Painting by Numbers? What My Lockdown Teaching Experiments, Followed by Encounters with a New Kind of Unit Design, Taught Me About Fine Art and Its Special Approach to Higher Education Teaching and Learning

In two short pieces on lockdown teaching and learning experiences (O’Kane, 2021a and 2021b), I strived to wriggle out of the pandemic dilemma: I felt proud of the way in which both those pieces, and the practices they describe, helped me to find creative ‘wiggle-room’ in which to reach across a divide between lecturer and students, opened by suddenly imposed, screen-based, online teaching and learning (Wolff, 2013). N Since then, however, I, and some of my colleagues, have encountered a new kind of unit design that seems to have been influenced, in its own way, by lockdown. Colleagues from colleges other than my own have recognised my description and experience of these unit designs and expressed similar concerns to those voiced in what follows. It is not yet possible to name this ‘kind’ or ‘type’ and so I have evolved an acronym, based on one colleague’s summarisation of: ‘the rapid emergence and dominance after the pandemic of a new type of teaching and learning [NTL], one that can be counted, measured and controlled [CMC]’ – hence ‘NTLCMC’. In this chapter, I critique and share ideas emerging in response to my experience of these NTLMCs. I hope to thereby help peers and colleagues to prepare for encounters with NTLMCs, while taking the opportunity to clarify, defend and promote the highest values of fine art teaching and learning.