Reading + Research
Methods explored
Decision making – eg from Brief Me Collective
A research journal for PGCert Academic Practice
Reading + Research
Methods explored
Decision making – eg from Brief Me Collective
Shift in project
0602 Collective Provisional research
Learning for Sustainability
Action Research
As part of my own professional practice working with design studios and commercial clients, I am often constructing and drawing on frameworks as a way of building projects from the ground up, evaluating projects with other member of a team, as a means of constructing and applying meaning and developing new ways of framing existing projects. I’ve used frameworks both internally with teams, and externally when teaching outside of the academic context as a facilitator. Frameworks for me are lenses, ways of understanding and communicating from a shared point of understanding. They are points of negotiation and sites where testing, stretching and reaching of projects and work can happen.
It has been interesting to start the Learning for Sustainability unit and meet the diverse range of practices and teachers on the course. It is clear already that this is a very emotionally complex subject, and as teachers we are all feeling an immense responsibility to deliver sessions to our students that are meaningfully, and responsible whilst not underplaying the absolute emergency in which we are operating.
We each had to bring an example of what we felt was good practice in action in terms of sustainability. I was particularly interested in the 8 to Create framework bought in by a fellow student, which was developed by The Sustainable Angle and focused on designing with sustainable materials. Although I had heard many of the 8 ideas posited before, it was done so in a clear and accessible way.
The session then focused on the application of different frameworks in order to test and certify the sustainability of a project or idea. The frameworks used were derived it seemed from the fashion space. It is obvious that this most material and pervasive of industries should be leading the way in terms of its responsible engagement with the systems and production methods it employs, but it was clear from using at least 2 of these frameworks that these ways of thinking and interrogating your projects was cross disciplinary.
TEDs TEN
“Since 1996, TED has been developing and refining a set of sustainable design strategies for textile and fashion designers.
These strategies have emerged out of a need for a toolbox for designers to help them navigate the complexity of sustainability issues and to offer real ways for designing ‘better’.
While the environmental impacts of our production and consumption system have become increasingly discussed and brought to the fore, and textile/fashion designers have begun to consider their responsibilities as creators of unsustainable products and systems, there have been few tools or frameworks for designers to be pro-active.
We became frustrated by the lack of real action in light of these often depressing facts, and wanted to create some strategies for positive change.
TEThese have now become The TEN and are continually changing and adapting. Please click on The TEN above to see the strategies” – http://www.tedresearch.net/teds-ten-aims/
Initially our group was tasked with using this framework in the exercise of designing an outdoor space for under utilised CSM roof. It was hard in the short session to interrogate our ideas, or indeed generate our ideas with touch points in all 10 strategies, so we focused on Design Activism…
Our idea became very immaterial and allowed for the space to be made a place by encouraging users to engage with a manifesto that would be collectively authored, but focused around a rehabilitation with nature. It is clear that even though this is specifically directed towards the fashion and textiles industry it clearly has reach across numerous disciplines and industries.
LIFE + DEATH TOOLKIT
“This toolkit was developed by Shibboleth Shechter and Tricia Austin in collaboration with MA Narrative Environments students.
The Life and Death Toolkit helps design students to reflect on the sustainability of their projects and make informed decisions throughout their design process. The toolkit consists of two sets of prompt cards and a worksheet. The prompt cards suggest topics to consider while the worksheet is used by students to record their reflections and evaluate the sustainability of their project.
The toolkit envisages design projects as part of a complex system or project ecology. It maintains that no project exists in isolation. It has been widely tested and well received by students.” – http://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/8217/
I was particularly impressed by this toolkit as it was so resolved and ultimately user friendly. It also intentionally functioned as a cross disciplinary frame work with which to interrogate projects and all stages of development.
FASHION FUTURES 2030
“Fashion Futures 2030 toolkit launched at Copenhagen Fashion Summit – an exciting new resource for industry leaders, educators and students.
Fashion Futures 2030 is an online toolkit designed to help educators, industry professionals and students engage in critical thought and discourse of fashion and nature through the exploration of four possible future scenarios. We have created tools and resources that explore different aspects of fashion futures with ways to incorporate them into your practice. By engaging with these future scenarios, fashion industry and education can develop visions, interventions and commitments to guide strategy for design, business and communication.
Fashion Futures 2030 toolkits are aimed at those teaching and working in fashion across a range of design, business and media roles and courses. The toolkit offers pathways for industry and educators which have been designed to be flexible enough to be planned and delivered as an hour-long ideation session, a one day workshop, or even a learning module.” – https://sustainable-fashion.com/projects/fashion-futures-2030-toolkit/
For me this was also a really powerful way of breaking through the usual discussion around sustainability. I respond really well to the idea of creative imaging as a tool to prompt alternative ways of being. If you can imagine it, it will become real. Think about the movements in feminist science fiction writing, or Afrofuturism. To break through, we must be able to imagine that something else is possible. As a thought experiment this is a great way to get students to really push, and would be incredibly useful to front load onto a project.
Thinking about my own students, we are always asking them to imagine what they will be doing in the future, be that in the short term… planning for their year in industry, or beyond that…. it will be important for the development of my workshop to ask them to imagine a future where the world isn’t as it is now. The jobs will not the be same as they will always be, who will our employers be? Who are we in service of? It will give me an opportunity also to do some imagining on their behalf. Also, it is interesting to note the connection between Tai Shani and her collective win of the Turner Prize 2019 in light of the collective imagining of a future of work and sustainable living for our students. https://elephant.art/why-we-need-art-collectives-now-more-than-ever/
The whole report (obviously) feels really focused on the systemic overhaul of university structures, but there is little on the direct effect on the student experience and impacts on their learning (the example of the permaculture club is a good one here). This doesn’t demonstrate that there needs to be high level executive backing for the genuine impact of sustainability within a university. The working together of the academic and corporate aspects of the institution.
This is evidenced in the U of Gloucester case study.
ESD is a vision of education that seeks to balance human and economic well-being with cultural traditions and respect for the earth’s natural resources. ESD applies transdisciplinary educational methods and approaches to develop an ethic for lifelong learning; fosters respect for human needs that are compatible with sustainable use of natural resources and the needs of the planet; and nurtures a sense of global solidarity. UNESCO Decade of ESD (DESD) 2005-2014
Interesting to see the social and ecological used within the definition here
sustainability ideals serve as an educational impulse and a goal for the improvement of learning processes
The unapologetic setting of ideals against this… it needs to be framed in this way
Critical pedagogies geared to futures and systems thinking, participatory and experiential learning, critical thinking, partnership working and values reflection, are all widely used in ESD
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildung
The term Bildung also corresponds to the Humboldtian model of higher education from the work of Prussian philosopher and educational administrator Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835). Thus, in this context, the concept of education becomes a lifelong process of human development, rather than mere training in gaining certain external knowledge or skills
https://infed.org/mobi/a-brief-introduction-to-holistic-education/ – has a useful reading list too and introduction to what is meant by holistic education: education should be understood as the art of cultivating the moral, emotional, physical, psychological and spiritual dimensions
This appears to be a good foundational framework to work within when developing ideas for delivery around this. It is clearly not subject/discipline dependant. – Does it suggest that we should do away with specialisms? What about what the ‘industry’ is insisting it needs. How does this develop ‘skills’ (annoying but a reality for our graduating students). Changing mindsets.
embedding approach as key to progressing the sustainability agenda and discouraged the creation of new specialist courses
This is an interesting approach from U of Glouscester – these courses often feel like ‘add ons’ and very reactive, rather than there being a reappraisal of what is already there. Everyone should be encouraged and given the framework to explore sustainability within their unique specialism.
“Those who are seeking to advance EfS in their institution need to find those opportunities, and key trends that are aligned to this agenda – so that you’re not opening new doors all the time. One needs to connect agendas whether that’s employability, active learning, work-focused learning, improving the overall student experience, and so on…” – effective change seems to happen in an organic way, rather than huge overhauls
I have waited a whole year to get into the Learning for Sustainability unit for my PGCert in Academic Practice. The ideas of sustainability are often seen as very material, but my work with students in the field of their professional practice at the Design School at LCC is a relatively immaterial approach. Through the unit I want to focus much more on the mindsets and cultures required for developing a sustainable approach to this subject. This will namely take the form of exploring collective ways of working as the foundations for sustainable work, living and beyond.
For me it seems strange to teach students about the importance of sustainability when we are preparing them to become participants in a global capitalist market place, which now universally acknowledged as requiring fundamental restructuring in order to begin to address the realities of the climate emergency and our reliance on the extractive processes of capitalism. The university’s emphasis on employability and increased links with industry often means that certain ideals of education (and in our case sustainability) are eventually subordinated to the contingencies of corporate capitalism. Employability is frequently promoted as increasing students’ personal capacities and capabilities in order to make them more likely to gain employment in their chosen careers. Through the emphasis on ‘self-enhancement’ and flexibility, students are promised security against unemployment. As such, employability becomes much more than skill development, and becomes a process of empowerment, it’s you against the world.
Remember it’s a jungle out there.
That jungle, the labor market as it stands, has not meaningfully evolved to address the environmental crisis, therefore the way we prepare (or empower) students to be at the heart of this evolution needs to apply to the delivery and frameworks used to teach professional practice.
The goal is to begin the process of empowering students to be agents of adaptive change by exploring dynamics of individual vs collective practice and presentation. These ideas still need to be refined in lots of ways to make it meaningful and useful in a workshop setting, but my thoughts are to create some exercises that are consciousness raising around the power of importance of a collective approach, but also that will have a direct practical implication. I am also keen to explore the social and political dimensions of sustainability (decolonising, recognising indigenous voices, precarity & politicised employability) beyond the ecological and material (though of course they are all enmeshed!) as the foundations for a sustainable approach, and explore students own cultural background and heritage as a way of exploring the sustainability agenda in professional practice.Here are some of the resources I’ve been looking at in case anyone is interested in this approach, and please do let me know if you have any thoughts or recommendations on further approaches and readings.
This has been really useful in term of practical exercises which explore unlearning institutions: https://www.valiz.nl/en/publications/unlearning-excercises.html from cleaning together to colour thinking.
This is very exciting political theory on the commons and life post capitalism: https://www.zedbooks.net/shop/book/omnia-sunt-communia/
I have been using this text with my students for the last year: http://joaap.org/press/pwb/PWB_TrainingForExploitation_smaller.pdf which gives teaching tools to explore the politicising of employability education and the culture of internships.
One of my students joint edited this really exciting publication from a students perspective about precarity and creative labour: https://theprecariatselfhelp.bigcartel.com/product/handbook
And I’m also really interested in the work of artist Rosalie Schweiker… http://rosalieschweiker.info/
About collaboration, kinship and solidarity with human and nonhuman beings…
https://www.dukeupress.edu/staying-with-the-trouble
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/donnaharaway
And have found the framing of the ecological crisis and mental health discussion by Timothy Morton really useful here (audio): https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000cl67/episodes/guide
Having attended a teaching observation with Jaqui where she introduced a group of students to the David Usborne Collection within the UAL archive. This is a collection of useful objects and it gave me my idea for conducting an object-based teaching activity. I am engaged in working with students to develop their approach to professional practice, and an important part of this is being able to take a brief and examine it. Alternatively, you could say that they have to be able to look at a problem and analyse it in order to ask questions about how to solve it. Seeing a collection of tools, objects that are specific to solving a particular problem, got me thinking about the briefing process within a professional context, and that by examining possible solutions, it might help us ask better questions about the problem at hand.
Objects are often a proposed solution to a problem. It is therefore possible to extrapolate problems or issues from objects, to work backwards from the conditions which brought about its production. By first considering how a problem might be solved, is it possible to gain a deeper understanding of the context in which it was created? In Dr Kirsten Hardie’s text Wow: The power of objects in object-based learning and teaching (2015) she cites Hooper-Greenhill observation that “students are encouraged to interpret the objects”, and acknowledges that “interpretation is the process for constructing meaning. Interpretation is part of the process of understanding”
For my session, my daughter and I raided the Poundshop in Birmingham city centre to find the most visually interesting objects that had very specific jobs, ie. they are singularly tailored in their form to the task that they are trying to complete. They are also strange and colourful to look at, and relatively abstract so that they might be able to spark interesting speculation about what they are in fact for. My aim is to use these objects and the teaching activity to allow students to quickly gain a new perspective of a problem (brief) through foregrounding the connections they make between their ‘prior knowledge and [the] new information presented to them’ (Reynolds and Speight 2008, p. 189) in a form of interpretation of the object as a way of understanding the context in which it might have been made or function.
I unfortunately missed the original micro teaching session with my group but managed to arrange a session with other students whom I hadn’t met before. It was interesting to arrange this with new colleagues and good to meet others from different parts of the institution with different specialisms. The session took place at LCC and the micro teaches ranged from us using a book in a very formalistic way to prompt new ways to develop research questions, to creating images on our phones and making protest banners. I found Laura’s session particularly useful.
Laura asked us to firstly handle and look at the object she had provided, in this case a book but it turns out that this could be anything, the object doesn’t really matter at this stage. We needed to write down on separate notes 10 things about the object itself. Following that, we had to write down 10 things about ourselves. From these selection of notes and thoughts we were then asked to formulate questions. Mine ranged from ‘what does an artist do with the smell of a library?’ to ‘how do black mothers read Shakespeare?’. I was surprised by the rapid way we could get to highly unique points of view, leaving the original object in our wake. The task relied solely on our own interpretation and experience of the object, rather than the object itself. The task felt very inclusive, as really no prior knowledge was needed to engage with it.
It was interesting to compare my approach to the object-based micro teaching session to Laura’s task. Having been inspired by what I had learned observing Jacqui, I was keen to use the objects to get participants to explore the context of the problem in which the object was created, therefore learning more about situation in the first place. On reflection now, I think this premise was a little too complicated. I had chose objects based on their aesthetic qualities, so that people would be drawn to them and want to engage with them. This part was successful as the group worked together to handle them, and choose which of the objects the wanted to focus on. My original lesson plan for the session had to be adapted as the group was only 3 people, so I asked them at the start whether they wanted to work individually or as a group of 3. They chose to work as a trio, which I felt was more effective as it caused them to enter into interesting discussion around the potential use of the objects.
The first part of the task was to LOOK. I started by using prompting questions:
Within your group, list your observations about that object, consider its visual and physical properties.
Can you tell how the object was made? (Carved, moulded, cast, etc.)
Describe the material from which it is made.
What size is it?
What shapes and colours are used in the object?
Is anything printed, stamped, or written on it?
The next part of the task the group were asked to GUESS. Here I asked them to speculate on what the object might be for, what might it do. Again I had prompting questions to help guide the discussion:
Each of these objects has a very specific function which is contained within its visual form. Take a few minutes as a group to interpret what the function of this object might be.
What might it be used for?
Who might use it?
Where might it be used?
When might it be used?
Finally, the group were asked to PROPOSE. This was where the key learning aspect of the task was supposed to be drawn. The idea was for the group to convert their thinking into the form of a question. This proved to be a little tricky, but once the group got the hang of it they managed to pose a number of questions. Some more serious and considered, some more lighthearted and frivolous.
Overall, I don’t think the teaching task was particularly successful in terms of getting them to understand the context in which the object was created. The task seemed to allow them to explore the visual form of the object in new ways. Although I had tried to select objects whose function, although contained within the form, was opaque, the group had seen these types of objects before and quickly guessed the correct use. I should at this point had developed a strategy to move the questioning of that object in a new way. Moving forward, I would streamline the learning for this task. It feels as though using objects in a speedy task can be a stepping stone to other ideas, rather than necessarily learning more deeply about contexts. The idea of looking at the context of an object, and the extrapolation of that from the object itself was inspired by looking at The Extrapolation Factory’s 99c Futures workshop conducted in 2013.
Having read the Extrapolation Factory’s Operators Manual I was really intrigued by their approach to the 99c stores in the USA. Within this they spoke of how the objects contained within allowed us to learn lots about the society in which they were created. For instance, although you might not be able to buy a VHS player in a 99c store, you would be able to find labels for a VHS cassette. By engaging with the object at hand, you would be able to extrapolate lots of ideas about the context in which it came into being. The VHS cassette labels allow us to talk about archiving, defunct technology, entertainment, piracy etc. This type of extrapolation was what I wanted to achieve within the task. However, I think this may have been too ambitious in the time frame allowed, and also I think the premise that I had tried to follow didn’t quite add up. I think what I ended up with was something that was trying to do too many things, not quite clearly enough! In the future, I might adopt some of the technique that Laura used within her session. The more immediate and personal reactions to an object. OR, I should be slightly more didactic with the object that I have chose, something that clearly speaks of contexts and worlds beyond itself, if that is the discussion that I wish to facilitate.
I already knew when Jaqui from my Teaching & Learning seminar group presented her personal introduction at our initial session, that I wanted to know more about what she did, and how she did it. Jaqui is a Curator at the Archives & Special Collections Centre, house at London College of Communication. Her practice is of course object focused, and the Archive was something that although I had been aware of at my time at LCC, I had never actually visited.
My form of teaching so far has been entirely removed from the physical. Post It notes are about as tangible as it gets. However, in the ‘real world’ I love tactility, and objects, and art works and collections. The idea of being able to bring it into my teaching seemed, at best, a pipe dream.
Teaching professional practice means that the students generally want ANSWERS from you. How do I get a job? What is wrong with my CV? Is my portfolio strong enough? Why don’t people reply to my emails?
There is not often opportunity for prolonged reflection.
The seed of change was planted by spending time observing Jacqui deliver a teaching session within the archive at LCC.
Jacqui was sharing some of the objects from the David Usborne Collection. This is a collection of useful objects, objects with purpose, tools. On the website for the collection there was a really interesting set of criteria which the collection used to select the objects:
The thought of the object’s ‘indifference’ to its decorative nature is very interesting, its function is key, its use, not the way it looks. But what Jacqui identified within this session is that we can identify ‘the problem’ if we work backwards from the object. I think it offers a brilliant perspective on the problem if we are able to look at a possible solution. And starting with that solution we are able to extract a context in which this object is the answer. It therefore allows us to ask questions about the context, and examine that as much as the solution itself. The solution (the object) gives us insights into ways to think about a problem.
In my practice as a teacher of ‘professional practice’, we are often situating the student experience within a selection of professional briefs. They are often asked to look at a problem and develop a solution, through a tried and tested method of examining the brief (the problem), conducting research (around the problem), ideating and prototyping solutions, then presenting their work. Is it possible to upset this process? Is it possible to start with a solution to the problem to allow their thought processes to develop in a different way? Can we ask them to solve the riddle of what this object is a possible solution for, to give them a greater understanding of the ‘problem’? This intuitive, personally lead way of working might indeed counter some of the cliches that can occur when approaching problems. Often it seems that when working with students, their initial response to the brief is already forming when they have finished reading it through. By slowing this process down, starting with ‘a solution’ and being asked to determine the problem themselves, might be develop more nuanced, personal responsive driven approached to the brief? Is it a way of developing empathy with the problem?
In a strange twist of the Jeopardy format, this is perhaps a great way invigorate discussions, and develop a method of ‘problem solving’ which allows us to draw empathetic conclusions to issues. It seems that this has a space within the development of a responsible practice. When tackling briefs, we are often over saturated when it comes to the ‘problem’ we are trying to solve. Having worked with students on a charity brief recently, the same responses seems to arise to the brief over and over again. By working back from the solution, we are able to ask new questions about the problem. By looking at how it’s tried to be solved, we can identify why there was a need for the solution in the first place.
As an approach, I really want to draw this into my teaching, especially when it comes to developing professional projects and collaborations with industry. It is something that I want to develop for my next Teaching & Learning tutorial session where we have to develop an object-based micro-teach.
In her work Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), Harraway discusses the use of string figures. String has often been employed within games as a form of practice thinking. These are: ‘relays,cat’s cradle, passing patterns back and forth, giving and receiving, patterning, holding the unasked-for pattern in one’s hands, responseability’, so it was interesting to be given string as a way of engaging with other participants in the Teaching and Learning seminar we attended in February. I find the use of string very powerful as a method of marking and monitoring a groups dynamic in the pursuit meaning making. As Harraway suggests, it embeds a sense of ‘responsibility’, or as she describes it the ability to be ‘response-able’. Through the visualisation of the group dialogue, participants are able to monitor and adjust the ebb and flow of the encounter, bringing in those and creating inclusive webs of discussion. One member of the seminar group said of the activity that it ‘speak to the generosity of the conversation’, and I would add here the responsibility of those participants within the conversation. The string speaks to all of our accountability, and the documentation of our shared quest of meaning. Here within the string figure, we are part of a sympoetic engagement, collectively producing a system of meaning.
As Harray goes on to say: ‘It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories’.
This method of visualising our engagement and creating inclusive discursive spaces allows for the recording of broad engagement with a subject, it visually ensures participation and welcomes inclusion. As Haraway says, ‘it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with’ – this process recognises the importance of individual context and cultures as vital to discursive meaning production.
This exercise informed some co-teaching sessions that I conducted as part of my role as lecturer on the Diploma in Professional Studies at LCC. We asked students to create physical networks of shared interests, and though this didn’t have discursive elements at the beginning, it allows for the creation of discursive groups based on areas of shared interests. Based on the physical linking, students were invited to start to consider how these relationships could manifest ‘in real life’. This activity asked them to think beyond disciplinary boundaries, and to create new learning relationships.
This also supports the activity Lindsay prepared for the session where we analysed a poem by Rainer Marie Rilke. The poem espouses the fact that learning happens exist in motion, its a dynamic dialogue between yourself and the ‘eternal partner’. It is great to be able to think of teaching as motion. I have tended to focus my efforts in a more static, transmissive format when teaching and these sessions have opened my thinking to the potential and power of discursive teaching, allowing me to step back from the role of information imparter, to being the one holding the string.
Text referenced:
Haraway, D.J., Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press Books, 2016
Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.
Wenger examines what creates a community of practice. This is not necessarily an ‘academic’ situation, and he uses a great example to describe it:
‘ nurses who meet regularly for lunch in a hospital cafeteria may not realize that their lunch discussions are one of their main sources of knowledge about how to care for patients’
It’s reassuring to know that this can happen over lunch. 🙂
He says: It is the combination of these three elements (below) that constitutes a community of practice. And it is by developing these three elements in parallel that one cultivates such a community.
How it works?
The sorts of activities that communities of practice engage in are:
Problem solving
Requests for info – feels a bit like asking the hive mind of facebook!
Seeking experience – I want to reach out to Carla both in terms of crossover but interest in how she works with mentors, I found that very interesting.
Reusing assets – how might this be relevant to us?
Coordination & Synergy – again, is there a way to make this relevant?
Discussing developments
Documentation projects
Visits – this if of course observations which have been very useful so far
Mapping knowledge and identifying gaps – I feel that this will be most of what we will do
Communities of practice have been around for as long as human beings have learned together. – I really enjoy this thought. I am trying to reflect on what communities of practice I might have been involved in that may have gone unnoticed. Although I believe strongly in communities, I think confidence has led me to not form those relationships based on shared experiences and shared goals. I think we’re often taught ‘in the real world’ to individualise our experiences, to celebrate individual achievements. I fundamentally disagree with this but it does not mean that I have not unconsciously distanced myself from these sorts of activities.
The community of practice is a living curriculum.
The very characteristics that make communities of practice a good fit for stewarding knowledge—autonomy, practitioner-orientation, informality, crossing boundaries—are also characteristics that make them a challenge for traditional hierarchical organizations.
Interestingly the development of a community of practices seems to be a socio-political act.
Key thoughts:
Communities of practice
Performative teaching
Although anxious about becoming a student again, I was really looking forward to the first Teaching & Learning session of the course. I had already had my first tutor observation, and he had confirmed suspicions that I already had about my teaching ‘practice’.
Excited by the diversity in the room. the varied motivations, and influences on teaching from the group were inspiring. As I come from a ‘professional’ context into the classroom, I often feel that my approach is not ‘academic’ enough, but being amongst difference really put me at ease.
Iestyn introduced the concept of ‘communities of practice’, a term I have been for a while with my own students, but that was picked up second hand from a colleague. Even without knowing its theoretical status, it seemed to make total sense in terms of what we were trying to achieve. This concept really forms a great underpinning of the work I currently do with a disparate cohort who undertake a year of experiential learning, annexed from the academic institution. This severing from the academic breast, sees them more than ever, need to develop the sense a community of practice. My students are clearly a ‘tribe learning to survive’, as Etienne Wenger says.
It is encouraging that I can join them on their journey and actually have a sense of empathetic engagement with what they are going through as they are finding their way in the world. My experience, however, will be in the negative. I will form a community of practice with my cohort within the academic context, and I could clearly see, through their introductory presentations how we can all learn from each other.
I think we all agreed that a pivotal moment in the session was Cai’s presentation. It felt more like a meditation that a personal introduction.
I was delighted by the way she took control of the room, filled it with light and led us. We all willingly went with her. Although I’m not sure that I learnt exactly what Cai did, the method in which she delivered stuck hard with me.
I was very glad to catch her on the way to the tube following the session to have a brief chat about her technique. We discussed risk-taking when it comes to students and their potential ‘eye roll’ at being asked to physicalise their engagement during a teaching session. Her fearlessness in seeking engagement was inspiring.
Her approach to this introduction, although different, reminded me in some ways of Yoko Ono’s event scores in her 1964 work Grapefruit. I have always found these provocations to be so beautiful, a perfect way to really see, or feel something. To push the act of looking, and being, whether in a space, in a thought, or in the world. Cai’s performative introduction took me there. Although not necessarily right to introduce verbatim, its a really inspiring thought to think that I might be able to bring these more conceptual provocations into how I design my teaching sessions.
Can we produce a series of event scores for the delivery of a session? It makes me very excited to think that we can.
On the way to the tube, I mentioned to Cai another, quite similar project from artists M Bayerdoerfer and R Schweiker, called teaching for people who prefer not to teach. They describe the project as:
‘a messy collection of ideas: contributions our friends and colleagues sent us, our own learning experiences and rumours we heard. You might ask yourself who this manual is for. Is it for teachers? Is it for students? Is it only relevant for teaching art? The answer is: Yes and No. We don’t know. Probably both. As self-employed artists, we have become used to performing our services anywhere, for anybody who books us. One day we might be doing a happy crafty afternoon in a primary school, the next day a post-graduate seminar on exhibition-making, the day after we’re making soup for the reading group we organised. And our methodologies need to work in all of these contexts.’
I was actually introduced to this book by one of my own students, and it feels like a real synthesis of Cai’s presentation, Yoko Ono’s instructions and the art school. I was excited when I first thought out asking students to ‘rub mustard into their feet’, but soon dismissed this as something for another type of teacher. The first session of the Teaching & Learning unit has made me think that perhaps, this is not the case.