Academic Year 2023 - 2024. Exploring Illustration Pedagogy Through Illustration Practice

This study explores illustration pedagogy through illustration practice, providing the unique opportunity to consider the entanglement of three academic identities: teacher, illustrator and researcher. The aims of this research were to surface findings that can begin to restructure a sense of self within Higher Education, to better understand student experience of illustration pedagogy and to uncover a more nuanced focus for future research.

Between September 2023 and June 2024, a body of practice-based research was generated, documenting moments of teaching from BA Illustration and Visual Media at London College of Communication. The slow visual documentation of an academic year allowed the abstract nature of this study to become more tangible and within this essay, practice acts as the foundation for further research and analysis. Informed by the methodologies of practice-based research, visual ethnography and arts-based research, methods include field notes, illustrative ethnographic fictions, focus groups and visualising illustrative ethnographic fictions. Research findings are explored through the analysis of three salient strands of interest: ‘Scenes of Affect’, ‘Question of Value’ and ‘Embodied Self’.

Upon conclusion, this study explores ways in which the research findings can actively enter the landscape of which they were initially inspired and argues that the project itself both defines and acts as an example of academic research that uses sensory affect to explore encounters within learning spaces, questioning the impact this has on learning experiences.

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