The Alternative Art School (AAS) is conceived as an open-ended pedagogic tool through which to interrogate the conditions and consequences of contemporary education. It is interdisciplinary in scope, but focuses on the values of design education, while challenging assumptions of the academic status quo. As a ‘school’ within a school the AAS exploits the opportunities of art school to envisage alternatives in a staff−student collaboration. Extra-curricular and unmarked, the AAS is framed as a case study here employing a dialogic process that aims to disrupt reductive government policy and challenge the fusion of commerce and culture. In this way students are encouraged to reframe their experiences and ambitions from a more critical position and to inspire change through creative dissent.
Risk is not a neutral term even in (western) contexts of art and design pedagogic practice, where risk-taking is entwined into the matrices of the academy from the macro to the micro: from institution to studio to tutor to student. Neither design education nor practice exist in a vacuum,
so the conditions and contingencies of risk in contemporary design pedagogy are unpicked, in relation to place, process and people, as inter-connected (though often fragmented) components of study. Art school is examined as a transformative locus for risk: a conceptual-architectural
site for knowledge but also a temporal space of subversion, within which the studio provides students with a relatively safe setting for risk in individual and collective formulations. Neo-liberal policies of standardization and competition are as embedded in educational institutions as they
are across all levels of society: the resultant loss of agency is felt individually and collectively. This article reframes risk as fundamentally located and dialogic, an autonomous cooperative and collective action, underpinned by critical thinking and disobedient pedagogies. This is a transformative
educational process anticipating change in an expanded mode of design in which the student members of the Alternative Art School are considered as critical agents, employing creative reflexivity as an antidote to the neo-liberal stifling of risk.
While problem-solving is defined as a research method based on a number of givens in a linear process, problem-finding is an open-ended mode of design, actively engaging participants in a reciprocal discourse. This method of learning by doing is implicit in design education. To examine problem-solving in the context of undergraduate study a collaborative staff-student research project is presented in the form of a case study. By continuing to find 'problems', design educators and students alike are challenged to push the boundaries of the discipline and frame it more centrally as an agent of change in society and culture. In a development of my Ph.D.and HEA Teaching Fellowship the design process is framed as a bridge between academic research and student employability. In this context I suggest that research strategies developed through doctoral study extend and substantiate teaching and learning in design.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.