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Refining teaching on the go

This week, I’ve been delivering a series of industry experience workshops for pre-degree students. As the sessions were somewhat spread out, I got the chance to reflect on each day of teaching, including on student engagement, and to amend things as I went on to deliver the next session.

Warm-up exercise asking students about their creative practice(s)

Having delivered the first two sessions, I noticed a few moments where student were confused about the task at hand, so I went back to the original instructions and tidied them up. I also more clearly organised questions, and rewrote rewrote questions to make them more explicit and easier to answer.

Another thing I noticed was that some students struggled with the idea of exploring their identities and embedding personal values within their creative work; a fairly complex subject but something I was keen to integrate within the class.

While I already made sure to spend time with student individually to go through this concept in detail, I also then added another slide to have students collectively think about the idea of identity.

The Iceberg—Visible and Hidden Identity

For this, I repurposed an existing exercise (2) to explore biases and simplified it so it allowed me to explore identity as a general concept; this was more fitting for the topics I wanted to discuss, but also more appropriate for the level of experience in the room. The additional ‘identity iceberg’ exercise also give me a chance to engage students in another way, and made the lesson more flexible. The exercise worked particularly well for an online session, where I asked students to contribute their own thoughts about their identities to an online board.

Extract from online workshop and student identity exercise

Aiming to make my lessons more inclusive, I am really keen to connect with students personal identities and backgrounds, however this can be challenging with students that are new to this concept, new to this type of education, and students with whom I haven’t had the chance to build up much of a relationship or trust – which naturally happens when teaching one off sessions.

I’m also finding that students’ limited understanding of English is making it difficult for me to delve into more complex subject areas, so there are a few hurdles to overcome.

I noticed some lulls towards the end of some of the sessions, but I am wondering if this is more my own personal discomfort with periods of silence in the classroom, or if students are truly disengaged. When I move around the classroom some students continue to work on their tasks or seem to be discussing questions, so perhaps this is more something to monitor rather than intervene, but also understand that some students might need silences and breaks, particularly in challenging lessons.

To improve on this, in my online session I made it explicit to students that they would have time for silent or group working, which I think helped them as well as me, setting expectations and avoiding any confusion or discomfort.

Having completed a week’s worth of teaching and looking back, one of the things I would really like to look at in future is students’ level of previous education and experience, as I think some of the topics and ideas that I tabled were too complex for them, even after I simplified them and included additional exercises and support. It may also be worth exploring with students slightly simpler tasks, but giving students the option to delve deeper into areas of specific interest to them; particularly as there tend to be students from many different creative backgrounds in the room.

References

  1. Teaching the identity iceberg: https://adl.org/sites/default/files/identity-iceberg/story.html
  2. The Iceberg—Visible and Hidden Identity: https://www.wondriumdaily.com/visible-and-hidden-identity/

At the intersection of contemporary art and communications

As I am developing a new series of interactive workshops with students, I am drawing on my own professional experience and have had the chance to reflect on my creative practice. This practice has largely revolved around two strands of work, communications and contemporary art, and I have worked at the intersection of these two areas for almost twenty years.

Contemporary art and communications meeting ground: graphic © Sebastian May

While much of my day to day practice feels natural and instinctive, I have spent a lot of time bringing these key practices and areas of interest together; focusing on projects that would allow me to draw from both areas and embed unique and meaningful perspectives.

But what is the actual output, if I had to describe it to someone? And what is the focus, or kernel of my practice, if I had to summarise it?

Often, on the communications side, I dedicate my work towards communicating artistic projects, or supporting other creative practitioners. On the contemporary arts side of things, I develop work that communicates specific messages, aims to enthral audiences.

Stepping away and looking at my practice from afar, it seems like the one connecting factor, my interest / passion / ethos, revolves around storytelling. I tell stories in my works of art, I tell stories in my communications campaigns, I tell stories in drawing on my creative practice in communications projects and vice-versa. Knowingly or not, this is also something I have been interested in and practiced from a young age, sketching out comics, poetry and performing in plays, dance, crafting ceramic works and drawing.

Even my interest in play and disruption, may not stem from the actual desire to play or disrupt, but from the unique stories these modes of pedagogy allow me to tell and in which to involve others. This is something I am planning to research further and see how I might be able to approach it through various lenses.