by Tim Savage
When I began my career as a photography technician in higher education 25 years ago, the distinction between academic and technical work was clear and helpful. Academics were thought of as the ‘master practitioners’ who taught creative and professional practice, while technicians prepared facilities, maintained equipment, and helped students to use specialist resources safely. However, as my career progressed, I observed the boundaries between academic and technical roles and responsibilities becoming increasingly indistinct and porous.
In my most recent role, as Director of Technical Learning at a leading UK arts university, I led a technical team of 130 staff whose remits became deeply involved in teaching and learning; many gained teaching qualifications and sought professional recognition, and it became increasingly common for technicians to transition their careers into academia, particularly in disciplines driven by new and emerging technologies.
Technical duties at my institution evolved informally to include writing and delivering progressively developmental lesson plans aligned to module outcomes, devising innovative and differentiated ways of teaching advanced disciplinary skills, collaborating with students to define and solve complex problems without precedent, contributing to feedback and assessment, and helping students develop both the skills and mindsets to succeed in their studies and to flourish in their lives and careers beyond university.
The scale and impact of pre-planned technician-led teaching was evident in the timetable and in the quality of work presented for assessment, but remained much less visible during periods of self-directed study, when students sought personalised advice and guidance at the point of need, sometimes seeking assistance to realise an idea, or having reached the limits of their knowledge, or wanting to understand why something in their work had failed or resulted in an unanticipated outcome. Anecdotally, and through formal feedback channels, students consistently reported these unstructured exchanges with technicians as being among the most valuable and impactful pedagogies they experienced, both in terms of the quality of their outputs and in their confidence and abilities to enter their chosen careers.
The workforce, it seemed, was changing. Academic roles were becoming increasingly focused on theory, research, and curriculum development, while technicians took on more responsibility for teaching practical skills. In this new model, technicians increasingly found themselves positioned as the new ‘master practitioners’ holding specialist knowledge and occupying the pedagogic spaces their lecturer colleagues had previously held.
From my position within the university executive, I saw this change driven by role creep rather than strategy, and neither the operating model that funded it nor the structures or policies used to describe, manage, and quality-assure it kept pace. Furthermore, despite the clearly transformed roles and responsibilities, it remained problematic for technicians to claim that they teach.
My new book, Technical Teaching in Higher Education: Insights from the Creative Arts, examines and attempts to make sense of this shift, exploring the rich and textured pedagogies involved, and considering how institutions might use that understanding to improve teaching and learning.
Making sense of the technical turn
In my research, I describe the growing educational responsibilities of technicians as a ‘technical turn’. Within creative arts HE, I attribute this evolution to a combination of political, economic, social, and technological factors shaping the sector, accentuated by the incorporation and mergers of art schools and former polytechnics into universities.
Susan Orr theorises this shift in arts education as an ‘academic turn’ in which institutional missions and the hierarchies of knowledge taught and learned changed. Previously essential practical, tacit, and technical knowledge and skills became deprioritised in the curriculum, even as they remained central to student learning, experiences, and graduate outcomes. Jonathan Harwood’s concept of ‘academic drift’ offers a way of understanding these changes, which some critics associate with the loss of the traditional art school.
But neither the technical nor the academic turns, nor the role convergences they have enabled, are new or restricted to the creative arts. In 1997, the National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education identified how the formerly clear distinctions between academic and non-academic roles were becoming increasingly blurred across the sector.
More recently, the UKRI-funded TALENT Commission on which I served provided evidence of the extent of technical involvement in teaching. Its national survey found that 95% of creative arts respondents were involved in teaching activities, compared with 75% of respondents from other disciplines. Subsequent studies have illuminated the scale and breadth of technician teaching across UK universities. These findings show that technical teaching extends across the sector, although how technicians understand and approach this work remains comparatively under-examined.
Five conceptions of technical teaching
My doctoral research addressed a related question: how do visual arts technicians understand and approach their teaching? Using phenomenography, I explored variation in participants’ conceptions of their pedagogies. I interviewed technicians across the UK in different kinds of institutions, spanning art, craft, design, and media disciplines. I examined what participants believed they taught, how they taught it, and why. I identified five approaches: Demonstrator, Instructor, Consultant, Collaborator, and Transformer. Each describes a different way of understanding and approaching teaching, and participants drew on several of these approaches depending on the learner and the context.
Demonstrators see their role as introducing learners to safe and competent practice. Their teaching makes equipment, materials, software, and specialist environments accessible through clear explanations and repeatable processes. They use didactic methods, while prioritising the clear understanding of foundations and conventions from which students can begin to work independently.
Instructors help students acquire, develop and apply skills in unique and personalised ways. Their emphasis moves towards adapting techniques to different purposes and developing the practical judgement needed to use them. Learning how to operate a camera, for example, becomes less about controls and functions, and more about understanding how its use can serve a photographic intention.
Consultants see themselves as subject authorities, whose role is to respond to a learner’s particular problem or ambition. A student may arrive with an unsuccessful process, a technical problem, or an idea they cannot realise. Teaching involves diagnostic assessment, questioning, and advice that help the learner evaluate possible solutions, evaluate risks and benefits, and make informed decisions.
Collaborators work alongside students, sharing in their processes of exploration and discovery. Knowledge develops through dialogue, experimentation, iteration, and encounters with materials or processes. These interactions and exchanges can take both student and technician beyond their existing understanding, supporting unknown and uncertain outcomes.
Transformers focus on changes in how learners understand their practice and themselves as practitioners. Their aim is to challenge and expand what students believe they can do, how they approach their work, and to broaden their ambitions and move beyond perceived limits. Transformative pedagogies were also found to influence curricula, more effectively integrate with academia, and inform institutional approaches to practical learning.
These five qualitatively distinct conceptions span a spectrum from teacher-centred content delivery to student-centred, transformative learning. They describe ways of understanding technical teaching, and an individual may adopt different pedagogies at different times. The range was broadly comparable with that identified in research on academics’ conceptions of teaching.
Putting the framework to use
The taxonomy’s practical value lies in making these different educational approaches and purposes more explicit. For individual technicians and their managers, it can provide language to reflect on practice, discuss teaching with peers, and identify development needs. It can also help educational developers connect teaching qualifications, mentoring, and professional recognition, such as Advance HE Fellowships, using authentic technical teaching and learning scenarios and case studies.
For curriculum teams, the framework can help identify where technical learning can be deployed most effectively within a programme and aligned with learning outcomes and assessment criteria. An equipment induction may prepare students to enter a workshop, but subsequent projects may depend on consultation, experimentation, and feedback.
Quality assurance and enhancement follow the same logic. Peer observation, student feedback, and shared reflection could help teams understand how technical pedagogies contribute to learning and where they need improvement.
For senior leaders, a clearer understanding of who teaches the curriculum and how is essential to linking strategy and operations. The academic/technical polarisation of the workforce is becoming increasingly unsustainable, prompting legitimate but challenging questions about workload planning, staffing structures and cost, and curriculum development. Such debates are likely to become more urgent as universities increasingly describe technician pedagogies as evidence of institutional teaching excellence, prioritise technical expertise and skills teaching, and place both at the centre of graduate outcomes and employability agendas.
The framework offers an evidence-based starting point for these conversations at a sector level; for institutions, it can help improve the integration of academic theory and technical practice within a constructively aligned curriculum, strengthen collaboration and understanding across role boundaries and break down longstanding silos in support of student education, experiences, and outcomes.
Dr Tim Savage is a consultant, author, and trainer specialising in technical learning, technicians, and institutional change in higher education. He previously served as Director of Technical Learning at the University for the Creative Arts and is a Principal Fellow of Advance HE, recognised for sustained strategic leadership in technical learning and teaching. His latest book, based on his doctoral research, is Technical Teaching in Higher Education: Insights from the Creative Arts (Routledge, 2026)
