A GRAPHIC design lecturer has flown the flag for Swindon during a recent visit to South Africa to help other educators improve their teaching practices.

Nicky Ackland-Snow, who has taught graphic design at the School of Arts at Swindon College for the past 16 years, was invited to act as international external evaluator, joining a panel review for the North West University in Potchefstroom, South Africa.

She was asked to participate as the only international representative based on her work.

The conference aimed to share ideas about how to best teach graphic design and the other universities that attended were from Pretoria, Zimbabwe and Port Elizabeth.

Nicky, who lives in Chippenham, gave feedback on how the subject is taught in the UK.

“There were many other course lecturers from other countries there and it was really good to talk to them about graphic design within education and the trends in South Africa compared to the UK,” she said.

“When I was asked to visit, I was really excited and intrigued to compare what other people are doing in other countries and what we are doing for students in Swindon. A lot of what they are doing is very similar to us and we were taken over there to review their courses.

“What we found is that they needed a cross-culture approach. They tended to push their students too hard and that was one of the recommendations. It was about quantity over quality but it was still a very good course at a successful university.”

North West University is part of a transitions plan, where universities support local townships, going into schools to do workshops in local towns as art is not taught in schools in South Africa.

As part of the September visit, Nicky also ran workshops for a group of 40 third and fourth year students on handmade collage arts with clippings from 60-year-old British newspapers.

She hoped it would inspire them to make collaged response to the political comments through their artwork while reflecting on the British culture encompassed in the newspapers.

“Learning about the impact of collaboration with students was an important thing I came away with and the fact graphic design is culturally moving into handmade techniques rather than digital technology,” she added.

“The teachers there were visionary and they talked about this thing called an incubator which is when students finish their courses, they stay on campus for another year as freelance which was interest.”

In between teaching, Nicky runs her own graphic design business and is currently spending her time illustrating a series of books. She hopes Nicky is hopeful that it will be possible to set up a staff exchange programme to learn from each other, providing opportunities for collaboration, and that this in turn could extend to a student exchange.