Some Issues Raised

GLAADH organised its 2nd Workshop in London on 7th June 2002 for the ten 'Initiatives' that are working with GLAADH and receiving our funding and support. The Workshop was devised as a participatory seminar to share information, develop a work plan and identify potential developments at an early stage. The GLAADH Initiatives represent diverse approaches to enacting curriculum change across a broad range of topic areas and the Workshop offered the opportunity for sharing resources, concerns and finding solutions to shared problems.

Four main areas were covered: curricula content and teaching and learning aims; strategies for curriculum design and delivery; reporting on progress through case studies; and creating and developing resources for teaching and wider dissemination. The morning began with informal presentations by representatives of the Initiatives followed by questions from the group. Learning and teaching specialist Prof. Barry Jackson followed with an introduction to the issues around curriculum change and ended the day by inviting participants to pool ideas on a suitable format for presenting their case studies.

During the afternoon, the discussion centred on the development of new resources for teaching and learning. GLAADH invited Charlie Gere, member of CHART (Computers in the History of Art) and a lecturer at Birkbeck College, and Francis Pugh of the Victoria and Albert Museum to share their views respectively on the use of new technologies and museum collections as supporting resources and tools for teaching. A summary of the speakers' presentations can be found on the Session Notes page and descriptions of the projects can be found on the GLAADH Initiatives page with links to more detailed progress reports.

During the day's discussion a number of common concerns were voiced and issues raised. Central among these was the concern about teaching subjects that fall outside the subject specialism of the provider. Among the responses to this concern was the tactic taken by a number of the Initiatives to incorporate under-represented but related subjects into existing modules rather than embark on the introduction of new courses.

Resources and the problem of access, particularly to literary sources in some subject areas, was also a concern. One response to this by the Initiatives was to suggest that the problem should be turned on its head and created into a critical exercise for students, asking them: why is there so little literature on the subject; where else might one look for information and how might this information be used in the context of art history or design history etc. As the day progressed it became clear that the issue of resources, be they staff, literary or images based, was key to all the projects, and that in one way or another, each project is seeking to increase the quality and scope of resources as well as access to them.

The GLAADH TEAM

Norma Rosso, University of Sussex	Leon Wainwright, Middlesex University	Emma Gieben-Gamal, The Open University
Craig Clunas, University of Sussex	Simon Ofield, Middlesex University	Cath King, The Open University
Barry Jackson, Middlesex University

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