Abstract

The paper presents the research that analysed the use of the teaching strategies – methods and procedures, teaching methods, and evaluation of students’ achievements – at one public art university in Croatia. The results show that the higher education in arts is based on contemporary didactic principles with a dominant paradigm of student-centered learning. Accordingly, students are encouraged to take an active role in the learning process, procedures of teaching arts are individualized, and monitoring the work and evaluating student progress is done systematically. However, there is a certain terminological inconsistency in the use of some didactic terms in teaching of art, since teaching art in higher education has appropriated the traditional didactic nomenclature, more suitable for teaching science. Through obtained results, the need for a conceptual redefinition was discovered, in which the specifics arising from the nature of artistic process, related to the specifics of individual artistic fields, would be emphasized and explained. The results show both positive and negative aspects of the current art teaching in higher education. The results of this research can contribute to better understanding of the art teaching as well as to the future systematization of teaching work at art faculties, especially in the part related to organization and evaluation of the teaching process.