Beopen+ed

If you make up your mind to study a creative subject at a university, you will most probably get your share of family members arguing that this kind of a degree will not secure you a job that comes with a decent wage. Despite the work of Sir Ken Robinson and many others, there is a long-held assumption that creativity is not as valuable as STEM subjects these days. In the meantime, the statistics show that creative industries contribute significantly to the economy, which makes one believe that the landscape of what an artist is and does to live a creative life changes.

Although many of us think that “true” artists have to pretend that orbits of art and business never touch, in fact, whether you are a commercial banker or a conceptual artist, we all have to deal with the market. History shows, that despite the popular misconception, artists in all times had to be entrepreneurial, being fundamentally responsible for earning a living. Today, as the career path of artist is changing, public funding for the arts has declined and funding for individual artists is especially difficult to find, artists are self-employed, building their own brands and businesses, and defining themselves what their creative career should look like. The digital age has created unprecedented access and opportunities for artists to reach their audience directly, challenging traditional training and education practices and career expectations. According to 2016 NEA Study, Creativity Connects: Trends and Conditions Affecting U.S. Artists, the population of artists is growing and diversifying, which also means change in the norms about who is considered an artist. Other findings reveal that substantial numbers of artists now work in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary ways and find work as artists in non-arts contexts.

At the same time, the study confirmed that artist-training programs are not adequately teaching creative students the non-arts skills they need to support their work (business practices, entrepreneurship, and marketing) nor how to effectively apply their creative skills in a range of contexts.

This is echoed by the report by CRE Research for Creative and Cultural Skills (CC Skills) and Arts Council England (ACE), which reveals that 33% of creative businesses identified a skills gap, with the most common gaps being in business marketing and communication skills (53%), and general problem-solving skills (48%). 44% of businesses identified a fundraising skills gap.

This makes the industry’s experts and leaders express their concern about whether higher education institutions are adequately preparing students for careers in art and design. With 66% of recent art school graduates carrying substantial debt as the cost of art degrees increases, students expect their institutions to prepare them with entrepreneurial skills to find or establish creative careers and teach them how to live creative lives. The shift for artist’s independence and a considerable change in the way artists pursue their creative career mean that the conventional approach adopted in education of creatives — the “just focus on your art as if the money part does not exist” approach – should give way to new paradigms.

While the incredible success of the UK’s art and cultural sector, which brings  hundreds billion pounds to the country’s economy, has resulted in a desperate need for managerial skills in creative industry, only a few arts and design schools and career service departments are taking note, offering courses in creative and professional practice as well as entrepreneurship. For example, in Australia, UNSW Art & Design has rethought its design degree, encouraging students to be entrepreneurial in their thinking. The university even offers a start-up accelerator that provides art and design students opportunities to incubate new business ideas.

In the meantime, only 34% of recent art school alumni believe their institution helped them develop entrepreneurial skills during the years of their education. Another survey initiated by US’s Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) shows that 71% of arts graduates indicated managerial skills were “Very” or “Somewhat important” to their profession or work life but only 26% of alumni reported their institution helped them develop entrepreneurial skills “Some” or “Very much.” In total, the difference between these responses was 45%, leaving a substantial gap between the reported need for managerial skills and the number of alumni who feel they attained them at their institution.

According to the research by Alec Dudson, founder of Intern Magazine, nine out of ten creative students say they do not even receive any insight into how to price their work, which leads to them being exploited early in the career, either as a freelancer or working in-house. Dudson points it out that only few art and design programmes have a ‘professional practice’ module embedded and even if they do, it seldom runs across each of the three years. In cases where there is no module-level provision, career departments and employability teams are left to pick up the slack, while being restricted to sign-up sessions and ‘employability weeks’.

In addition to developing artistic techniques, contemporary artists have to master managerial, financial, and organizational skills that are essential to manage the business side of their creative practice, early on in their art school education. The fundamental list of skills includes business and career planning tools, strategies to market and sell their work, basic budgeting and financial management, legal requirements for protecting creative works, communication and negotiation skills, and networking tools to succeed in the digital world.

Holding both an MBA and an MFA in painting, Amy Whitaker, Assistant Professor at NYU Steinhardt School of Culture and an author outside of academia, believes that teaching business to artist should be, however, broader than merely teaching them how to market their work. Her approach comprises presenting business as a set of structural tools and building blocks that anyone can use in service of their larger, non-business lives. She encourages creative students to embrace business not as “an identity or a belief system, but a skill — like writing or calculating or drawing.” “Like any other medium — wood, oil paint, steel — capitalism has strengths and weaknesses,” she writes. “It is only by understanding those possibilities and limitations that you can use the medium well.”

To thrive in their creative career, artists do not have to become business people but they do need to understand business. This means that art schools and design education institutions must move towards a mode of teaching that properly trains their graduates to navigate the creative industry effectively.

Cultural norms these days are changing quicker than some of us could keep up with. Even the study of such a seemingly stable discipline as art history has turned out to be controversial. Back in January, Yale University announced it would eliminate its popular survey course “Introduction to Art History: Renaissance to the Present,” in response to student complaints that its curriculum promoted an idealized Western “canon” — a product of an white, straight, European and male cadre of artists — at the expense of other narratives. This was followed by heated debate both in mainstream and social media: should universities teach traditional art history surveys or not?

The decades-old Yale’s art history survey course, covering the evolution of art from 1300 to the present time, has been one of the department’s quintessential classes and most popular offerings. This spring, however, it was taught for the last time. As Art history department chair and the course’s instructor Tim  Barringer explained, the course was “problematic,” because it put European art on a pedestal, at the expense of other artistic traditions “equally deserving of study.”

The last, 2020 edition of the course was taught with an array of modifications. This year, the emphasis was placed on the relationship between European art and other world traditions. The class considered art in relation to “questions of gender, class and ‘race’” and discussed its involvement with such issues as Western capitalism and climate change. The 300 students of the course were also invited to write an essay nominating a work of art that has been left out of the course’s curriculum or its textbook.

According to Yale Daily News, instead of this singular survey class, the Art History Department will offer a range of others, such as “Art and Politics,” “Global Craft,” “The Silk Road” and “Sacred Places.” Barringer added that in two or three years, his department will offer a substitute class to “Introduction to Art History.” But the new class “will be a course equal in status to the other 100-level courses, not the introduction to our discipline claiming to be the mainstream with everything else pushed to the margins,” Barringer said.

New introductory courses will be added in the next few years, but they will not be billed as a comprehensive survey. Wanting to deflect accusations of iconoclasm, Barringer — himself a specialist in European art — presented the move as “expansive rather than reductive,” positioning the changes as part of an effort “to offer Yale undergraduates a range of introductory courses that do justice to the diversity of our faculty’s research, of Yale’s collections, and of the student body itself.”

The news elicited a maelstrom of opinions online, causing particular unrest among conservatives who perceive the change as a disservice to students looking for a broad overview course, rather than more specialized offerings. A headline in the conservative journal Commentary read “Yale’s Art Department Commits Suicide.” The New York Post labeled it ‘PC idiocy’, while the renowned critic James Panero in his article in the Spectator simply likened Yale’s art-history department head to Joseph Stalin.

Those opposed to the new development argue that the history of art reflects the history of the world. No matter if we like it or not, the Renaissance was “intertwined with the rise of modern banking, a time when power-hungry and wealthy patrons used art for self-glorification”, and colonialism. However, they warn art historians against erasing the past with its glories and warts, for this will only leave future generations of students ignorant. Failing to understand the evolution of art, The New York Post writes, the students won’t be able to criticize it. Nor will they be able to appreciate other artistic traditions and customs, for they will have nothing to compare these to.

The conservative media also make a point that although Yale claims the introductory course is being eliminated in response to student uneasiness, the interest in the course among undergraduates skyrocketed following the news that this will be the last time it is taught. During the school’s shopping period, when students sit in on potential courses before officially enrolling, more than 400 people attended the semester’s “Introduction to Art History” class, though the course is capped at 300 due to space constraints. This fact is considered to serve as a proof that the decision to drop the course in fact comes from the top, not the students.

However, other experts rightfully note that the debate whether the curriculum should be reshaped in response to the overall the “globalization” of art history or not has been going on for decades within every art history program in the country.

Dushko Petrovich, Professor at Boston University and Rhode Island School of Design and lecturer in painting/printmaking at Yale, points it out that although art history maintained an “overwhelmingly European focus” since it had been established in Europe in the middle of the 19th century, the earliest survey texts were not focused exclusively on the West. He refers to the essay “Origins of the Art History Survey Text” by Mitchell Schwarzer, Professor of Visual Studies at California College of the Arts, and a historian of architecture, landscape, and urbanism. According to Schwarzer, many of the discipline’s foundational tomes were decidedly global. Franz Kugler’s Handbook of Art History, published in Germany in 1842, declared itself the first comprehensive book on the subject and had geographic span to match. Debuting a year later, Karl Schnaase’s eight-volume History of the Fine Arts argued that belief systems inherited across cultures were key to understanding any civilization’s artworks, and Anton Heinrich Springer’s detail-oriented studies emphasized the inclusion of all peoples as an organizing principle.

However, art from beyond the West – Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas – were presented in the books as Schwarzer put it, as “foundation stones for the development of higher forms of artistic expression in Europe.” Wishing to establish hierarchies of achievement among nations, early art historians settled on ancient Greece and medieval Germany as the highest points on this vast timeline. The connection between classical and Renaissance culture laid the foundation for the subsequent high point: modern Europe. After this, Schwarzer writes, “non-European art was almost completely excluded from the later and crucial stages of art historical development.”

What we see happening today is in fact an attempt to rethink this traditional approach to art history and re-educate ourselves. Due to the civil rights and the women’s movements and the subsequent shift in students demographics, art history as discipline is moving on too. In 1995, Mark Miller Graham, a historian of Mesoamerican art, wrote in “Rethinking the Introductory Art History Survey” issue of Art Journal, “I don’t think that there is now any justification for confining the introductory courses in art history to the art of the West.”

Petrovich welcomes the shift that is ongoing in Yale and the universities in the country. He passes an opinion that thematic courses (such as Yale’s four new aforementioned offerings) “reach across geography and chronology without any claim of comprehensiveness or canonicity”, thus doing a “fair job of summarizing the variations that are possible with this approach, where ideas, materials, trade routes, or social uses of art can all be used to narrate an introduction to the field.”

He also mentions that as few faculty have the expertise to teach a truly global class on their own, a common solution will most likely be “team-teaching,” with several voices replacing the “old man tells you everything you need to know” model of teaching, as critic and former art historian Aruna D’Souza put it.

Denying the influence of Western art would surely mean dismissing its great truth and beauty. Still, the truth is there has never been just one story of the history of art, but rather a host of narratives surrounding the history of engagement with art, architecture, images and objects across time and place. There is every reason to believe that and the art history surveys that we will see in the future will most likely offer students a variety of voices that will educate them on the topics the generations of their predecessors were ignorant of.

Educators would like to believe that their classroom is a place for students to put away their usual routines and mundane thoughts and settle into the joy of learning. The sad-but-true reality, however, is students being carried away from the educational content with distractions of all kinds. With modern life bringing new opportunities to get distracted by every day, is that possible to fight distraction?

Today, higher education instructors are teaching in an atmosphere that could be described as the “age of distraction”, or a “culture of distraction”. A typical classroom in a university or college is literally fraught with opportunities for distractions that challenge learners’ attention and focus and influence their abilities to process course information, more often than not in a negative way.

Our cognitive processing capacity is limited, which is especially noticeable when difficult content is presented through poor instruction or when peers distract us from the learning process. Larger part of the discussion surrounding distracted students these days tends to focus on the “technology in the classroom” debate. Those who are opposed to the use of laptops and phones in the classroom often argue that today’s students get more distracted than their predecessors from the times when devices were not present in the education process. However, according to James M. Lang, Professor of English at Assumption University in Worcester, MA, and the author of the book Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It, the history is not so straightforward in this regard. In his book, he not only gives an overview of philosophers and writers complaining about the distractibility of their minds going back as far as Aristotle but also considers the work of biologists and psychologists who explain why we have our distractible minds.

To cut it short, “our devices did not create our distractible brains; our brains have always been distractible”. What is indeed changed is that our devices have become especially effective at drawing our attention away from learning of whatever else cognitive activity. The explanation lies in the fact that our brains are very attentive to novelty, and our phones offer us “an endless buffet of novelty,” from the weather and directions to social media accounts and email.

Still, technology is just one of the many classroom distractions that might hamper students’ engagement. A recent study reveals that certain instructor and peer behaviors were equally distracting and had similar negative influences on students’ cognitive load. The participants of the research claimed that they were often distracted because of incompetence, offensiveness or poor class management of the instructor. The examples include instances where teachers said or did something that had irritated or demotivated them, when Power Point slides were flicked through in too fast a pace or when an instructor played music in the background during a group project. They also found distracting their peers misbehaviours – such as asking questions that seemed completely unrelated to the class material presented in class that day, fellow-students coming in after the class has begun or even talking too loudly during the lecture. What is even more interesting, students were easily able to recall specific days, events, and people who they found distracting. The ease with which they could recall these instances speaks to the level of distraction that occurred – it was memorable for students even when students could not recall important course content.

This finding, together with the idea of the human brain as an eminently distractible organ, suggests that a battle with possible distractions that interfere with learning would be imminently a losing one. Instead, Lang advises, educators should focus on cultivating and sustaining attention in the classroom. “Attention is an achievement, not something we should take for granted,” he writes. “Since learning depends upon attention, it should have a prominent place in the way in which we think about our courses and classrooms.”

The study Peers and Instructors as Sources of Distraction from a Cognitive Load Perspective echoes this opinion revealing that students are more easily distracted by technology when overwhelmed by information (or when the information is presented by the instructor in a confusing way), the class is too easy, or the instructor is not involved or relating to students. It makes it hard to escape a conclusion that inadequate teaching and lecture skills, ineffective presentations, as well as going off topic, irrelevant self-disclosing or using humor, seem to be the pressing topic that should be addressed by those wishing to cultivate attention in the class.

One of the strategies for sustaining attention that some teachers intuitively employ is putting structure to any classroom session, as playwrights do in the form of acts and scenes and intermissions. Such “pattern teaching”, a term introduced by Dr. Christine Tulley, Professor of English at The University of Findlay to describe a modular classroom experience in which the instructor deliberately shifts between different modes of engagement (active and passive; individual and group; speaking, writing, and thinking), might really help hold the attention of students over an extended period of time.

The global switch to remote learning as a response to coronavirus pandemic has brought a new dimension to the task of staying focused doing cognitive work, with more instruction delivered virtually or in a hybrid format. When learning comes mediated through screens, fighting distraction can be more challenging, especially when the course content is difficult to process. The core challenge remains the same: our readily distracted brain is tempted to escape from the learning session, and during a Zoom session in a home environment switching for another task could be done with a single click.

Even if the educator is mixing teaching strategies, the generic suite of teaching activities remains more or less the same. Eventually, they become routine enough, so that students check in to class – in person or online – physically, but their minds are somewhere else. To avoid routine and familiarity deadening the attention, educators deploy what Lang calls “signature attention activities” to break the monotony and “wake students from their educational sleepwalking”.

The very word ‘distraction’ has Latin roots: dis  stands for apart, while trahere  means to drag. There are numerous things in the world – from devices close at hand to concerns and fears about the global economic and political upheavals – that can pull our mind in many different directions. In this diverse environment, the classroom could be a perfect opportunity to push worries an anxieties aside in order to focus on something fascinating. Mastery of knowledge or search for solutions could offer us a welcome rest from the kaleidoscope of the modern world’s distractions.

The new reality is that this year with the pandemic serving as a catalyst for many processes in higher education has forced the sector’s leaders acknowledge – the traditional analog on-campus degree-focused learning model is seriously challenged. However, the future of higher education goes far beyond following the major general trends of digitalization and blended learning.

Experts believe that the current crisis is likely to be remembered as a critical turning point between the “time before” to the “time after,” when digital, online, career-focused learning became the fulcrum of competition between institutions. The future of higher education will see the rise of postsecondary alternatives, such as “massively open online courses” (MOOCs) and industry-driven certification programs.

Ben Nelson, CEO of the Minerva Project, a global college in which students live in residential settings in one of four international cities (San Francisco, Berlin, London and Seoul) and take all courses online, expects a rise in public-private partnerships.

To remain financially sustainable, universities of the future will shift towards leveraging innovative financing models such as public-private partnerships – and private equity investments. A public-private partnership, which typically comes with financial sponsorship as well as industry alignment, allows cost reduction of course overheads, and better outcomes for students because of a closer contact with industry. The future of higher education also involves offering services to industry, including consultancy and delivery of co-developed curricula.

Today already, we see how private companies increasingly drive the digital transformation of higher education. According to investment intelligence firm HolonIQ, the first half of 2020 was the second-largest half year for global edtech investment – at $4.5 billion, much of which is focused on higher education and its intersection with the workforce.

Looking at universities 10 years from now, Nelson predicts emergence of learning ecosystems created by governments, higher education institutions and the private sector, which will extend beyond the traditional university campus and three- or four-year course. An early example of this is the Hong Kong-based readtogether.hk forum, a consortium of over 60 educational organisations, publishers, media, and entertainment industry professionals. It provides more than 900 free educational assets, including videos, books, assessment tools, and counselling services.

Some promising postsecondary alternatives that mark the general disrupting trends have been gaining ground over the past several years. One of the most successful alternatives to the traditional 4-year college model is Lambda School, an online school that trains students to become web developers or data scientists offering them a 9-month full-time program or an 18-month part-time program. It first became popular with its pioneering use of income share agreements (ISAs) to offer students a way to enroll and learn the necessary skills for a successful career without paying tuition upfront. Instead, payments are only made after the student becomes employed and earns above a certain level of income. It should be noted that Lambda School does manage to successfully place its graduates in well-paying jobs at top tier companies.

Another promising alternative is Praxis, a one-year program that includes six months of hands on skill building followed by at least six months of time building skills and a track record in a job. Rather than offering a degree, Praxis is focused on building skills and gaining real-world experience that result in a starting point for a successful career. Students can either pay upfront or defer payment until after they have landed a job, and Praxis will even return the cost of tuition if a graduate is unable to find a job within 6 months.

In spite of the diversity of educational models in higher education, Peter Cohen, president of the University of Phoenix, envisions a grimmer picture of a “society of monoculture education,” where national governments dictate what is to be learned. He emphasizes that these days we see the sector self-homogenizing. “You look at most curricula at most universities – they’re exactly the same,” he says. “The fundamental approaches, the sequences of courses are not only the same, they’re also curated the same.” Cohen’s hope is that a decade from now a growing number of institutions “will stand against those trends, will have very distinct educational philosophies with a well-thought-through curriculum of extraordinarily high academic rigor that will focus on actual learning outcomes.”

Speaking of learning outcomes, experts predict that continuous skilling beyond degrees will play a big role in the university of the future. Harvard Business Review provides data showcasing that while students invest their time and money into a higher education with a primary goal of getting a good job, seeing a degree of a reputed institution as a guarantee, employers need practical skills, not just knowledge and titles. Cohen confirms that more than 85% percent of students, a large share of which are working adults, come to the university in order to get a better career. That is why he expects the universities of the future to be better aligned to what industry is looking for – “the sort of bursts of learning that allow people to get those promotions and new jobs that they need.” With careers changing over time due to the rapidly changing technology and society, the idea that you go to school once when you’re young and you have the skills you need for life appears to be long gone, he explains.

The future of higher education will most definitely see a shift away from the flawed logic of “certifying somebody to get a job”. According to Minerva’s Nelson, “none of our formal education trained us for the context situations and challenges that we deal with every single day.” Instead, universities will be focused on training their students for more systematic thinking and equipping them with a unique skill of answering this moment, i.e. being ready to encounter a novel situation.

We can only guess what the future of higher education will be like in 5 to 10 years from now. But one thing we know for sure. Many universities are taking the challenges brought along with the pandemic as an opportunity to innovate and rethink their strategies to become the university of the future the society needs. But those that do not embrace change and hope to revert to traditional ways when the crisis is over are will definitely be left behind.

Across the world, coronavirus has fundamentally changed the student experience. It has also raised a number of questions concerning what universities should offer and to whom. It is obvious that COVID-19 will leave a lasting imprint on the higher education that won’t “go back to normal” as we knew it, pre-pandemic. But the truth is the crisis has just accelerated some disruptive trends of the sector, and even without it, the future of higher education was never going to look like its past. Let us imagine what higher education will be like in 2025-2030.

The first trend that comes to mind when one thinks of the university of the future is of course digitalization of learning environment. The reality showcases that to succeed today, universities have to embrace innovation in education and have strategies to best respond to the latest digital trends with potential roles in teaching, such as augmented reality and artificial intelligence (AI). As the COVID-19 crisis struck, online learning became increasingly mainstream, with nearly every institution moving their programs online, after decades of slow and steady adoption.

Today, we already see the ‘digital divide’ existing among universities. Top private universities have better IT infrastructure and higher IT support staff ratio for each faculty compared to budget-starved public universities. In addition, online courses require educational support on the ground: instructional designers, trainers, and coaches to ensure student learning and course completion.  There is every reason to believe that this divide will be more apparent in the future, as institutions that do not try to maximize their tech-related are not likely to survive.

All experts in education agree that digitalized learning environments becoming the norm implies that higher education of the future will be based on blended learning. Ben Nelson and Diana El-Azar from the Minerva Project, a leading educational innovator, describe the future of higher education as “a mixture of in-person, location-based programmes, experiential teaching, and the flexibility of both synchronous and asynchronous virtual learning.” The model they propose suggests students living together on campus, but still taking part in virtual classrooms.

Hybrid teaching models support student-centricity, provide for a personalized and adaptive learning experience and enhance the cost-effectiveness of large programs. Such models imply that courses and lectures that require little personalization or human interaction can be recorded as multi-media presentations, to be watched by students at their own pace and place, or even delivered to very large audiences at low cost by a non-university instructor or technology platform (e.g. an online education provider like Coursera). Such courses can be commoditized without sacrificing social interaction as one of the important benefits of the face-to-face classroom, which would free resources to commit to research-based teaching, personalized problem solving, and mentorship. For students, that would mean having online classes at their own pace and at much cheaper cost. They would use precious time they spend on campus for all types of activities that require face-to-face engagements. Some years ago, experts predicted that massive open online courses (MOOCs), such as Coursera, Udacity, and edX, would kill traditional education (“just as digital technologies killed off the jobs of telephone operators and travel agents”). However, the history proves that certain campus-based activities, such as social networking, group assignments, field-based projects, and global learning expeditions, can enhance the student’s learning experience.

The third disruptive trend is the transition from a degree-based talent pipeline to a skills-based talent pipeline. The nature of jobs is changing, and students need to be able to update their skills throughout their careers. Recent surveys show that students prioritize employability when selecting universities, however, the idea that a college degree singularly prepares students for decades of work has long been outdated. Since many future jobs are not yet defined, universities must equip their students to be lifelong learners who can acquire new skills and give them broad, cross-disciplinary problem-solving skills and entrepreneurial mindsets. Overall demand for continuous education and corporate training is growing.  Scott Pulsipher, the president of Western Governors University, a nonprofit, online, competency-based university, points it out that COVID-19 has created sudden demand for mid-career reskilling and upskilling at unprecedented scale. “In the future, degrees will continue to hold value, not because of the degree credential, but because a degree is composed of many skills and competencies that are valued by employers”, he says.

Connected to that is another major trend – digital credentialing, described as “a rapid shift from static educational records and transcripts, previously an extremely analog process that centered around degrees, to online, digital credentials focused on certificates and certifications that summarize achievement, skills or competency”. In a digital economy where continuous upskilling is needed to keep pace with technological advances and skills outdate in no time at all, universities will move beyond bachelor’s degrees as their primary product, toward more nimble, lower-priced, digital “credentialized packages”. This process is central to achieving the goal of greater education/workforce alignment, which hinges on integrating college and employer HR systems.

However, Nelson and El-Azar emphasize that in the university of the future investment in student-centric learning outcomes will be more important than technological innovation. No technology can improve poor teaching – on the contrary, it can only be made worse by “distractions from the digital world.” Instead, institutions must improve student learning outcomes by updating their curricula and pedagogy, and technological solutions can help in this process. For example, digital learning platforms can measure talk time per student, allowing a professor to evaluate participation objectively.

Change is hard. But with the ongoing crisis accelerating the processes that would otherwise have taken decades to be fully established in institutions of higher education, the university of the future will hopefully be more student-centered, flexible and resilient.

As universities everywhere partially open up their doors this autumn, they have to cope with many issues of the coming academic year, trying to reinvent the education process in response to the coronavirus pandemic and the consequent restrictions. Many creative hands-on courses are struggling to come up with safe ways to prepare their students, but departments and institutions teaching music, theatre and dances are probably hit the hardest.

In the era of social distancing, the performing arts industry itself is not going to function as before, given the health risks of live performances in indoor spaces with live audiences. Many venues are threatened with closure and the public may remain wary of attending live arts events even when restrictions are lifted. With coronavirus posing a threat to the future careers of today’s performing art students, drama schools, university arts programs and conservatoires are perceived as training people for jobs that are disappearing. This might be unnerving for university arts programmes and conservatoires, for a recent survey shows that as many as 40 percent of incoming freshmen are considering a possibility of passing on attending colleges this year, while 28 percent of returning students haven’t decided yet if they come back to the campus.

It is true that future performances and professional communities or performing arts rely on the talent pool coming out of higher education but the fact that supply is enormous cannot be ignored. “If there’s possibly no freshman class this year, that’s not going to impact, down the line, the number of dancers available to audition,” says Susan McGreevy-Nichols, executive director of the National Dance Education Organization. The same goes for music, according to Jesse Rosen, president of the League of American Orchestras.

Therefore, with this uncertain future pending, many of the age-old methods of training musicians, actors and dancers need to be drastically reshaped.

Like other arts institutions that offer dance, drama and music degrees, administrators of New York City’s Juilliard School, have spent the summer devising new classes and techniques and setting up safety protocols for rehearsal studios and theaters. For the first weeks of the fall term, the school is offering online classes, followed by a gradual progression of on-campus classes. Trying to pursue “the making-lemonade idea” President Damian Woetzel hopes to invite some big-name artists for guest lectures via video, which would be impossible under different circumstances, because normally all the stars would be touring the world.

Similarly, the Berklee College of Music in Boston, USA, which will be completely remote this autumn, is including virtual master classes with prominent artists who are stuck at home like most everyone else due to the coronavirus restrictions causing the closure of the venues. The college will be completely remote this autumn.

What makes distance learning especially challenging for performing-arts schools is a need for technology and tools that aren’t available outside of specialized classrooms. Training students to perform might be tricky as each art has technical demands, such as safe flooring, adequate unobstructed space, and the precise timing of music and sound — impossible over laptops with different bandwidths. For example, it is impossible to leap into a partner’s arms in online dance classes. However, instead, they can focus on nuances and overlooked details, such as how to use faces or how to position hands.

Australia’s National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), whose alumni include Mel Gibson and Cate Blanchett, adapted their public performance schedule to take place in the digital space across a variety of platforms and are currently gradually reintroducing the students to the campus after developing a series of protocols that enable much of our training to continue.

In addition to ‘new normal’ practices like temperature checks at entrances, the wearing of masks in public areas and air-conditioning systems switched to ‘extraction’ mode, coronavirus-safety protocols in institutions training musicians and actors includes for example, banning on-stage kissing or teaching in small “bubbles” of players, which could slowly be integrated with other groups as restrictions on social distancing ease.

Apart from day-to-day operations, schools of the performing arts also to develop solutions to immediate practical problems around recruitment and assessment.

At the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, some applicants had not yet attended an interview or audition for autumn 2020 entry at the time of lockdown. To get around this, the institution created video instructions to for the applicants to record themselves performing their monologues and song choices. The interviews were held online and course-specific questions were answered by the staff during virtual open days.

Although the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire (RBC), UK, hopes to deliver the majority of the curriculum face to face by the second semester, it is possible for incoming students to do their first semester online. The administrators hope to “give them an in-person experience online”, holding over until later any elements of the course that required face-to-face interaction.

Assessment poses similar challenges. At RBC they decided on accepting all kinds of online offerings, instead of keeping final-year students in limbo until they were able to hold live examinations in a hall. According to the principal, Julian Lloyd Webber, some of the students had only an iPhone and no recording equipment but that didn’t stop them from creating things of “incredible standard and imagination”.  “The internet is so much a part of musicians’ future that it was very helpful for them to have to do this,” Lloyd Webber believes.

This is echoed by Jesse Rosen who is sure that digital proficiency that students will be gaining now will help them in their future careers. He claims that musicians that can create visual works for live-streaming or sharing online could be a major boon for orchestras and music ensembles that desperately want to increase their reach and audiences.

There is every reason to believe that performing arts will adapt to the current context and thrive again, and it will be today’s students, flexible and adaptive, capable of working across all platforms, with a blend of traditional skills and new techniques and understanding, that shape the future.

Last year, one of the world’s most prestigious art schools, The Royal College of Art in London, announced plans to expand its curriculum in order to transform the accepted paradigm of an art and design university, by injecting key scientific disciplines into the mix of creative courses traditionally on offer. RCA’s new ambitious five-year campaign programme, named GenerationRCA, sends a clear message that today’s designers must be trained to tackle larger interdisciplinary issues. The world is too complex and interconnected for designers to not be proficient in a variety of disciplines, from traditional craft-based skills to the science and technology that are an integral part of our daily lives.

As announced, the RCA will continue along its recent path of introducing exciting and provocative new programmes such as Environmental Architecture, a year-long masters that focuses on the city from a sustainability perspective, and Digital Direction, another year-long program that concentrates on digital storytelling in the creative economy. In the meantime, future programmes will center on nano and soft robotics, computer science and machine learning, materials science and the circular economy.

According to vice chancellor Paul Thompson, the launch of the GenerationRCA is the most significant development in its 182-year history. “Founded in response to the first Industrial Revolution, today the RCA stands as the vanguard of a new era in art and design, which promises breakthroughs in robotics, autonomous vehicles, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence,” he said. This watershed moment reveals that some art educators finally understand that science and technology need to be part of the curriculum in order for art schools to survive the digital age.

Historically, art and technology are separately boxed by our education system and ideological gap between the two is undeniable. However, such interdisciplinary programs are not completely absent from the academic world. There has been much discussion over last decades about how STEM education needs to expand to STEAM, incorporating art and creative thinking into more right-brained areas of innovation. Aware that art can spark an excitement about learning that goes beyond the artistic to embrace science, math, technology, and engineering, prominent tech and science schools like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University and Carnegie Mellon have integrated design and arts education into their curricula. As is true in the best learning moments, a connection to art can ignite the drive for more learning across disciplines, more creativity and motivate students to continue seeking new solutions.

But so far, the science sector has been more open to welcoming art than the reverse. Although there are art and design schools that do digital arts education well, like UCLA’s Design Media Arts curriculum, which uses technology-powered art processes, very rarely a traditional school adopts science and technology as a core focus.

Despite the many possibilities that science and technology present, few art programmes embrace the new paradigm. It is noticed that art teachers are often reluctant to implement computer technology in art education, either because they don’t have the skills to use the technology or because they prefer the traditional approach and techniques. According to the 2019 State of Art Education Survey, 52.2 percent of art teachers want to learn more about teaching digital art effectively, but only 21.9 percent of art teachers feel comfortable actually teaching a digital arts curriculum. Some traditional creatives are not only unsure how to integrate technology into their teaching, but also hesitant to see coding and other technology-led processes as artistic practices.

Prof. Mick Grierson, a research leader at the newly opened Creative Computing Institute at the University of the Arts London, admits, “There are plenty of people who, for decades, have been in the art and design community but haven’t really been able to find a home for their technology-led creations and practice,” he says. “So of course, they naturally migrated to a STEM environment because it’s easier for them to talk about the materials they use and the approaches they take.” “It’s like the art school has handed the baton of creativity over to the computer scientists and programmers, who often make terrible art,” echoes digital artist Alan Warburton.

Back in 1990, Deborah Greh, St. John’s University educator, clarified that using technology as a tool to develop art works should not overshadow art principles, concepts and techniques. Too often artists are enchanted by the novelty of the tool itself, its formal and aesthetic possibilities, so they sacrifice substance in the process, neglecting the fact that art needs something to day. It doesn’t really matter, if a work of art is analog or digital – the qualities that make it meaningful remain the same, and that is something only art schools can teach.

Today, digital art still is not treated as seriously as analog art, and experts admit, universities will need to adopt an even broader shift in thinking to change that.

“The biggest problem that digital art forms have faced is that scarcity equals value, and being readily available means these works essentially are worthless,” says Grierson. This is echoed by digital artist and educator Vicki Fong, who believes that digital art is often perceived as being more about production. “People are using digital skills to speed up the process, so more art is being made at a much quicker rate, which doesn’t necessarily increase the quality,” she says. All this is the negative impact of the traditional creatives and art educators being slow to embrace computerized art and admit that it should belong to the realm of art rather than STEM environment.

Predictably, artists won’t just naturally begin incorporating technology into their work without schools teaching them how. As curator Julia Kaganskiy told Artnet, to succeed in technology-led art teaching schools should integrate both technological thinking and practice. “As software, algorithms, non-conscious cognitive agents and cybernetic thinking increasingly shape the world around us, artists need to have a strong grasp of the practical and philosophical implications of this transformation,” she says. “I’m not saying that every artist needs to learn to code, but they should probably read some media theory and software studies texts, maybe even some posthumanist philosophy.”

The process of integration of science and technology into the art school curriculum still has a long way to go. As technology infiltrates every element of our life, educators need to do more than just prep students with basic graphic software. One thing is clear: the artists and designers who embrace technology as part of their art training will no doubt be more in demand than those who do not.

According to Sumita Singha, a practicing architect and academic who has worked in India, France, Spain and the UK, strangely enough, diversity and equality are ‘taboo’ words in architectural education. Considered to be liberal and creative, way above what is considered ‘political correctness’, most architects do not see the elephant in the room. While architecture is getting better at talking about equality and diversity, it still remains a profession of middle-aged white men, and architectural education appears to be symptomatic.

Diversity in architectural education takes many forms – it can manifest itself as diversity in people, be it students, academia or practicing designers as the education’s final product, in the course or curricula, and the way it is taught.

Rich architecture is impossible without influences from diverse bodies of knowledge and experience brought on the table by representatives of various cultures, sexes and ages. For built environment to reflect the society, architecture should be a representation of the population as a whole, which means architectural education should be as inclusive as possible. Unlike some other professional courses, where the output is  standardized all over the world, such as medicine or engineering, architecture is specific to the context, with factors like aesthetics, environmental conditions, etc varying widely in different cultures. This makes the architectural course extremely demanding and complex.

At the same time, with its widely accepted culture of excessive working hours, a growing debt problem, and elitism, architecture is considered to be one of the most challenging courses. It takes one from seven to ten years to qualify as an architect. It is estimated that each architecture student spends more than 34 hours per week in studies and pull all-nighters more often than not. Material outlays, study trips and numerous associated costs make the course exuberantly expensive.

The UK is one of the leading countries to provide architectural education for both home and overseas students. Recent data shows, that although Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) students and women are well represented on architecture courses in the UK, there is a bid drop out of both female and ethnic minority students.

Research shows, that approximately 37% of architectural students are women and the percentage is increasing. This increase, however, is not reflected in the architectural profession, with the majority of them leaving the profession after qualifying. Women represent only 13% of the total amount of practicing architects. Less than 8% of women own their practices and number of female professors or Heads of Schools can be counted in one hand.

“Diversity in student body of UK is well represented in architecture,” writes Singha. “However expression of Architectural Diversity – both in the end products of graduates and buildings – is not. The first woman was admitted to the Royal Institute of British architects (RIBA) in 1898 after a hotly debated council meeting where Ethel Charles, holder of its Silver Medal (1905) won by a margin of one vote.  However, it was only in the year 2000 that RIBA adopted an Equal Opportunities policy for its staff.” Thus there has been, and still is, a lack of role models for aspiring female or BME students.

International survey reveals that among the most common reasons why women leave the profession there are many factors, such as pay gap, poor promotion prospects, discriminatory attitudes and sexist behaviour. Research from Strathclyde University suggests that sexism is something female architects face during their years of study – e.g. at ‘crits’, where students pin up their work and invited critics make points and suggestions about the work. The teaching and evaluation in architecture courses remain extremely ‘personalized’, occurring on a one-to-one basis, rather than through essays or exams. Predictably, as the tutors are mainly white older middle class men, instead of being an important source of ideas for the students, crits “turn into an arena where sexism and machoism prevail”. The solution can be found in student-centered teaching methods, such as a more extensive use of peer assessment, which implies inviting other students to critique other students.

As for BME architects in the UK, the percentage is too small to be a part of the statistics.  The BME students feel under-represented and undervalued in the profession and this is due in no small part to architectural education becoming more elitist, caused initially by high fees.

Experts believe that the fact that skilled people drop out of studies because of financial challenges and biased attitudes or leave the profession after they have qualified means serious implications for the future of architecture in general. The shrinking talent pool has a wider impact on the diversity of the profession and its output. As Harriet Harriss, dean of the Pratt Institute School of Architecture in New York, says: “The effect of reducing diversity-of-access to an architectural degree will result in the profession failing to represent the society it seeks to serve, and deplete both our relevance and credibility.”

In addition to the diversity issues as evaluated on the premise of gender or ethnicity, there is a problem of the syllabus and the teaching remaining too ‘euro-centric’. One area often lacking diversity is architectural history and theory. Kendall Nicholson, Ed.D., a licensed educator, trained architectural designer, and an avid architectural researcher, points it out that with figures like Vitruvius, Thomas Jefferson, and Le Corbusier being often the subject of the courses in question in the US, architectural history and theory is taught as traditionally European, male and modern. “And this is where we find implicit bias,” he writes. “While these names should be part of the body of knowledge, I would argue that an architect’s required awareness of history and theory should be more expansive. By excluding architecture found in non-European cultures, the curriculum, perhaps inadvertently, communicates that they are of less importance.” Additionally, these curricula often fail to recognize the contributions of female architects and designers. This is echoed by experts in the UK. “I find that architectural teaching in the UK is stuck in the past.  It is kind of strange, I look around – I see there are students from all backgrounds, not just white, and then I look at what they are studying and the language being used – it  could be from the 1940s,” says Lesley Lokko, architect, teacher, author and cultural commentator.

In other words, architecture students, no matter their origin, are taught that Western designs are more progressive than the ones offered by the vernacular traditions of their own countries. The diminishing of the cultural input of non-Western cultures is not the only result of these experiences. What is more important, after qualifying these students tend to design in the Western style. According to renowned writer, historian, and teacher, author of the concept of critical regionalism, Kenneth Frampton this leads to the fact that the architects of the so-called Third World tend to ignore comparable alternate patterns of their own culture that could with minor adaptation have been employed equally effectively in both Western and non-Western worlds.

Many architectural schools and courses are taking steps forward to diversify their curriculum. The latest edition (2014) of US’ student performance criteria issued by NAAB requires programs to ensure students have an understanding of “History and Global Culture” as well as “Cultural Diversity and Social Equity”, which is a significant evolution from the 2004 requirement that students demonstrate an understanding of “Western Traditions” and “Non-Western Traditions.” To follow these guidelines, the University of Virginia teaches courses like “World Vernacular Architecture” that feature examples from Cambodia and Morocco, while the University of Colorado Denver supplements the textbooks in architectural history with “required readings on architecture of the Middle East, East Asia, Americas and Africa.”

Architecture students of today are the architects of tomorrow. For this future not to be narrow-minded, the profession should continue to struggle with diversity issues. Without recognizing that the educational aspect of architecture seems to push the profession backwards, it would be hard to create inclusive architecture that acknowledges and respects vibrant and diverse influences of practitioners from all backgrounds.

Illustration by Sunra Thompson

Not long ago, writer and director of the Open City charity organization Phineas Harper wrote in his Twitter that the architecture profession has to face up to the fact that it has grown to be “more elitist than the most elite university in the world.” The assumption is not at all new.

‘Elitism’ in architectural schools is a recurring criticism among architecture students. According to the student survey by the UK’s Architect’s Journal, 44 per cent respondents name cost as the single biggest issue facing them and their peers, while 45 per cent believe they will never be in a position to pay back their student debt after graduation.

On top of that, Peter Lampl, founder of charity The Sutton Trust, raises concern that “not only will graduates be saddled with tens of thousands of pounds of debt, but they’re also having to shell out thousands of pounds each year for laptops, study trips and printing.” Hidden extras such as model-making, printing and study trips, as well as computers and books are becoming increasingly normalised. The research reveals that students in the UK spend around £2,000 a year on these costs.

This forces students to turn to their parents for financial help, with 81 per cent of those polled saying that their families have contributed to their education.  The extent of parental support was so significant that they acknowledge there is simply no way they could afford to study architecture without help from their parents. As one of the drop out students confesses, this not only puts greater pressure on parents, but it can also be demoralising for students wanting to be self-sustaining adults. Many students admit that the prospect of huge levels of student debt, followed by a career of modest salaries and long hours, make them start having doubts.

Predictably, students from poorer backgrounds are often left on the margin of the profession. Costs of the course, accommodation, private institutions and equipment price many talented students out of a potential career in architecture, especially when you relate that issue to the level of fees that are prevalent in the profession. According to Sumita Sunghi, this is one of the reasons cited in the 2003 CABE study of Minority Ethnic students and Architecture, as to why BME architectural students tend to drop out of studies.

The 2018 data shows that for students from BAME backgrounds, the drop-out rate is higher, at 17 per cent, than the overall percentage of drop-off among UK respondents (10%). Sonia Watson, CEO of the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust, which supports students from disadvantaged backgrounds into the industry, is concerned by the figures. She says: “We have always known that the huge cost of qualifying as an architect can deter young people from disadvantaged backgrounds from considering architecture as a career. The sad thing is that the rise in costs and the need for extra financial support to continue their studies seems to be hitting those from BAME backgrounds the hardest.”

Students from ethnic minority backgrounds appear to be more inclined to end their pursuit of becoming an architect early. The costs are not the only barrier to the profession. As they do not receive financial support, many BAME architecture students live at home, which means it takes them a lot longer to get into university and their sleep time is reduced.

Students raise concern that, with the cost of studying architecture ever increasing, the prospect of becoming an architect seems unattainable to those from less privileged backgrounds. It is “sending them the signal that ‘architecture is not for you’,” says Ashley Meyes, 24, Sheffield School of Architecture, Part 2 graduate, acknowledging that she wouldn’t have entertained the idea of studying architecture for 10 years if she knew what she know now. Mellissa Kirkpatrick, 23, studying on the Part 2 collaborative practice course at Sheffield University, thinks it is evident that “within architecture schools there is a move back towards it being an ‘elitist’ profession, and a sentiment that architectural education should be more of a luxury for those who can afford to go the full way to qualification, rather than essential education available to all.”

Phineas Harper draws attention to another fact he has discovered as the former deputy editor at Architecture Foundation. According to Harper, although at least 90 per cent of people in the UK receive their education from state schools, which are free to attend and funded by the government, fewer than half of architects featured in Architecture Foundation book are from state schools. This is significantly lower than the 68 per cent of new students at Cambridge University last year who went to state schools.

Harper made the comments as the UK government received intense criticism for using an algorithm intended to determine the A-level grades, which are used by universities to select new undergraduate students. The algorithm was introduced this year, as it was not possible to hold exams due to the coronavirus outbreak and the consequent lockdown. As the statistical model took into account teacher’s predictions, mock exam results and previous year’s A-Level performances at each school, pupils from state schools were disproportionately affected by the downgrade compared to those from private schools. As a result, many students missed out on university places receiving lower grades than they were predicted by their teachers.

With the existing system of teaching architecture, rewarding those who already have the most, the numbers of students abandoning their hope of becoming architects seems likely to rise.

Another form of design critique used in studio format learning is intermediate group critiques that are similar in form to final reviews or “juries”, yet are much more generative and positive, possessing the same coaching functions as individual critiques. Unlike juries, group crits are focused on advancing the work of the individual designer and benefiting the group via generalizable comments.

Whatever the format, a critique should have well-defined goals. Mitch Goldstein, Associate Design Professor at College of Art and Design, Rochester Institute of Technology, warns that it is crucial to know what the point of the crit is, for the process to be generative: “Some crits are for exploring concepts, some are for finessing details, some are not even crits at all, but are really celebrations at the end of a project.”

Goldstein is the man behind the howtocrit.com website where he shares his wisdom on how to give and accept criticism during design education. According to Goldstein, effective critiques must focus on the work, and not on the designer. “It is incredibly important to understand that the purpose and value of a critique is to improve the work — critique serves the work, not the person who made the work. A critique of your work is not a critique of your humanity, and making bad work does not make you a bad person,” he explains.

This is echoed by Gaia Scagnetti Ph.D, Assistant Professor in Communication Design at Pratt Institute, New York. She points it out, that in art and architecture, critiques often connote negative experiences, charged with destructive and personally abusive juries. In her paper “A dialogical model for studio critiques in Design Education”, she cites a New York Times report from 2006, where a graduate describes the crits in Yale University as ‘a gladiator spectator sport’. Scagnetti discloses that while there is no evidence or studies demonstrating that destructive critiques benefit learning outcomes or prepare for the working environment, motivating feedback have proved to produce a positive impact on students development. “Many scholars have addressed the need for critiques to avoid the climate of fear, defensiveness and anxiety that have been traditionally associated with critiques,” she writes, noting that the emotional experience associated with harshly negative juries can remain alive even years later for those who repressed their emotions to prove they are strong enough to endure them.

Scagnetti also expresses her concern that only few schools offer faculty training to reform their critique culture and assess their learning outcomes. Lack of opportunities to learn the strategies for educationally successful critiques often result in overwhelmingly negative or excessively positive critiques, as well as simplistic ones that present criticism without evidence. Meanwhile, critiques that focus primarily on minor details, facts or factual errors are often distracted from larger, more important issues. Neither of these are helpful.

However, a critique is not a competition but a collaborative generative activity, and a positive, formative atmosphere is essential to make it effective. Successful critiques either advance the discussed work or challenge the designer’s thoughts, leading to new insight for future work. The outcome of a successful design critique is brilliantly formulated by Goldstein. “You should not get “torn apart” in a crit. Crits should not be “brutal” — crits should be honest and useful. If you walk away feeling like garbage, or like you were beaten up, it was not a useful crit. It was a belittling one.You should walk away from getting a crit feeling empowered and excited to make the work better, not defeated and miserable from the experience.”

Critique can be challenging for young designers. According to Goldstein, the hardest thing about critique is that one has to accept critique without taking it personally, without getting heated, and without getting defensive, otherwise some helpful remarks may remain neglected.

Many design students get a wrong impression that success in a critique means that people like their work, and that success in the next critique is showing how carefully they follow the critic’s suggestions. Juliette Cezzar, Associate Professor of Communication Design at The New School’s Parsons School of Design in New York City, Former president of AIGA NY, believes that ability to take criticism is a critical skill to learn when at a design school. “It’s a gift exchange, not an oral exam,” she writes about a critique.

She explains that instead of sorting people into “good” people who like their work and “bad” people who don’t, young designers should start seeking out people who see things differently. “The person who doesn’t get you or what you made is the one that is most likely to come up with the idea or the insight that you can’t come up with on your own. People who see things differently are gold.”  She advises, that to call a critique successful, the designer should take away two or three insights, ideas, or suggestions they are excited about but couldn’t think up on their own.

Goldstein, in his turn, urges participants of a critique to sift through the opinions and evaluations they are exposed to. “Since you are going to get a lot of opinions about your work, you will have to decide what feedback you do and do not care about. Just because someone told you something, does not mean you have to act on it (this includes your instructor). Everything is up for interpretation — but also note that ignoring what everybody says probably won’t help your work improve.”

So, what role does critique play in design education? Scagnetti describes a critique as an educational process, in which students learn to become members of a community of practice, mastering self-analysis and reflection. Here, the relationships between different members of that community are negotiated, and the ethos of an individual as a designer is voiced. Critique nurtures independent thinking, helps develop social relationships and professional identities, as well as promotes the culture of egalitarian participation space, which will later equip students with the power to change the culture of the working places they will encounter after graduation.

The role of critique in modern design education definitely transcends its assessment function. Critique supports reflection and engagement among designers of all types, from graphic design and architecture to UX design, while sustainable feedback makes students less and less dependent on the teacher feedback to evaluate their progress, and more focused on self-evaluation. Over time, exposure to critique can help develop thinking skills of the designer, their capability to analyze, anticipate, and respond. All things considered, one can’t but agree with the words of Brad Hokanson, who claims that a instilling a habit of critique and an ongoing practice of generative evaluation of creative work is in fact a general goal of design education.