Extant bodies of research identify the dilemmas encountered by, and adaptive strategies of international Asian students (IAS) undertaking second language undergraduate study. However no substantive research has explored the existence of subject specific dilemmas that such students encounter in the study of design within a western setting. Doctoral work exploring design education is rare. This study addresses the gap in the research record by investigating the specifics of the study of visual communication by IAS attending an Australian university. Through the voices of the IAS and academics, the specific nature of the manifestation, understanding and misunderstanding of such dilemmas is explored. Together with the investigation of visual communication, the author discloses the nature of perception and misconception between a group of design academics and a cohort of IAS. The study uses complementary methodologies, synthesising quantitative and qualitative data. The study's statistical data was generated from 460 first and second year student surveys. This was undertaken over a three-year period, with resultant data sub-categorised to enable a representation of the IAS to emerge through identification of their particular motivations, expectations and actualisation of dilemmas within the context of the wider undergraduate cohort. The author develops and utilises an explanatory framework after Pierre Bourdieu, to analyse data emanating from interviews with multiple participants of an established population of academics and IAS. She explores the perceptions of their realities and the construction of their representations, as located through both their convergence and divergence. The study's paradigm is constructed by the field of design, as an objective world and site of the inquiry. Viewing the study's data through this conceptual framework, the author constructs a representation of the field and educational site using socio-cultural structures and the populations' multiple realities. The study reports on the layers and contradictions of communication, miscommunication, myth and fiction, constructed through the educational field. This is further interrogated to reveal the arbitrary structure of the field, its pedagogy and creation of its internal logic by which the field is perpetuated and student performances reproduced. The outcomes of the investigation include a detailed identification of lA design students' disclosures of the dilemmas of expectation versus experience, and the systematic misperception of paradoxes within the pedagogy of visual communication, presented as convergent and divergent expectations of the IAS and academics.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/258658 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | McWhinnie, Louise J. I., Art History & Art Education, College of Fine Arts, UNSW |
| Publisher | Awarded by:University of New South Wales. Art History & Art Education |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Copyright McWhinnie Louise J. I.., http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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