Catherine Smith

Art schools have long held a reputation for being different, operating at the periphery of mainstream education systems (Llewellyn, 2015). Despite this renown, a recent archive-based study of arts education in the UK highlighted how poor art schools are at preserving their histories, with a particular lack of detailed documentation of teaching methods (Drabble & Gridneff, 2025). However, several studies do exist that identify signature pedagogies (Shulman, 2005) of art and design education, most significantly studio-based learning and the crit. This study reviews previous research into arts signature pedagogies, and challenges the notion of studio-based learning as a signature pedagogy, critiquing its dominance within the literature. The central argument is that the active learning mode most commonly operating within the space of the art school studio is an under-researched pedagogy: the workshop. 

Primary research explores the phenomenon of the art school workshop as a pedagogic mode, drawing upon creative ethnographic methods for the observation of eleven workshops across different subject areas within a specialist arts university. Fieldnotes, photography and sketching were employed as documentation methods. Creative non-fiction is used as both an analytical device and a way of expressing the primary research findings, which are presented as a collection of workshop scenes. The scenes are intended to evoke affective and sensory experiences of being in an art school workshop. 

Dimensions of the workshop are explored in discussion, which proposes the workshop as a new signature pedagogy within arts higher education. Recommendations for enhancing workshop teaching practice are proposed. The thesis hopes to make both a theoretical and a practical contribution to continuing professional development for educators in the art school.

Names of Supervisors: Professor Mary Modeen and Dr Daniel Clarke