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.