Most undergraduate students are experienced in a traditional pedagogical culture in which it is the teacher's role to ask questions which the students then have to answer. If we think that a fundamental aim of university teaching is to enable students to become autonomous learners, this presents a dilemma for both teachers and students. The following paper reports on a project undertaken at the Western Australian School of Visual Arts during 1996, which aimed to introduce independent learning practices in the school's Visual Art Theory program by means of syndicate group learning. Research into the ways in which students responded to this initiative, in particular their perceptions of the opportunities and problems it presented to them in terms of their learning, are reported in the following paper, the particular focus of which is an analysis of the extent to which the students were enabled to raise their own questions. We also suggest some possible strategies to address the problems identified in this paper.
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