History of Art Department,
University of Sussex, November 2002
Craig Clunas
The context for this
study is the History of Art Subject Group at the University of Sussex which in
1994 decided to address a perceived narrowness of its curriculum through an
alteration of the balance of its provision away from the art of Europe and
North America to take in the art of Asia.
Around 30-40 undergraduates are admitted each year to a BA programme in
History of Art which contains a mix of compulsory and optional elements. Since 1994, when a specialist in Chinese art
was first employed at Sussex, one of those optional elements has been a course
entitled ‘Art and Society in China 1400-1700’, offered initially to Level 2 and
Level 3 undergraduates together, but later reconfigured as a purely Level 2
course. Typically 10-15 students opt
for the course in any given year (for some it is not a first choice).
The course is taught
by a faculty member with a specialist background in Chinese art, and delivered
through a weekly 2-hour seminar over a 15-week period in the Spring and Summer
terms. It is assessed by a mixture of
coursework (3 pieces of writing) and unseen examination, counting in the ratio
30:70 towards a student’s overall mark for the course, which in turn
contributes to their degree classification.
The pattern of teaching was dictated by the need to fit the course into
the pattern of existing ‘Special Periods’, as to an extent the principal
learning outcome was kowledge of a specific historical context. In recent years of running the course,
attempts have been made to introduce new forms of writing in addition to the
traditional essay. These include the
annotated bibliography (learning outcome: ability to search out resources from
both library and www) and ‘imaginary collection’ (learning outcome: empathetic
understanding of the distinctive hierarchy of values in Chinese art of the
period). In 1994 no significant resources
existed on campus for the teaching of Chinese art, other than the Barlow
Collection of Chinese Ceramics, Bronzes and Jades, which due to the nature of
its contents is of limited value in teaching this period of Chinese art. A one-off pump-priming grant was made
available to history of art from University central funds for the acquisition
of library materials and slides for teaching.
However this could not begin until a specialist in this material was in
post, and so there were issues in the first year of student access to learning
materials.
Evaluation
After eight years of
running the special period course ‘Art and Society in China 1400-1700’ it can
be said to have fully naturalised itself within the curriculum, with the number
of students opting for it in any given year broadly matching that of other
choices. However it is clear that
student willingness to opt for this material is conditional on their having had
some exposure to it in the their Year 1 (compulsory) lecture course, ‘Stories
of Art’. This can be used to remove
some of the ‘fear of the unknown’ surrounding Chinese material, and suggests
the important lesson that the importation of specialist modules to a degree
programme will be better embedded if seen as part of a strategy which addresses
the whole range of the provision, and provides a ‘taster’ before requiring
students to commit to it more fully.
The issue which year after year has been expressed by students as their
greatest fear at the beginning of the course is ‘unfamiliar’ names, dates,
historical contexts; these have been addressed through handouts, through simple
drills and quizzes, through making explicit which information is core and which
is peripheral. Student satisfaction with the course, as measured through
anonymous questionnaires, matches that of other options, while student
achievement as measured by examination results and confirmed by external
examiners is also comparable. The addition of a module of this kind to a
programme must be seen as affecting the programme as a whole i.e. what is said
about European art necessarily changes its meaning if taught in a context in
which it is relativised as one tradition among several, instead of being ‘the
story of art’; this means that a department as a whole must ‘buy in’ to change
of this sort for it to succeed. The
development is seen as a success and is ongoing, although an overhaul of the
total arts curriculum means this course will no longer run in precisely this
format after 2005. Its exportability is
clearly conditional on the willingness of HEIs to shift resources, and to be
willing to teach less of one thing in order to teach more of another.