1. ‘There is a disease, and it’s called Goldsmiths’
BALEAP Biennial Addressing the State of the Union: Working Together = Learning Together
‘There is a disease, and it’s called Goldsmiths’
Gary Riley-Jones
Goldsmiths, University of London
Bristol, 7 April 2017

2. The Institution-Focused Study

3. My Area of Interest The relationship between: EAP Art Education
Criticality
… as practised at Goldsmiths

4. The Research Questions
What does it mean to be ‘critical’ in Fine Art as practised at Goldsmiths?
Can ‘criticality’ in Fine Art be taught and, if so, what can EAP learn from this experience?

5. Understandings of ‘Critical Thinking’
1) the application of logic to argument – this approach sees critical thinking as a well-defined, rational, transparent, teachable set of behaviours – although when pressed, most of those who advocate their teaching have difficulty defining them (Atkinson, 1997: 74)

6. Understandings of ‘Critical Thinking’
2) Social practice – an organic part of the culture, which may be culturally based behaviour. This behaviour is tacit and learned in a largely unconscious way. Teaching academic ‘thinking behaviours’ overtly is not transferred into other contexts (Atkinson, 1997: 72)

7. Approaches to ‘Critical Thinking’?
The classic approach e.g., the Teachable Skills Approach (Ennis, McPeck, Cottrell);
Critical Pedagogy (Freire, Giroux);
Post-Structuralist Critique (Derrida, Foucault, Butler);
Critical Embodiment (Rogoff)/Critical Being (Barnett)

8. But why so much Confusion?
= Competing Epistemologies
(Defined narrowly, epistemology is the study of knowledge and justified belief)
From: (last accessed: 30/03/17)

9. To Further Complicate Matters…
… language professionals yield to the epistemological trap… a preoccupation with language as an end-in-itself, rather than a vehicle for self-discovery and social transformation (Morgan, 2007: 950) [original emphasis]

10. To Yet Further Complicate Matters…
Not all Art Schools share the same epistemologies…
Modernism and Saint Martin’s
2) Postmodernism/Conceptualism and Goldsmiths’ College

11. Saint Martin’s and Modernism

12. Saint Martin’s and Modernism
The artist as (largely masculine) hero;
The importance of self-expression;
The role of the avant-garde and ‘originality’;
The pursuit of ‘Fine Art’ rather than kitsch;
The assumption of Western universality;
The centrality of the role of the art critic;
Art history as a linear progression;
Optimism…

13. Saint Martin’s and Modernism
However, by the late 1960s/early 70s conceptualism was coming to the fore and two of its principal targets were:
the entrenched ‘material-character, physical object’ paradigm of art making, and the possessive individualism that was cultivated by its modernist authors…
(Atkinson and Baldwin, cited in Wood, 2008: 183)

14. Goldsmiths’ College and Postmodernism
Art as part of a field of cultural production;
Challenging Western aesthetic values;
Allowed for the historically marginalised to be represented;
All art contains signs which are culturally and socially determined;
The conflation of ‘low’ and ‘high’ art to ‘unpack the ideologies of power, gender, class or race upon which artworks are constructed’.

15. Saint Martin’s and Goldsmiths – an Epistemological Shift?
The work of art is an object which exists only by virtue of the (collective) belief which knows and acknowledges it as a work of art Bourdieu (1994: 56)

16. One: Number 31 (Jackson Pollock, 1950)

17. An Oak Tree (Michael Craig-Martin,1973)

18. The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (Damien Hirst, 1991)

19. Consequently…
Epistemology determines what it is to be ‘critical’ as it is epistemology which valourises the questions you ask…

20. So what does it mean to be Critical in Fine Art today at Goldsmiths?
‘I think one of the features of art over the past 50–60 years, I suppose has been its reckoning with this question of what criticality is…’
(D, lines: 104–111)

21. What does it mean to be Critical in Fine Art?
‘How do you make sense of it? And your previous notions of what being critical was, of being able to arrive at some kind of judgement just has the ground pulled from under it and so the issue is not learning how to be critical and then being critical because someone can tell you how to be critical. The issue is what does it mean, how can you be critical, what is appropriate and so questions of responsibility… all sorts of things come in because of the context, the politics of the situation…’ (D, lines: 135–143)

22. How can Criticality be Taught in Fine Art?
All four participants agreed that discussion and dialogue were central:
‘…we say… there’s a lot of talking that goes on here… We’re actually interested in what places those conversations go to…’
(B, lines: 46–50)

23. How can Criticality be Taught in Fine Art?
‘student-centred learning… is the principle of education today’ (A, lines: 255–256)
‘I think [dialogue] is the basis for understandings’ (B, line: 45)
‘… we are not going to tell them anything in the sense “Tell us all you know about this”; we’re going to say “What are you interested in?”, “Why is it important?”, “Why is it critical?”’ (A, lines: 267–272)

24. The Difficulties of Such a Pedagogy?
‘But you’re not teaching me anything’ (A, line: 278)
It’s ‘very difficult to teach someone on a teaching model which they don’t understand… if they take offence and feel irritated, that’s a huge resistance’
(A, lines: 278–281)

25. The Difficulties of Such a Pedagogy?
‘a huge process of transformation of thinking and positioning yourself in the world’ (A, lines: 402–403)
Students can express ‘a resistance to changing their position’ (B, line: 490)
However, ‘I think it’s very rarely resistance. It’s quite often fear… it’s more fear of the unknown, a fear of risk-taking and fear of being confused…’ (C, lines: 490–496)

26. The Difficulties of Such a Pedagogy?
The importance of failure as an artist ‘depends on what you went through… and what you learnt through that… and how you move the work on from that’ (C, lines: 55–57)
Confusion too ‘can be really productive’ (C, line: 461)

27. The Difficulties of Such a Pedagogy?
‘I think learning’s very difficult and… painful, difficult time to learn’
(A, lines: 498–499)
‘Embracing difficulty, embracing failure. We talk about this a lot… Failure, as you know, we only learn when things go wrong’ (A, lines: 508–509)

28. Light at the end of the Tunnel?
Epiphanies: ‘… often something will happen in a student’s life and it can be related to the course or could be parallel to the course but it’ll change the way in which they perceive how they learn and what they’re learning and that can be a real epiphany…’ (A, lines: 458–461)

29. Light at the end of the Tunnel?
Critical Mass: ‘the point at which something happens – explodes! Or the critical mass of a certain number of people required for political change to happen…’ (A, lines: 494–496)

30. What Role for EAP?
‘I suppose the bottom line would be I just want them to speak English better, quicker… because I think there’s a lot going on in their heads that I don’t ever get a chance to see’ (D, lines: 452–456)
‘… so getting them speaking… writing of course for research and everything else so… they have to be able to read texts in order to research, they have to… look at ideas…’ (C, lines: 738–744)

31. What Role for EAP?
‘Well, it’s a hugely important role. Your in-depth knowledge of critical thinking is just so invaluable for our students and your role is simply not that of the role of a TEFL foreign language teacher… It goes beyond that on the simplest level in terms of specialist language and understanding the subject-specific language we’re using…’ (A, lines: 562–566)

32. What Role for EAP?
‘… I think that when you’re looking at students’ writing and also in their forms of presentation, you’re not just teaching a language but an approach and a way of thinking that is embodied by that language…’ (A, lines: 571–573)

33. Conclusions
Among Goldsmiths Fine Art tutors criticality is situated and as such criticality can be seen as ‘as a series of strategies and tools rather than a body of knowledge as such’ (B, lines: 308–313)
Fine Art at Goldsmiths is clearly engaged with critical theory and as such is both pluralistic and politically/ideologically engaged

34. Conclusions
‘What I ask my students is: “What’s at stake, what’s really important, what’s urgent and what’s valuable? Why do we need to remember these things? Why do we know these things? Why do we need to think or feel in this way and why is that important and really urgent?” Because if it’s not, go home and be an accountant or do something in your garret, and make up why you’re at university’ (A, lines: 422–428)

35. Conclusions
Art Education, as practised at Goldsmiths, is ‘a site of change and resistance’ (Benesch, 2001: 42)
‘Affective factors’ such as fear, confusion, anxiety and failure are necessary to ‘challeng[e] an individual’s core sense of being (A, lines: 385–386)

36. Implications for EAP
Collaboration between subject tutors and EAP tutors in terms of content is not sufficient in itself;
If one accepts a transformative role for criticality, then EAP must engage at an epistemological level.

37. Implications for EAP
‘We all engage with art and culture, we all engage with politics and we all exist within a framework of complex power relations which we have to negotiate consistently and art exists within this as well, it’s not outside of that’ (A, lines: 811–814)

38. Selected Bibliography
Atkinson, D ‘A Critical Approach to Critical Thinking in TESOL’. TESOL Quarterly, 31 (1): 71–94.
Benesch, S Critical English for Academic Purposes. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Ennis, R.H ‘A Concept of Critical Thinking’. Harvard Educational Review, 32, 81–111.
Freire, P Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum.
Giroux, H.A Teachers as Intellectuals: Towards a Critical Pedagogy of Learning. South Hadley, MA: Bergin Garvey.
Rogoff, I Smuggling – An Embodied Criticality.file:///Users/garyriley-jones/Downloads/rogoff-smuggling.pdf. Available as a PDF. Last accessed 5th November 2016.

39. One of the Symptoms… Damien Hirst