Fashion Variations: Students Approaches to Learning in Fashion Design

This research unpacks the assumption that students understand research in the discipline of fashion textiles in a unitary and unproblematic way. It is one of the first empirical studies to examine learning from a phenomenographic research perspective in this particular discipline and is a result of reanalysing data collected for a previous study (Drew, Bailey and Shreeve 2001, 2002).

The research question in this case was to ask what were the qualitatively different ways in which students in fashion textiles project work approached the research component of the project?

The paper is published in ADCHE, a peer reviewed journal and has been cited by Biddle-Perry. The study led on to further work in the phenomenographic tradition, with a small research grant from the ADC-LTSN being awarded to look at student conceptions of assessment using learning outcomes in the design project.

Although phenomenography as a research method is widely known and the outcomes of it inform learning and teaching in higher education (eg Marton and Saljo 1984, Prosser and Trigwell 1997) to such an extent that deep and surface learning has been accused of hegemonic status by Haggis (2004), there have been few applications of this research approach in art and design.

It constitutes a rigorous research methodology (Kerlind 2005) and the study of approaches to learning in practice based subjects (eg Drew et al 2001, 2002, Case and Marshall 2004) highlights the need to contribute an art and design perspectives to mainstream debates on learning in text based academic disciplines in order to fully understand different and more widespread learning and teaching practices.

Linda Drew

Current Research

Linda Drew, Ph.D., is Dean of Graduate School for Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon at the University of the Arts London. Dr. Drew was previously Dean of Academic Development at Chelsea College of Arts and Design, University of the Arts London and prior to this was Co-Director of the Art, Design and Communication subject centre based at the University of Brighton. She is editor of the peer-reviewed journal Art, Design and Communication in Higher Education published by Intellect. Her research interests focus on conceptions of, and approaches to, learning and teaching situated within the context of practice-based disciplines. In this regard she is one of a growing clutch of active design researchers working with both phenomenographic and social constructivist approaches to research.