DESIGN EDUCATOR
CUT&PASTE: FOCUS GROUP
– COMMENCING END OF 2020 –
Exploring Trainee Art Educators’ Perceptions of Visual-Plagiarism in NTU-NIE.
This focus groups acts as a continuation of the exploratory RIEO CUT&PASTE project on the topic of Visual Plagiarism. Preliminary research identified that lack of knowledge prior to tertiary education and the ambiguity between referencing an image or copying an image are significant contributors to unethical creative practice. Therefore, this study intends to explore how Visual Communication (VC) techniques embedded within active learning pedagogies can be utilised to enlighten prospective art educators on the topic of visual-plagiarism.
Via a focus group study, the questions this proposal plans to investigate are; do trainee art educators have the adequate knowledge and tools to educate secondary school art students on the topic of visual-plagiarism? And if this proves not to be the case, how can we best support art educators in acquiring said knowledge and tools? It is hypothesised that trainee educators will be unfamiliar with the ambiguity of visual-plagiarism and that VC can aid in development of effective active learning pedagogies. User testing is also integral and accordingly, sample teaching and learning collaterals will be provided to participants, to gain feedback on usability, quality and effectiveness of VC strategies.
The overarching aim of this research is to establish how the prevention of visual-plagiarism is currently taught within arts education (if at all) and to gauge opinions on the efficacy of current educational models in comparison to the proposed active learning methods. The findings of this study are intended to facilitate application for further funding in order to explore curriculum development, larger scale user testing and ultimately implementation of an educational strategy across secondary schools in Singapore.