When I was a student I was fortunate enough to be an exchange student at the Kyoto Seika University in Japan where I studied Conceptual Art and Casting. The experience I had there changed my whole perception of what an Art education could be: At the university the heads of department were practicing artists who had studios inside the college, where they would make their work with students either observing or helping them. Each tutor would then also function as a senior technician running the workshops with the aid of MA students who were trained and paid to be junior technicians. This was not limited to typical material processes either, with my writing tutor also having a studio where she could practice her performances in calligraphy and dance. The absence of boundaries between academic and technical staff was so stark that upon returning, I found it difficult to re-aclimitise to study in the UK. I would still maintain that it is the most important education I received as it gave me a way of perceiving processes, materials and thoughts as one holistic idea and allowed me to see past the constructed divides and hierarchies existent in the UK education system as outlined in the House of Lords Social Mobility Committee report (2014) and further extrapolated on by Ashton in beyond the STEM vs Art dichotomy
That is not to say that the pedagogy there did not have its own negatives: My tutor had clear favourites, prejudices and there was very little attempt to be inclusive, polite and equitable. He was very homophobic to one of my classmates and for the first month I was there he refused to talk to me directly and made constant references to atomic bombs and the evilness of westerners (he was born in Hiroshima in 1946). Like the Mozambiquean students in Savage’s ‘The New Life’ , my experience of a truly foreign education system was enlightening in both positive and negative ways. Nevertheless my approach to arts education since then has been to find a way to bridge the academic and technical aspects of teaching.
One of the tutors atop a tilt furnace during a bronze pour in gardening pinafores
References
Ashton, H. Cutting the STEM of future skills: beyond the STEM vs art dichotomy in England.
Savage, P. (2022) ‘The New Life: Mozambican Art Students in the USSR, and the Aesthetic Epistemologies of Anti-Colonial Solidarity’, Art History, 45(5), pp. 1078–1100.
House of Lords Select Committee on Social Mobility (2016) Social Mobility in the Transition to Adulthood. London: The Stationery Office. Available at: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201516/ldselect/ldsocmob/120/12008.htm (Accessed: 19 March 2025).