The Experience of Teaching Creative Practices: Conceptions and Approaches to Teaching in the Community of Practice Dimension

This paper explores conceptions and approaches to teaching held by academics in departments of art, design and communication and explores links between the conceptions, the approaches and the communities of practice associated with the subject context. Much of the work which has examined teachers’ conceptions built on research frameworks that also explored students conceptions and approaches to learning.

This study of conceptions of teaching is phenomenographic, results are presented in the form of an outcome space of the categories of conceptions. This analysis is enhanced by a quantitative study using the Approaches to Teaching Inventory with reference to the sociocultural perspective on practice, particularly emphasising learning to practice. This paper concludes with a discussion of the phenomenographic study of conceptions of teaching and the quantitative investigation of approaches to teaching and their relation in turn, to the concept of communities of practice.

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.