Learning & Design:
Stuart Bailey

‘… what would be the potential payoff of an art/design pedagogy founded on critical faculty? What kind of outcome are we after?’ asks Stuart Bailey.
Rob Giampietro has kindly sent us a number of references on the topic of Learning. Among them, Stuart Bailey, “Towards a Critical Faculty,” a short reader concerned with art/design education compiled for the Academic Workshop at Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York, Winter 2006/7, from which the question above and the following extract are taken:

‘A provisional answer: to educate students primarily towards becoming informed thinkers, sensitive to both culture at large (“the world”) as well as their specific Culture interests (e.g. “the art world,” “the design world”) and how both overlap and effect each other…
… by introducing a vocabulary relevant to describing both forms of c/Culture (for example, defining and discussing the intricacies of the terms in De Duve’s table, from “talent” to “deconstruction”)…
… in order to develop the skill of coherent articulation, fostering the ability to explain, justify, defend and argue for both self-made and others’ work…
… towards an observable level of critical sophistication, where “critical” refers to engaged discussion as part of a historical and theoretical continuum rather than the regular ego-feeding value-judgments of the group or individual crit…
… in short, to foster an environment of progressive reflexivity.’