Art College and the Postcolonial Encounter: Student diversity within the 'sociality' of learning

Upon entering art school all students undergo a process of adaptation that is not solely a matter of adaptation to a set environmental situation: the subject also contributes to its shaping. An art school context that is genuinely inclusive necessarily gives space for such reciprocity. The question that the chapter addresses is how a curriculum within BA Fine Art that is better aimed towards addressing contemporary debates arising from postcolonial thought, its histories and related art practices can impact upon the social and peer-oriented form of learning so vital and specific to the field of Fine Art in ways that allow for this kind of reciprocity. The chapter draws on a research project conducted in 2012-2013 on a UK-based BA Fine Art course involving both curriculum development and qualitative research. The research considered if curriculum development could operate to provide the vocabulary and relevant theoretical frameworks to open up the terrain of postcolonial thought, including ideas of hybridity and creolization within the power relations of contemporary global culture, as a ground for a discursive encounter across the entire student body, rather than approaching it as specialist territory for a few.