Tag Archives: design education

not to be missed in June and September !

16 Jun

My first academic year as head of Sint Lucas Antwerp – School of Arts is almost over. The least one can say is that it was an unconventional year. I was appointed in full lockdown. We left Malta without being able to say goodbye in a proper way. The year started in a semi-ok way, but after a month we were again in a lockdown with restricted possibilities to lecture and coach students.

But here we are, proud and happy to present the exhibitions of our bachelor, master en premaster students. Times have been challenging for them, but the results are there based on passion, drive and skills supported and coached by a super dedicated staff. I’m honoured to be their dean.

When you are around do not miss the shows 

Oh … and colleagues and friends in Malta. We are planning to come over in September to have the goodbye party 😉

 

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Lecture on Arts Education for the MRER

18 Dec

AECSim

The lecture was part of the MRER (Malta Review of Educational Research) Lecture Series in collaboration with Edukarti (Art Education organisation based at Department of Arts, Open Communities and Adult Education, Faculty of Education, University of Malta). It focused on the role of Arts Educators in a changing society and their influence on Higher Arts Education.  This is in fact a topic that continuously offers debate between arts educators and art practitioners. Artists are becoming educators, facilitators, researchers and inspirers not just in schools but also in socio-cultural, business and community settings. So which challenges lie ahead of us as lecturers and what implications do these challenges have on the training of Arts Educators as we prepare them for these new roles?

The topic is analysed starting from this year’s winner of the Turner prize since for me this nicely sums up what it is about. From there the reflections tapped into my  own challenges and experiences in higher arts education over the last couple of years.

You can find the slides of the presentation AECS

 

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challenging group dynamics in participatory design

23 Jun

homePhoto10At IDC 2015 (interaction design and children) in Boston PhD candidate Maarten Van Mechelen presented the following paper I collaborated on. Well done Maarten! It is a pleasure to be your mentor.

In this paper we explore whether Social Interdependence Theory (SIT) is a useful theoretical framework to anticipate on challenging intragroup dynamics in co-design with children. According to SIT, there are five principles that mediate the effectiveness of cooperation: positive interdependence, individual accountability, promotive interaction patterns, social skills and group processing. First, we theoretically ground six challenging group dynamics encountered in a previous study. Next, we introduce SIT and describe how we applied each of the five mediating principles in a new case study in which 49 children aged 9 to 10 were involved in a series of co-design sessions. Afterwards, we present our findings and reflect upon the SIT inspired co-design procedure. Finally we touch upon topics for further research and we make a call for more research on SIT in the Child Computer Interaction (CCI) community.

the proceedings of the conference are free to read here

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