Cultural Characteristics of Art Students

Extensive changes in recent decades have affected Iranian universities and due to these changes focusing on cultural programs has increased. Cultural planning requires a comprehensive understanding of the community's values, attitudes, and behaviors, because each cultural policy ultimately needs to be accepted by its target audience. Therefore, identifying the status quo can be considered as a prerequisite for cultural planning. The objectives of this paper are to identify the status quo of Art universities and the students by investigating their cultural traits, and to present suitable strategies for cultural planning. This paper is based on a qualitative research, which was conducted at two universities – Tehran University of Art and Tehran College of Fine Arts. The methods used to collect data, were in-depth unstructured interview and focus group analysis. The most important finding of this research is the significant difference of cultural conditions between art students and students of other majors. This difference should not be treated in a superficial manner. The first step in addressing this differentiation is to discriminate the origins of the differences. The results indicate that some of these differences are related to the nature of art majors, and thus inevitable, while some other differences must be tracked down and taken into account by policy makers.