Teaching Beyond the Curriculum

Before taking up the role of Deputy Director Academic at Glasgow School of Art, Rachel Dickson, was Dean of Academic Programmes at Central Saint Martins, she was Associate Head of School at Belfast School of Art, and have a history of designing and leading courses across all levels of Higher Education, from Foundation Art and Design [year zero], to BA Ceramics, Jewellery and Silversmithing, and more recently MFA Design. She graduated from the Royal College of Art with an MA Ceramics and Glass, and began her career in higher education almost immediately. As a maker, her focus is both personal and political, with recent works including a commission for the Northern Ireland Assembly launched on International Women’s Day, exploring the lack of female representation as Members of the Assembly. ‘At The Table [2016]’, a thirty piece ceramic dinner service visually exploring the data surrounding the lack of women in the role of MLA in the Assembly. Since 2015, she has been involved in the co-funded Creative Europe project ‘Ceramics and It’s Dimensions’, a project spanning eleven countries with twenty-five partners which bring museums, universities, and research institutes together to provide an integral view of ceramics past, present and future. She is also a judge of the international ‘Future Lights’ ceramics competition.

Dr. Eleanor Herring is a Lecturer in Design History & Theory. Eleanor graduated with a BA (Hons) in Design from The Glasgow School of Art and went on to graduate with distinction from the MA History of Design at the Royal College of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum. In 2010 Eleanor was awarded an AHRC Doctoral Bursary to study at the University of Edinburgh in the Department of Architectural History and Cultural Studies. Her PhD thesis, entitled ‘Furnishing the modern street: the critical reception to street furniture design in postwar Britain’ was completed in 2014. Eleanor has worked in Higher Education since 2006, teaching undergraduate and postgraduate design studies, design history and theory, design anthropology and material culture studies at a variety of institutions in the UK, as well as in Singapore, Germany and the Netherlands. She has taught on a number of practice-based and academic design programmes, As a lecturer in Design History & Theory, Eleanor’s teaching tends to focus on the issues surrounding design in a social, cultural, economic and political context, particularly the systems and structures underpinning design, the designed environment, the politics of space, authorless and anonymous design, and design policy. She is especially interested on ways in which different agents try to control the meaning of design and for what purpose.