About

Adviser

I have been an art educator all my professional life as a teacher, senior examiner, lecturer, senior advisor, inspector and now consultant. At various times I have worked with government agencies, national associations and quangos to develop the UK national curriculum for art, assessment practices and guidance.

I have served on the executive of the Art Adviser’s Association for about 20 years, including two terms as both Chair and Secretary. Since 2015 I have been a consultant for art education in both Kazakstan and Saudi Arabia. Currently I have been working with NSEAD contributing to their work to support art education in the UK in the field of Design and Artificial Intelligence.

Maker

I do make stuff and have used this site to record and share 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.

Old adviser colleagues

Courtauld Gallery 2023

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 social media’s unrestrained, constant, compulsive sharing.

As teachers are now required to reinvent the wheels we reinvented some years ago, I may use this site to share some earlier work that may stimulate ideas. For instance, here is the Expert Subject Advisory Group website set up in 2014, of which I was a member. It contains information which may still be of interest. The debate about design in education has still not been resolved and ‘design and technology’ is a subject in decline.

Dan

PS

Here’s one I made earlier with my 6th form in 1982. A mural on the platform of Albany Park Station, Sidcup.

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 (above). 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.

Today, the platform walls are just painted white; nothing is left.