
Making use of the current unit objectives on my course, which ask the students to re-brand a well-known fashion brand, I’d like to use this opportunity to re-frame the traditional crit presentation into ‘a creative direction pitch’. The objectives of this change would be to apply a professional approach to personal creative practice. The aim is to encourage students to assume the creative director role, use their brand research and concept as vehicles for their pitch, and re-frame their WIP visual outcomes from mere project results to actual visualisations of their re-branding ideas.
My objective is that such an intervention will trigger a contextualisation of a ‘professional self’ and encourage an industry-ready presentation skillset.
Bibliography
Department for Education and Skills (2003) The Future of Higher Education. Cm 5735. London: The Stationery Office (DfES)
Holt-White, E., O’Brien, D., Brook, O. & Taylor, M. (2024). A Class Act: Social mobility and the creative industries. London: Sutton Trust
Orr, S. & Shreeve, A. (2018) Art and design pedagogy in higher education: Knowledge, values and ambiguity in the creative curriculum. Abingdon, UK: Routledge
Shen, Y. and Sanders, E. B. N. (2023) ‘Identity discovery: Small learning interventions as catalysts for change in design education’, article in CoDesign
Shulman, L. S. (2005) Signature Pedagogies in the Professions. Daedalus