Our current experience working with the students from the BA Art & Design course allows us to investigate and think critically on how the students should engage with the classroom. The course offers and promotes the city, being Birmingham; as an extension of the classroom, and promotes the students to work outside of it’s studio in Margaret St.
One initial observation that we made was the lack of relationship students have with the classroom; it offers no sense of ownership or integration when it comes down to the student/teacher relationship. Students seem to stagger into classrooms and wonder wether it’s ‘ok’ to enter the room and wonder around the corridors waiting for their seminar to start. Shouldn’t the classroom/studio be a place of communicating, observing, learning and becoming integrated into the educational establishment?
We understand the promotion of ‘post studio’ working, and we think it’s great; the city acting as a wider learning resource, but the classroom should still offer the student a base for collaborating, teaching and communication between peers. It does and always will act as a base, but the current layout and furniture arrangement doesn’t offer an integration of personal relationship between the students and teachers, this is something we look to address.
DH
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