As Student Experience Lead at UAL Online, I continuously look at ways of improving the student experience, and a focus of my work is creating opportunities for student voice to support creative education online. For example, in 2023 I designed and launched UAL Online’s team of student partners, who support the co-design of online education at UAL and who have directly supported this action research project.
Therefore, part of the environment within which my research takes place is a specific online learning context that is aligned to the UAL Online Learning Framework (see below). It highlights six guiding values for the design, build and delivery of online learning and student experience, and forefronts flexibility, access and inclusion. It is important to recognise that I designed my research to align with this framework.
In addition, the UAL Online model structures online learning into three distinct categories: guided (45%), independent (40%), and live (15%). The focus of guided learning within this model made it interesting for me to spotlight it within my own research, shining a light on structured, self-paced learning that students are required to complete; although my wider work touches on all three categories.
I am also interested in some of the opportunities provided by guided learning to scale an offer of online learning, such as providing access to a larger and more diverse global cohort of students; compared with some residential offers that rely on predominant live delivery of creative education.
The project also brings together my own background in communications, the creative arts, and storytelling. I am particularly interested in how storytelling supports communities of creative students and enhances their experience. Copeland and de Moor (2018), for example, say that “digital stories carry the currency of authentic voice across networks when brokered effectively”. I am interested and how I can enable students to use their authentic voice and lived experiences within their studies.
In the previous PgCert unit, I looked at developing opportunities for students to explore their personal identities within classroom activities. In a way, my action research project is a continuation of this work but also goes further. Whereas the previous activity (or artefact) that I had designed enabled students to better understand their identities, the activity that I developed as part of the action research project enables students to express themselves much more freely, engage with their learning in a much more creative and more personal way, which supports the idea that their personal identities truly sit at the heart of what they do.
McNiff and Whitehead (2010, p.59) state that “What action research stands for is the realisation of human needs towards autonomy, loving relationships and productive work; the urge towards freedom, creativity and self-recreation.” As I previously wrote, through empowering storytelling activities in the classroom, I can empower different voices and hand over the reins to our students in a more meaningful way.
This isn’t to say that my own positionality doesn’t have a direct impact on how activities are run and supported. As Maisha Islam (2023) rightly says, “positionality influences every decision when you conduct research.” Nevertheless, through giving students agency to direct their own learning, we can open up learning activities to be more inclusive and socially just.
Bibliography
Copeland, S. and de Moor, A. (2018). Community Digital Storytelling for Collective Intelligence: towards a Storytelling Cycle of Trust. AI & SOCIETY, [online] 33(1), pp.101–111. doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s0014601707441.
Maisha Islam: Rethinking academic research culture and decolonial approaches to student-staff partnerships, (2023). [Podcast] Spotify: Pedagogies for Social Justice, Student Partnership. 23 Sep. Available at: https://open.spotify.com/show/1BhrbuKdFOIBmlzGYAZyui?si=0402efe096f14a1e [Accessed 16 Nov. 2023].
McNiff, J. and Whitehead, J. (2010). You and Your Action Research Project. 3rd ed. London: Routledge.