Art Education

I have been an art educator all my professional life, as a teacher, senior examiner, lecturer, senior advisor and inspector. I worked with government agencies, national associations and quangos to develop the UK national curriculum for art, assessment practices and guidance, and for about 20 years I served on the executive of the Art Adviser’s Association, including two terms as Secretary and Chair. I am currently working with the NSEAD supporting some aspects of their work in art education.

I had set up a website for art teachers even before Bucks County Council (my employer at the time) had a website of it’s own. This was sustained throughout my time with Bucks and celebrated the work of teachers and students in Bucks schools and shared work I had produced as an adviser. However, I abandoned this website when I left Bucks, though there are traces of my work in art education scattered around the Internet.

Since leaving Bucks, I have been a lecturer at the London Institute of Education joining a project to develop the art curriculum in Kazakhstan and in 2022/3, I worked on a new art curriculum for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

I do make stuff and have used this site to record this. So, spoons and sculptures are mixed into this scrapbook site. I have also been a full-time carer and, latterly a full-time widower, which has left me both sadder and wiser.

Sometimes it is good to share personal creative and professional work with old friends and others including some who have ended up in different parts of the world (above). So I have set up another ‘danchina’ website. I know it’s old-fashioned to have a website rather than ‘Facebook’, but it’s something I can control and add to when I feel like it. I don’t enjoy the unrestrained, constant, compulsive sharing of social media.

As teachers are now required to reinvent the wheels that we reinvented some years ago, I can use this site to share some earlier work that stimulates ideas. For instance, here are some assessment papers. Here is the Expert Subject Advisory Group website set up by the government in 2014., of which, I was a member. It contains information which may still be of interest. My current work with NSEAD focuses on Design, the role of AI, and the Big Landscape. I guess I may use this site to share some of this, as work in progress.

Dan China

PS Here’s one I made earlier.

A couple of years after the first mural the waiting room was demolished, so the 6th form and I went back and painted an imaginary waiting room on the now empty space. It had the same elements of story telling as the as the earlier one.

A few years after that, we painted our third mural. This time, we covered both sides of the platform. Again, there was a narrative, this time contained in a comic strip design. Everyone involved had to contribute an arbitrary image of something they liked. The collection of images was interspersed with snippets of text “next day…”, ‘…and then’, “Later…”. We hoped this would nudge the imagination of the station’s commuters in the daily wait for their 8:30 to Waterloo. Some of the images harked back to the earlier murals and were a private knowing wink to those who would recognise the reference to the earlier works.