Book chapter Gold Open Access 2025

Revisiting salient themes in signature pedagogies for arts and design education, pointing to future exploration

Signature Pedagogies for Professions in Arts and Design: Issues, Methods, Contexts, and Practices
Journal · pp. 287-306
Abstract

The exploration of signature pedagogies in selected arts and design disciplines has identified distinctive traits and concepts that are important to professional education in each field. This chapter discusses nine salient themes that characterise these pedagogies: the artist's voice, style and identity; interpersonal interaction and collaboration; reflection and reflexivity; technology-enhanced teaching and learning; linking, connecting and relating through synthesis and coherence; creativity; truthfulness, authenticity and trust; creative collaboration with other artists and designers; and the interplay between surface structure and deep structure. Based on these themes and the chapter topics, nine pedagogical issues are proposed for future exploration and development in the signature pedagogy framework. These are pedagogies of pioneers in the profession, generative apprenticeship, reflexivity, transition, artistic tradition and heritage, truth, evocative ambiguity, creative uncertainty and designerly formation. Collectively, these pedagogical issues inform three defining characteristics of signature pedagogies: first, what experts in the field do; second, how knowledge within the discipline is analysed, critiqued, accepted or refuted; and third, what constitutes the threshold concepts that shape the discipline. © The Author(s) 2025. All rights reserved.

Keywords

Author Keywords

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Index Keywords

Teaching Pedagogical issues Engineering education Teaching and learning Creatives Design Education Art educations Professional education Art and designs Deep structure Exploration and development Uncertainty
Author Affiliations
Teaching and Learning Centre, University of the Arts Singapore, Singapore City, Singapore
Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Singapore City, Singapore
Funding & Acknowledgements
No funding information
References 10 References
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