Riffing on writing

Abstract

My article looks at the problems generated by essay writing for two students that I taught contextual studies to, some ten years ago. Both students, bright and engaged, were poorly served by an assessment mechanism that failed to adapt to their needs – for cultural reasons, in the case of one student and due to educational needs in the other. The article explores the challenges that the students had, not in writing per se, but in the conceptual understanding of what a critical essay is, uncovering some of the limitations of art and design at tertiary level. Using my reflections as an educator, this article seeks to understand how to overcome unhelpful binaries that thwart creativity and to propose other ways of moving forward. This article is a response to Jenny Rintoul’s ‘“I came here to do art, not English”: Antecedent subject subcultures meet current practices of writing in art and design education’ (2022) in WoW Special Issue 1 of Journal of Writing in Creative Practice.