Hi, Jacque,
At the recent conference held in London by the Centre for Learning and
Teaching in Art and Design (www.cltad.ac.uk for abstracts), I was surprised
to hear from Jenny Wilson (Univ. of Tech., Sydney) that all schools of art
and design in Australia were obliged to abandon portfolio assessments
because they contravened laws governing discrimination.
She and her colleague Geoff Caban had turned what I would have thought to
be quite a problem into an opportunity for researching the various learning
styles of their incoming cohort. This in turn had led to the development of
innovative teaching methods. Interestingly, she reported that students with
strong maths/science grades were doing particularly well on design courses.
The question of why portfolio assessment is deemed more discriminatory than
the tertiary admission scores remains unanswered.
Greetings to all my old colleagues at Curtin! Kind regards, Howard.
Dr Howard Riley PhD MA(RCA)
Coordinator for Postgraduate Research
School of Art & Design
Swansea Institute
Townhill Road
Swansea SA2 0UT
UK
Phone +01792 481285
Fax +01792 205305
email [log in to unmask]
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