Critical Curiosity: collaboration and collective engagement towards developing individual students’ art practice

Abstract

Roundtable: Three linked presentations from the Fine Art programme at Chelsea will present, and open for discussion, ways in which critical curiosity is developed and engendered on the course through curriculum innovation.

The curriculum in Fine Art has shifted away from teaching ‘the arts’ (using a skills-based approach) to a student-centred model of teaching art which aims to equip students with the critical awareness to identify and develop/mobilise the skills necessary for their own individual mode of practice. There is an increasing emphasis on students as partners within this process, and on collaboration as a key to partnership. Fine Art courses are uniquely placed to draw on a wide range of collaborative models, since discourse and open-ended interdisciplinary enquiry form the basis of so much of art’s practical and discursive production. These three presentations will highlight some of the ways in which Chelsea’s Fine Art courses have drawn on subject-specific models of engagement in order to expand the curriculum to encourage and inform student-led collaboration and engagement.