University of Reading, Department of Fine Arts

Información

Department Aims

The University of Reading aims for excellence in teaching, research and scholarship, in an intellectually stimulating environment. The Department shares this commitment, and aims, through its programmes to:

Provide the practical and intellectual framework for each student to develop, both independently and co-operatively, a singular art practice and to learn effectively through teaching contact with a variety of research active staff.
Provide a learning environment that promotes a questioning and reflexive attitude.
Provide the opportunity for students to identify and examine relevant cultural issues in order to position themselves relative to current practice and theoretical debates.
Facilitate the acquisition of knowledge, experience and attitudes necessary for students' professional development as artists, life-long learners and a diversity of employment opportunities.

The Department offers programmes that demonstrate the full breadth of Fine Art as an area of study without division into discrete specialisms. The programmes plait three strands: art making, contextualisation/theory and professional practice. Art practice is fundamental to all programmes and with the changing nature of contemporary art we promote knowledge, learning and students' forging of connections between their current activities and models of past practice.

We aim to provide students with an educational experience that is empowering and student-centred, enabling them to become independent, resourceful and confident in their abilities as thinkers and makers. In our graduates we aim to develop reflexivity, articulacy and independence of mind. A variety of approaches to teaching are used to place the student at the centre of their learning, and students are encouraged to build upon their interests. Teaching strategies encourage complexity of creative practice and resourcefulness.
The BA programmes are written to promote the understanding that in order to make art it is necessary to see practice as historically formed and subject to current cultural conditions. The contextual studies modules and research seminars are designed to put the making of art in contact with those forms of knowledge that have influenced and supported it.