Drawing through the Senses: New Strategies in Art Education Methodology

The forthcoming reassessment of the European Higher Education System is a wide priority to all countries that signed the Bologna Treaty back in 1999. This reassessment will conclude in a deep and solid structure laid on the newest and most exciting intellectual achievements in the major disciplines. But also teaching methodologies must carry out an intense review that will lead, not only to a creation of a variety of new curricula, but also will bring the opportunity to reexamine old methodologies and develop new ways of transferring knowledge. Art educators are not immune to the climate of the period and so, this paper will try to show how a studio-based art classroom experience can tackle new methodologies in art teaching comprehensively. We, art teachers and professors, are encouraged to think what we ought to be teaching and, more important, how we should be teaching it. This is exactly the primary research questioning that a group of drawing professors at University of Granada (Spain) came up to and that finally took shape in a Innovative Educational Project named "Strategies, methodologies and processes to improve the teaching of Drawing by using New Technologies". It is within this context that we will describe some methodologies applied to the drawing class at a high education level (University). This will show the possibilities of extending our traditional concepts concerning the parameters of drawing towards new approaches on a different translation of a discipline-based methodology reached through deep research. We will introduce data resulting from seminars and studio-based case study including the use of technologies, collaborative drawing processes, drawing through reading, drawing through the senses, spatial strategies, drawing action and movement strategies, etc. Series of drawings generated by students in the different drawing procedures proposed were developed and then analysed as an original and integral part of the research process.