Curriculum atelier head. Bernardine Walrecht. Mathieu Meijers tutors. Fred Nagengast. Iris Toonen. content Mission and Qualities Competences per Year

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1 Curriculum atelier head Bernardine Walrecht coordinator Liesbeth Fit Rien Derks Teun Hocks Mathieu Meijers tutors Fred Nagengast Pier Luigi Pompeï Stefan Silvestri Iris Toonen content Mission and Qualities Competences per Year Objectives and Programme Working Methods Assessment Quality Assurance appendix: Example Assignments 3rd Year

2 Mission and Qualities of Atelier At Atelier, students are familiarized with their own personal qualities and idiosyncrasies, and they learn to use these as strengths in their work process. Atelier asks students to consider their development and processes at length and to become aware of their uniqueness and authenticity. Starting out from wonder, the student will try and find new meanings for himself in materials, shapes, skills and context. Atelier encourages unpredictability in the course of a process, in such a way that students will recognise new meanings as personal growth. This will impact their inventiveness in their work and approach. By losing their way every now and then, students will fall back upon some deeper inner motive, and become better judges of their own, individual creativity. I am glad I was allowed to completely lose my way for a while one of our Atelier students once said. Atelier s strength lies in its personal approach of the student. A typical Atelier tutor will have students do what they are good at, and make them think about the way they do it, without being judgmental. Atelier tutors will try to help students broaden their perspectives and to see things from a different angle in order to come to a personal preference or quality/uniqueness. An Atelier tutor is able to observe the process and supervise it focusing on its purposefulness and meaning for the student. Tutors demand a great deal from their students and from themselves. There is a great love of the profession among the team, which is something every tutor tries to impart to his students. Competences per Year Below you will find the relative weight of the different competences per year: what are the main points for assessment at Atelier for the different years. first year second year third year

3 Objectives and Programme The objective at Atelier is to teach students to look for and find a solid foundation in their work process. The methods Atelier uses to achieve this are aimed at making, acting, doing, and reflecting. In his design process, an Atelier student will arrive at solutions by acting. Without inhibition or prejudice, full of energy, vitality and passion, with love and pleasure. By working and producing in meditative settings and concentrated ways and by visualising poetry and story, students learn to express their individuality. The programme helps students discover their own identity as a source of inspiration and practise their powers to reflect upon it. The programme asks students for concentrated action first, and to think later. In order to be able to do so it is necessary to train not only their ability to observe, but all of the senses. Make first, respond to it afterwards. By reflecting on the things they have made and through trial and error students become aware of themselves and the personal characteristics of their process. Atelier will often give assignments that can be difficult to understand or fathom for students at first. Confusion is good is a much-heard phrase. The Atelier programme operates from a double perspective: the personal need, and the public need. This dynamic disparity is the framework within which students develop 4 bearings within themselves: - being uninhibited, doing; - wonderment, observing; - individuality, the essence; - passion, the intensive. The set-up across the years: 1st year: acting, making, doing, observing: studying shapes, sketching, painting, studying materials, reflection. 2nd year: acting and reflecting (language in all its dimensions plays an increasingly important role): spatial studies (3D), sketching and colour (2D), shape and language (from 2D to 3D), reflection (1D). 3rd year: intensive action, research and translation ( translating a fascination into a visualization): personal need (the autonomous) and public need (the applied), reflection and fascination. and present his personal profile as clearly as possible. What can a student learn more, and what more does he have to learn, to help him fully master his process and guard and perpetuate his uniqueness in it? What are the essential characteristics of his own process, and how can the student continue to use them as a source of inspiration for his way of working? Some of the important skills tackled in the Atelier programme: imagination, size, shape, colour, skills in terms of making and treating the materials. Not the material in itself is important, but the possibilities it offers the student to help him tell his story. Important factors here are the senses, and intuition. The process becomes more extensive and more like a research project. We never work towards a product or a function. A suggestion for a product or function is the maximum that we present. In the current academic year we first introduced short, workshop-type forms of study, during which we had outside tutors work with a group of students for several weeks. In addition, two of our permanent tutors Mathieu Meijers and Marietta de Vries, have been working with the head, Bernardine Walrecht, as a permanent group to observe and safeguard the students growth. Working Methods The dominant working method throughout the three Atelier years are group-based instructions and discussions, assignments done individually, and, aside from individual talks, mostly group discussions of the midterm and final results. The third year, during which students specialize in Atelier, offers specific assignments that tie in with each student s interests and developments. We discuss their individual progress each week within the group, with the thirdyear tutorial team supervising the group of students. In addition there are several additional assessments during the third year during which we will assess the results jointly and discuss them through self-evaluations and peer assessment. Atelier uses what we call seconds, with one student taking notes of the feedback aimed at the other. We are also increasingly using self-evaluation, for which we expect the student himself to thoroughly consider his development and present this in writing. In the 3rd year we increasingly invest in self-reflection and group reflection. We expect the student to gain increasingly more insight into his fascinations, preferences and work process. By setting them abstract subjects and assignments we encourage students to formulate their own thoughts and visualize them. Reflection as such takes up a very important place. Language in all its forms is incorporated; the language of the profession, the vocabulary of shapes, design language are important elements to help students grasp their personal imagination. The tutorial team will monitor the student as closely as possible, and try to direct him in order to help him define

4 Assessment In the teaching week preceding the actual assessment, the tutors will discuss the results of their own assignments with each individual student. This allows students the opportunity to adjust or perfect things. The assessment takes place over three days during which we will focus on one year per day. Each day begins with a preliminary discussion of the individual marks per tutor and the possible problem cases that will need additional attention during the assessment. Then the head, coordinator and tutors will make a tour of the works on display, take down their comments using the assessment sheet with criteria, and they will come to a shared result. Points for Assessment 1st Year: Attitude (motivation, effort, passion, concentration, presence). Process (development, understanding, self-knowledge, planning). Professional (technical) skills (applying and executing techniques, skill, carefulness). Theoretical skills ( powers, originality, imaginative powers, poetry). Points for Assessment 2nd Year: Attitude (attitude, motivation, effort, drive). Process (development, understanding, self-knowledge, planning, insight, analyses, reflection). Professional (technical) skills (applying and executing techniques, skill, carefulness). Theoretical skills ( powers, originality, imaginative powers, poetry, communication, meaning, context). Points for Assessment 3rd Year: The above competences are also leading in the 3rd year assessment but we will take ample time and focus our attention on allowing students to evaluate themselves throughout the year, and as a teaching team we will give the students advice and ask them what they need to further their development at regular intervals. Quality Assurance Atelier consists of tutors with a range of different specialisations: - Tutors who focus predominantly on technical skills and materials. - Tutors who centre on the process the student goes through while working on an assignment. - Tutors who work with students focusing on the Atelier theoretical content. The head of Atelier is responsible for the quality of the lessons, the increasing cohesion of the programme, the collaboration between tutors, the content of the programme and recruiting new tutors. Each tutor gives his own assignments, often new ones for each academic year. During the assessment we will also discuss the quality of the assignments themselves, which we judge based on the results. So the assessments are not just an important time for students, but definitely also for the team. The assignments for the 3rd year are determined by the joint tutorial team. Each year, Atelier takes an academic trip to Florence with the 3rd year students, which is something that hugely benefits the relationships within the group and the quality of our education. It is important to offer students some insight into the long history of art and applied art that underlies today s design profession. Subjects such as colour, material, size and shape have always been important, and can be elucidated especially well by using Renaissance examples. The trip also focuses on Atelier s specific inner eye character because we will work in meditative settings (in churches, chapels, at an early hour, after long walks). The one aspect that is typical for Atelier is the personal way in which it guarantees the students cultural knowledge and stock-in-trade. If it turns out we are somehow failing with a student, we will come up with an assignment that ties in with both the student s personality and interests and his need to study, for instance, a certain stylistic period from art history.

5 appendix Example Assignments 3rd Year The set-up for the 1st semester of the 3rd year ( ) The group is divided into 2 equal groups. Group A will be taught by Mathieu Meijers for ten weeks, group B will attend three different workshops led by a number of outside tutors. Both groups will attend Marietta de Vries class reflection/ fascination on Thursdays, where they will work on their own book for 20 weeks, based on their own wishes, desires, and fascinations in this profession. This is a process that is very insightful to students and they are supervised one-on-one during this journey. Setting out from personal fascinations the material is funnelled increasingly directly towards a subject that forms a thread through the student s work, something that keeps cropping up without the student even realizing it. Mathieu Meijers lessons will consist of abstract subjects and teach the students to translate almost philosophical concepts into sizes, shapes, and colours. This inquisitive way of working is taught to the group that reaches insight through making things. The subjects succeed each other at breakneck speed in order to tap into the student s intuition. A possible assignment could be: make a dead shape; make a sublime shape; connect one shape with another, create a transition. The vocabulary of shapes is amplified by the use of colour. This season s three workshops focused on language. Group B has successively worked with: *Maria Blaisse, 4 Fridays in the Westerpark in Amsterdam. eele&feature=youtu.be This workshop focused on the almost invisible visual vocabulary of nature. Students were asked to study this vocabulary in-depth, distil their preferences from their studies, and work with these. *Frank Eerhart, a 2-day intensive course. The subject was (written) language. Students have worked on the concept of language, the abstraction of language, the sound of language, free writing, transposing image into language and vice versa. *Koos Flinterman, 3 weeks, every Friday. This time the subject was the difference in the visual vocabularies of art and of design. The eventual assignment was to make a (suggestion for) a content carrier, based on a text by Heidegger, where the text itself could almost be seen as an object. After ten weeks the groups will swap places. During this second half the workshop-group will start with the lessons by Koos Flinterman, then Frank Eerhart, and after that, four lessons with Gijs Assmann. He intends to activate the students by giving them short assignments each lesson that will address the specific visual vocabulary of design.