monitoring results”.
After workshops in Budapest and Athens the inter}artes network came to Stuttgart in June 2007 to share their results. As Merz Akademie had just started an intense debate how to define our ‘quality’, or rather the central values of our education, there was a great interest to hear about the outcomes of the work.
Over the past decade we have had different encounters with external quality assurance procedures. Having run a Master’s course in collaboration with an English university we were familiar with external reviews and QA procedures. During that time we struggled to keep the pace of a system whose workings and inner logic were largely obscure to us. It felt like having to produce elaborate solutions to problems we did not feel we had. We now see that our proc- esses were like ‘teenager’ affectations and imitations of playing adult, but it was a valuable period of learning a new and foreign language and practice.
Two years ago ZeVA,1 a German agency for evaluation and accreditation, evaluated our degree programme. The ministry had asked us and we were not happy having to undergo this process. We worked on the self-evaluation document with a sense of indignation:
who was to tell us anything about our quality? But looking proudly at the finished report we immediately thought that we should have the opportunity for a review every two/three years, also as a resource for up-to-date data. Of course we showed the positive remarks of the experts’ commission to the public.
Now we are faced with an institutional accreditation process. Again, we can’t say this is something we would have decided to do ourselves. The less the impetus and desire for a review comes from the school itself and the less it is seen as a partner, the less impact such a process has. People will resort to playing games, wasting time and money. Therefore I found it brave from my colleagues in Cluj-Napoca, Sofia, Vilnius and Brno to have invited the inter}artes
network for such a review on their own accord. 1. Zentrum für Evaluation und Akkreditierung Hannover
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Looking back however, we see these - sometimes confusing and difficult - experiences have helped us to understand that quality assurance issues are not an external imposition to be cleverly evaded or a curse to be warded off. It is a responsibility an institution must accept for its own sake, for the definition and protection of what it sees as its essential and distinctive specificity, which makes it unique and the best place to come to as a student.
As a result of these experiences and stimulated by my involvement in the inter}artes strand 1 we started to gain a different understanding. We realised that it cannot be delegated to one person, it must be supported by a substantial and representative committee that has the power to effect change within the school. A member of the Rectorate chairs this group and professors, academic and technical assistants, students are members. We meet once a week and have started our work with interesting debates about various quality concepts as they relate to different aspects of artistic and academic education as well as the institutional context. We discussed two articles by Lee Harvey, director of the Center for Research and Evaluation
at Sheffield Hallam University 2. Harvey focuses on quality as transformation rather than on the better-known concept of quality as fitness for purpose. Since Merz Akademie´s slogan is Gestaltung studieren verändert (Studying design transforms) we were keen to talk in concrete terms about what exactly this transformative process is, we want to bring about in our students.
We are also discussing assessment criteria for examination work, a discussion difficult and complex as enlightening and fruitful for the school. In other words, we have taken
ownership of our quality concept and have taken important steps to strengthen our quality culture. Like many people we tend to flinch at this euro-speak, at the seemingly uncritical use of terms, but we must define and defend our special nature, unsere Eigenart, vis-à-vis competitors and sometimes adversaries from the outside. It is sometimes even more important to protect what is valuable to us from ourselves. Our excellence and good practices erode, decay, morph, are forgotten over time, over generations of staff and students, especially when they are informal and based on a presumed common understanding, as tends to be the practice in art institutions. While the close contact with artistic teachers and mentors is the basis for education, an institution must place the responsibility for the success of the students´ education also on processes and structures that work with a degree of independence from personalities and are built on a shared definition of educational values, which are more than individual styles and attitudes.
A school must have a clear perception and a way of measuring, for itself, whether this change is for better or worse, whether it brings the school ahead or makes it slide back. It must have effective means to bring about meaningful change, to push the school in the direction it has set out. An important measure is the degree of excellence of graduates. For us this does not 2. Harvey, L. and Green, D., 1993 ‘Defining quality’,
Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 18, no. 1. and Harvey, L. Understanding Quality in: EUA Bologna Handbook - Making Bologna work
only mean winning prizes and finding well paid jobs. Even more important it means for graduates to become mature artistic personalities, equipped with cognitive, aesthetic and technical skills to successfully translate their critical thinking and unorthodox perceptions into media artefacts that have the power to transform, not merely to add to the mainstream. To build and protect an educational process and an institutional context, ensuring this outcome is our aim.
When you define such ambitious and complex goals – as many colleagues do in a similar vein at their institutions - you are faced with designing complex mechanisms of monitoring results. You cannot simply resort to forms, statistics and numbers; you must be reflective, sharp and inventive in your quality work. I think these attributes are exactly the assets the arts can bring to what is easily misunderstood as the dreary business of quality assurance.
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