On Modularisation

This article was written in 2004 for „A curriculum for artists“, published at The Laboratory at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford and the New York Academy of Art, edited by Paul Bonaventura and Stephen Farthing. (ISBN 0-9538525-3-9) 
At that time Klaus Klaus Jung was Professor and Head of the School of Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art.

Homogeneity
Through my former job for art schools in Norway, the network that derived from it, my studies in Germany and my engagement with the European League of Institutes of the Arts (ELIA), I have had a chance to peek into a variety of art schools across Europe and beyond. I have seen many similarities; there is still a recognisable smell, with a hint of turpentine, and now there is the familiar sound of humming ventilation in computers and video systems. Students everywhere box themselves into tiny cubicles, often as a reaction to limited studio space, but they also continue to project an atmosphere of curiosity and active learning. Most art schools have understood that they have to scrutinise themselves in a wider international context, and we all try hard to gather, digest and make available all the information needed to reflect on ourselves as artists in the western art scenes that surround us.

The research in this book seems to suggest that what happened to major art collections in the western hemisphere - that they have all started to look alike - has also happened to art schools. I am not that pessimistic, but I recognise a trend. However, I don’t believe that different mixtures of subjects with innovative shifts and experimenting with new ingredients alone will help to stop this tendency. 

It is part of our job as teachers to help students gain clarity in their expectations and orientate themselves when entering a complex system stretching from local logistical and financial support to international success as an artist. We should make use of any subjects that might support these aims and decrease the emphasis on them when they prove to be less beneficial than expected. We will do this in the rhythm defined through our communication with colleagues inside and outside the art education system, and this might sometimes lead to comparable developments elsewhere.

Art schools attract strong individual personalities, as students and as staff. The composition of a group of strong personalities and how cooperative communication is established between them is what makes an art school attractive. This will always cause managerial nightmares, but it is our strongest asset. It creates an atmosphere that empowers students to rely on their own individuality, analysis and reflection when they have to face decisions, and their individuality is the prerequisite for any development in the arts. 

Doesn’t this also produce a natural competitiveness and, when supported sufficiently, guarantee a form of heterogeneity much stronger than a simple academic mix of subjects?

Specialisation
I regard a wide and inclusive debate, where works of art are the best arguments, as fundamental for all higher art education. To achieve that end, I originally believed that borders needed to be pulled down and traditional divisions into specialism should be regarded as obsolete. However, I also believed that there was a danger in all this. I had observed a lack of orientation among students as well as an unfounded, self-referential and excessive self-confidence. 

When I began work at Glasgow School of Art, I decided to follow a different path. I saw no need to dismantle the existing departments. They were and are strong units and provide an excellent opportunity for building identity. Identity, permanently scrutinised and well founded through individual reflection is, I believe, still the core for artistic drive. It should be our pedagogical goal, to provide a framework that allows students to find their place.

However, there is also a danger in a departmental structure based on specialism, when the desire for identity seals, excludes and prevents debate. The framework of a department must not be misunderstood as a zone of protection. Whatever thought, idea, common understanding and art work is produced must be made available and must become subject to discussion in the context of the school as a whole. 

In an initial policy paper for Glasgow, I suggested that each department should have the purpose and opportunity to concentrate on theory, practice, pedagogy, history and research, in close communication with students and staff from all over the School. I was looking for a skeleton structure that would provide support and elastic stability for true interdisciplinary work, based on individual disciplines. I was looking for staff and students who know what they are talking about when they bring their thoughts, beliefs and findings to the debate. 

The process of testing and questioning identity continues. It certainly does not stop with a degree. Yet postgraduate studies imply that we expect more from students. The process of building identity should reach a higher level. A postgraduate student should be able to ride a bicycle without stabilisers. A student artist with a profound understanding of and belief in painting will work side by side with others who make use of technology, who want to initiate social interventions or comment on and influence political and cultural development. Everybody will try to gain clarity from conceptual planning and contextual insight. Here, at least, the debate I am trying to generate should have reached a point where it has an opportunity of providing an understanding of difference and thus enable other ways of producing knowledge.

Modularisation 
‘No art school can afford to stand still.’ This is what I announced to staff, students, management and funding councils in my former jobs in Norway, whenever I had the chance. I intend to continue saying this in my new job in Scotland. The process of reflection, testing, enhancement and realisation should be central to our practice as artists and educators. It is my conviction that as an art school we are not only an educational institution. We should also take a role as influential player in the cultural development of a region, a nation and beyond. I believe it is our most important objective to take art further. This also includes a thorough understanding of the need for continuity and a responsible attitude towards tradition and cultural identity.

Unfortunately, most recent changes in the educational sector in Europe are politically motivated and far too based on pure financial thinking. Educational institutions are put under pressure to force cost cutting. Of course, an institution like an art school should put systems in place to ensure that public money and the investments that students and their parents make are used effectively. Simultaneously, we must try to achieve the greatest benefit for the complex interaction of learning, teaching and research. 

‘Lifelong learning’ is a term that politicians in education like to put at the top of their objective lists. As dull as it might sound, I have realised that such an ambition embraces a realistic vision of our ways of living and learning, now and in the future. It is becoming increasingly more difficult for a young woman or man to afford three to six years of their lives studying in one go. I expect more and more students to leave an educational institution at a point prior to their final degree in order to come back later on. The need to earn money to fund further studies might be the most obvious reason, but there is also a need to gather extra experience. More than that, the overall amount of time individually spent on studying seems to exceed the normal three to six years that funding councils set as a limit. When those years are combined with well planned interruptions, in order to get a solid understanding of what circumstances define success in the practice of art and all other art related activities, an exciting gateway to ‘lifelong learning’ has been opened.

Student and staff mobility is another phenomenon that gains more and more influence on programmes in higher arts education, as well as in other educational areas. The intention to remove obstacles for mobility is a fundamental element of the Bologna Declaration. [1]  Although political authorities with responsibility for education in Britain seem to want to make it go away by ignoring it, the signed and soon-to-be ratified goals that 33 European ministries of education - Britain included - have developed will increase movements in education that started long ago. The strong contrast in policy between financing education through students and financing education for students will accompany all efforts at increasing mobility in the immediate future.

As art schools, we will have to face the challenge of supporting this constant coming and going, facing the danger of designing a ‘draughty corridor’ of ‘nervous’ mass education. We will no longer be the nests where fledglings are fed until they learn to fly. The mesh of learning, teaching and research needs to be expanded, covering many more stages in the development of an individual artist, and we will have to weave our offers much more into wider cultural developments. 

Modularisation is offered as a solution to the challenges in ‘lifelong learning’, increased mobility, student-centred learning and the emphasis on the need for more choice. I am afraid this solution is too simple, as it seems to favour a very mechanical approach to learning. Instead, if we take our subject seriously, we must try to understand an art school as a complex living organism. 

[1] ’On 19 June 1999, one year after the Sorbonne Declaration, Ministers responsible for higher education from 29 European countries signed the Bologna Declaration. They agreed on important joint objectives for the development of a coherent and cohesive European Higher Education Area by 2010. In the first follow-up conference held in Prague on 19 May 2001, they increased the number of the objectives and reaffirmed their commitment to establish the European Higher Education Area by 2010… On 19 September 2003, Ministers responsible for higher education from 33 European countries met in Berlin in order to review the progress achieved and to set priorities and new objectives for the coming years, with a view to speeding up the realisation of the European Higher Education Area… They agreed on the following considerations, principles and priorities: Ministers reaffirm the importance of the social dimension of the Bologna Process. The need to increase competitiveness must be Ausgleichd with the objective of improving the social characteristics of the European Higher Education Area, aiming at strengthening social cohesion and reducing social and gender inequalities both at national and at European level. In that context, Ministers reaffirm their position that higher education is a public good and a public responsibility. They emphasise that in international academic cooperation and exchanges, academic values should prevail.’
‘Realising the European Higher Education Area’, Communiqué of the Conference of Ministers responsible for Higher Education, Berlin, 19 September 2003
The main objectives of the Bologna Declaration are Europe-wide adoption of a two-cycle system, adoption of comparable degrees and promotion of mobility. For further information, visit http://www.bda.ahk.nl/Documentation/Documentation.htm