students as partners – Sebastian May

Observational notes at PgCert seminar. Image © Sebastian May.

As we explore the range of policies, frameworks, strategies, codes, principles, guides, regulations and more … available to use within our creative arts context, I begin to wonder how I position my own academic practice within this peculiar and complex higher education environment. Indeed, what are my values? How do I position them against this vast area of existing materials? How to prioritise what’s available to me, and against my own values, ethics, morals and beliefs?

In my practice, flexibility, creativity, and empathy are values that I continue to embrace and embed within different approaches. In some way, these become lenses through which I use other tools, such as some of the frameworks discussed in our recent workshop.

The UK Professional Standards Framework makes for an interesting reflective tool through which I can sense check my own approach but also my own value system. Its’ three dimensions (Activity, Knowledge, Values) are relevant to all parts of my practice, although there are areas around assessment and providing feedback which I have yet to develop in more detail. Where the framework lacks substance is around truly understanding students, which is very much part of my work around student engagement and experience.

I also wonder about the focus on developing professional practices, inherent in the UKPSF and other frameworks. Within my own practice, I have been exploring spaces of play, opening up more creative spaces for students to engage, explore and learn.

For example, it resonates with me what Gielen and van Heusden outline in A Plea for Communalist Teaching, where they discuss how teachers should “facilitate interactions between students and encourage them to learn from each other”, something which play can beautifully facilitate, sometimes in a disruptive way.

It may be difficult to argue that these spaces directly impact professional development, however I do believe these spaces are critical in the development. If spaces become a tool however, does the lack of disruption they offer counter their initial purpose or use?

Similarly, looking through UAL Principles of Climate, Racial and Social Justice, which explicitly hone in on very specific themes, I wonder how I am able to make small interventions within my own teaching practice to integrate at least parts of the framework and integrate these with my own values along the way; the university’s principles of practice make for a brilliant technical guide. For example, where I am unable to make changes to course handbooks, how can my delivery or management of a course, or simply the way I engage with students make a different that meets some of these asks, as well as my own values and aspirations within teaching and learning? Much of my practice focuses on creating new work, using materials and products, so there may be some easy ways to integrate environmentally-friendly and socially conscious modes of production. I am also thinking about ways my team could bring on board a Climate Advocate or Coordinator to evaluate what we do more broadly.

Bibliography

Gielen, P., & de Bruyne, P. (n.d.). (2012) Teaching Art in the Neoliberal Realm Realism versus Cynicism.

Attending last week’s Students as Co-Creators Symposium: Beyond Engagement (1), made for an inspiring day hearing from academics and students about dynamic approaches to teaching and learning.

Professor Catherine Bovill outlined the different relationships that we may engage in with students, from active learning to co-creation and partnerships. She describes the latter as creating the most ‘equal’ playing field. My biggest take-away from the conference was that whatever we can do to work more closely with students (as partners), even small interventions, will immediately improve their experience. This felt encouraging.

Throughout the day, I captured some interesting ideas, for example asking students to bring in localised / personal examples and connect these to their work. This is something I’m beginning to do in my drawing sessions and aligns with the idea of culturally relevant pedagogy described by Maria V. Luna-Thomas and Enilda Romero-Hall (1) and UAL’s online learning framework (2).

It was also interesting to see some of these ideas resurface in one of our PgCert sessions later in the week and how they worked in practice. I noticed some of them even neutralised each other. For example, during one session students were asked to create name cards (Teaching Intervention A) to facilitate communication and connectedness across the cohort. Later in the morning, however, students were then asked to rotate around the room (Teaching Intervention B) and I noticed that many lost their name cards along the way. I observed students looking slightly lost in their new groups, looking for each other’s name cards.

I thought one simple solution would have been to provide everyone with sticky tags that stayed with students throughout the day. I also thought there might be more playful ways to create connectedness amongst students, perhaps using association or role-play activities. This is something I hope to test in the future.

Further notes and reflections

I wondered about my own role in the situation above, if I should have pointed this out during the session or have helped the group make introductions.

With an interest in play, I’m also curious to look at some of these approaches in more detail. I wonder which approaches might even be considered or dismissed as play; what does it take for a learning approach to become play? I also wonder if some of these approaches are successful if they take on a disruptive nature. For example, can impromptu games engage or unsettle students? Does it come down to the individual in the room? More on this later.

Additional interventions to engage students referenced at the conference:

Using voting tools to start more personal conversations and creative processes, which I am planning to trial in some of my upcoming online sessions.
Asking students that they’ll be expected to summarise their class at the end of the session, which I believe is something that requires careful planning as putting students on the spot like this could cause unnecessary stress and does not feel inclusive to different abilities.
Explaining the reason behind learning approaches used in the ‘classroom’.
Asking students to use the classroom space different or move through the space during the class / lecture, e.g. one lecturer asked students to highlight traffic circulation patterns by physically moving through the lecture theatre.
Asking students to evaluation sessions, units and courses – and most importantly telling them that this would be expected of them at the start.
Creating safe spaces for discussion, amongst students.
Aligning class work to outside ‘real world’ examples, such as work lead by other institutions, such as the Design Council.

References

Hosted by AdvanceHE in Manchester.
Luna-Thomas, M.V. and Romero-Hall, E. (2023) “Culturally relevant pedagogy in digital praxis fosters an inclusive environment that embraces multiple ways of being and knowing, promotes democratic learning experiences, validates learners’ pre-existing knowledge, is bolstered by empathy and care, and fosters co-creation of knowledge across cultures.”
UAL online learning framework area 5 states: Be proactively inclusive. Take a universally inclusive approach to developing (digital) learning, environments and experiences that are fundamentally welcoming and accessible for everyone. Nurture the student community and celebrate diverse contributions to the curriculum, culture of UAL, and future of the global creative industries. Offer the support students need to succeed throughout their studies.

UAL online learning framework Download

Bibliography

Luna-Thomas, M.V. and Romero-Hall, E. (2023) “La Clave: Culturally Relevant Pedagogy in Digital Praxis,” in S. Köseoğlu, G. Veletsianos, and C. Rowell (eds) Critical Digital Pedagogy in Higher Education. Athabasca, AB: Athabasca University Press (Issues in Distance Education). Available at: https://read.aupress.ca/read/critical-digital-pedagogy-in-higher-education/section/01b49dc8-5d84-4f6f-a302-41fdc708d47b#cvi (Accessed: March 10, 2023).