How do art and design technicians conceive of their role in higher education?
Spark: UAL Creative teaching and Learning Journal (Sams, C 2016)
Recently, one of our illustration AL’s has taken a new role in the print technical area. The print studio at Lime Grove is new, and has the potential to be shaped with a completely fresh start – what do the students of Lime Grove need from the print facilities?
In the reading “How do art technicians conceive of their role in higher education?” (Sams, 2016) several things I hadn’t considered are pointed out.
For instance, I work in the illustration area, so my understanding of printmaking comes from this angle, but technicians at Lime Grove work with many different pathways – they have knowledge or need to adapt for Fashion and Textiles (often working with fabric, a completely different print technique to paper), Graphic Design and soon will incorporate areas like Fine Art and Performance which have their own different needs.
“A technician’s role is complex and varied, offering technical support in a wide range of disciplines” (Sams, 2016)
I wrote a screenprinting workshop for my students where I consulted closely with technical staff – basic things can be overlooked by academic staff – what is the maximum printable area? How big are the screens? The squeegees? How many students can access the studio at a time? Considering amount of students per hours in a taught day, how many can we comfortably fit? What is the cleanup time? etc. Having knowledge in printmaking in your personal practice does not equate to knowing how to structure an efficient print project with 64 students, and often this lands on technical staff to solve. How much of the problem solving is on academic and how much on technical?
Technical staff had valuable rules for the workshop:
- Grouping students by ink colour
- Clear sizing of printable area
- Pairing up students so they can help each other enabling peer to peer learning
- Creating stencils the session prior to printing, not on the day
“A technician deals face to face, not through emails, Moodle or online tools” (Sams, 2016)
No amount of emails can replace a conversation where academic can see the space and speak to the person – Structuring things via email only can cause disconnect between areas. Often academic and technical staff are not in contact or are at odds on how the flow of students in the studios can work – Sometimes technical areas seem “over there” or out of the realm of academic staff. Personally, I would like to see more dialogue between Academic and Technical. Academic staff need to understand the limitations and possibilities of technical areas and technical staff need to have some flexibility to specific projects. I think arranging time to go and speak to technicians before writing the workshop was good practice i would like to continue.
References:
Sams, C (2016), How do art and design technicians conceive of their role in higher education?, Spark: UAL creative teaching and learning journal, pp 62-69