Reading Allan Davies’ (2012) ‘Learning outcomes and assessment criteria in art and design. What’s the recurring problem?’ Network, Issue 18, prompted me to think about how it applies in the context of my work. Davies, unlike Bloom’s taxonomies presents a model of deliberate ambiguity which allows for the particular nuances of the creative arts; having some over-arching structure to the learning outcomes while leaving space to explore divergent pathways.

As a Technician, I am not party to the assessment criteria and this affects my ability to advise students. Even when I have read the Learning Objectives for the course module, which we are not routinely given access to, they can be (following Davies’ suggestion) deliberately ambiguous. So I have to make certain judgements about what I feel is important, when I am teaching students, and then cross my fingers and hope that the course teams would agree with me. Which in most cases, they would. But in those circumstances where there is doubt, I usually frame this to students in terms of the different choices they can make and the reasons they might have for choosing one over the other, and leave it to them to make their own mind up. The student will have been party to the introduction of the Learning Outcomes (LO) in their initial brief for that project, where they should have discussed the LO’s in more detail and so they should be the best judge of which part of my advice best aligns with their Learning Objectives. This becomes part of their ‘research’.

The full version of this post can be found here.