The pedagogical approach of introducing undergraduate students to research as part of the core curriculum emerged from two decades of pedagogical experimentation, suggesting that project based curricula (as opposed to units of study divided into topics) and collaborative work in interdisciplinary teams (Boyer Commission Report, 1998; Kinkead, 2003) can better foster a student-centered context of inquiry in which knowledge is constructed from, and applied to real problems (Baxter, 1998).

Undergraduate research has been predominantly discussed in relation to programs in the STEM areas, with a significant increase of social sciences and humanities programs gradually adopting this approach. There is however a striking absence of references to undergraduate research in Art and Design. Healy and Jenkins (2009) explain this is due to the stronger tradition of teamwork and established research methodologies in the STEM disciplines, making it easier to involve and train new team members. Although the Humanities have a more individualistic approach to research, its participatory and ethnographic approaches are conducive to engaging students in projects of research.

In this presentation, I will be analyzing the context for undergraduate research in the third domain of knowledge – Art and Design. I investigate the context underlying the lack of references to undergraduate research in Art and Design, and I present this approach as timely and necessary for both students and institutions. I identify a number of contemporary challenges to defining and articulating research in Art and Design, which I associate to the “malaise” around the old disjunct between practice and academia. In spite of the fragile research background of practice-based domains, I build an argument, supported by a case study conducted in 2009, for the idea that Design and Digital art programs specifically, have long been exposing their students to processes of research as part of the core curriculum, and thus the prevalent model of education in Design and Digital Art lends itself to, and in fact already is preparing students for research. 

Baxter Magolda, M.B. (1999) Creating contexts for learning and self-authorship: constructive developmental pedagogy. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Boyer Commission Report (1998). Reinventing undergraduate education: A blueprint for America’s research universities. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Stony Brook, NY. Freire, M. (2009). A case-study of curricula design and teaching strategies for educating tomorrow’s new media artists. Masters of Arts (Art Education). Concordia University, Montreal. Jenkins, A. & Healy, M. (2009). Developing undergraduate research and inquiry. The Higher Education Academy. York, UK. Kinkead, J. (2003). Learning through inquiry: An overview of undergraduate research. In New Directions for Teaching and Learning, Vol.93, Spring 2003, pp.5-17. Whiley Periodicals.