Advancing Student Experience in the Art and Design Curriculum

Advancing Student Experience in the Art and Design Curriculum: Project-Based Learning will renew the critical attention paid to projects in the art and design curriculum and rigorously consider impacts on student experience.

How exactly do we conceive of ‘projects’ in the context of a post-secondary creative arts curriculum? Each chapter in this book confronts the project as a specific, potent and transformative site of learning with vast engagement potential for the contemporary student. What unites the project-based learning methods in this book is an emphasis on the motivated and purposeful activities of the learners that result in tangible making and doing. Craft-based learning, practice-based learning, experimental learning design, culturally informed practices and reconsideration of obsolete learning mechanisms all coalesce in this text and evidence the innovativeness and abiding power of project-based learning.

Each author in this book describes a diverse experience of learning that serves as an exemplar of project-based learning and illuminates the histories, theories and dynamics of the method for teachers, learning designers, educational theorists and interdisciplinarians.

William Platz SFHEA is an American Australian artist, teacher and researcher with a disciplinary focus on drawing and research concentrations in pedagogies of drawing, studio education, curriculum development, learning design, life drawing and portraiture. Dr Platz is currently Head of Drawing at the Queensland College of Art and Design at Griffith University. His teaching leadership and practice have been recognised with multiple institutional, national and international teaching excellence awards and credentials.