ABSTRACT
Information communication technology (ICT) can be approached in a number of ways and a variety of contexts. Principally, in terms of government policy, ICT is a generic transferable set of skills to be acquired by teachers and learners. Crucially, in the context of art and design, it is the technology’s potential to support critical thinking (questioning working methods and procedures) that offers greatest potential (new meanings, interpretations and practice) (Davies 2000a). The authors’ collaborative research within Birmingham’s Institute of Art and Design (BIAD) postgraduate course in initial teacher training has contributed to the view that ICT is the most powerful catalyst yet for challenging predictable practices (orthodoxy) in the art and design curriculum. Advocating a form of critical pedagogy, loosely based on models presented by Grossberg 1994 (see Giroux and McLaren 1994: 16-21) and further contextualized within the subject area by Addison and Burgess (2000: 327-31), continuing research represents an attempt to empower trainee teachers and their pupils/students ‘to reconstruct their world in new ways and to rearticulate their future in unimagined and perhaps even unimaginable ways’ (Grossberg 1994: 18). More than any other technology ICT is inescapable and unavoidable in contributing to both the administrative design and delivery of the curriculum, and posing fundamental questions as to what we are teaching and why?
