Degrees of Difference

What’s in a name? Quite a bit, actually, says Bridie Lonie, head of the Otago Polytechnic School of Art.

The Art Schools’ flagship Bachelor of Fine Arts programme will evolve into the Bachelor of Visual Arts* next year, with the option of a diploma or a degree at the Bachelor or Honours level available to students.

Bridie is excited about the move, which she says is designed to enhance the key strengths of the existing program while offering greater flexibility and a wider range of options to students.

“We have the capacity here to deliver a skill-based teaching program with a lot of contact hours”, Bridie says. “The Bachelor of Visual Arts* bridges the gap between the face-to face experience with an artist-practitioner and a self-directed, research based, conceptual approach.”

One of the key features of the new programme is that students will be able to move towards specialization in a chosen discipline in the second semester of their first year, after experimenting with a range of ways of making art. There are eight specialization areas from which you can choose. This opportunity alone sets Otago Polytechnic apart from any other Art School in New Zealand.

“Students have been asking for an earlier move into specialization, so we’re responding to them”, Bridie says. “We’re also giving them a degree which takes three years instead of four and is then followed by a more accelerated postgraduate year.

She points out that there are some things, however, which remain the same.

“Our graduates come out having had a holistic education. They have transferable skills and they’ve had to learn a kind of professionalism. I think that graduates of this sort of program are more mature as a result of that process, because they have to meet themselves; they have to engage with themselves, and ultimately, the ideas are theirs.”

* Subject to final approval.