Initially I wanted to use focus groups for my primary research. One focus group comprising of staff members and one of students. However, my tutor directed me to this paper which highlights the ethics and problems of using focus groups which are very valid and applicable to my project.
The problem of whether of not one can speak one’s mind in a focus group is particularly important and relevant to this project. In both the students and staff group, there is a diversity of age, experience and cultural background. Some younger member of staff might feel less inclined to comment or vice versa.
This problem is also relevant in the student focus groups. A native English speaker from the West with a familiarity of the decolonising context will feel more confident in contributing whereas an international student might not as encouraged.
There is a need to balance out between avoiding or closing down potentially distressing discussion and silencing the voices of certain participants to whom such discussion may be important or beneficial. This balancing is quite a tricky thing to do.
On further research and reflection, I decided to change format to one-to-one interviews with staff and an interview like questionnaire for students. This is encourage them to speak their minds and take their time to respond to questions. This method is more labour intensive but will yield significantly better results I believe.
On reflecting on my questions for my questionnaire, I wondered about whether the term “decolonise mean the same for everyone.
A bit of context, my project is to look at widening ways of seeing in fine art / fine art education. Immediately, I thought of the term decolonising the gaze as a focus point of my research question. However, when I’m reflecting on my own experience as a teaching staff and as an art student and PG Cert student, maybe non-Western seems more appropriate.
For my IP Intervention, I wanted to create a resource list for non-European/Anglo-Saxan centric art and cultural institutions. This very non-western focussed project has led me to think about widening ways of seeing in our teaching methods. The development is firmly based on a non-western way of being and seeing. As I believe that Contemporary Art was born out of western art history, the canon and theoretical discourse is also firmly rooted in Western academic, social and cultural discourses.
When I started ARP, somehow subconsciously I conflate the two. Certainly most colonial powers in recent history are Western countries. However, the term “decolonise” is by no means limited to Western countries. A colonising power refers to dominating forces that control and extract a subjugated people. To decolonise means then to detach from its influence. Geography is not a prerequisite. We can see many examples of Eastern powers who dominate and control the peoples in their own country, the PRC regime and their domination over the Uyghurs is a case in point.
So when I say to “decolonise” way of seeing, what do I mean? I meant to acknowledge developments, influences, theories and knowledges that do not stem from the Contemporary Art canon. As Contemporary Art came from the West, its canon is also rooted in Western discourses. So perhaps for the purpose of ARP, I ought to use non-Western to be specific.
I brought this question to my tutor group. I am grateful for the useful comment that not everybody is familiar with the term “decolonise”, especially as some of my participants are students or alumni. A helpful suggestion though, is to be open about this in the questionnaire and to ask them what comes to mind if they are asked about decolonising ways of seeing in the fine art education context. In the end I decided to adopt this approach in order to be more open.
I have really enjoyed using the Shades of Noir resource throughout this unit. Some of the case studies it published, unfortunately, resonate with my own experience. And some, I have to admit, are also mistakes that I have made in the past and very useful to have them spelt out to me and know what I could have done differently – a very good self-evaluation tool. The Little Book of Big Case Studies, in particular, are very useful resources in giving us actionable options that we can take home and start practicing, as well as an index of external resources we can either use or direct our students to.
I read Paolo Freire’s seminal text Pedagogy of the Oppressed in the last TPP unit. This reading gave me new reflections which was invaluable. In my TPP blog, I wrote about Freire’s aversion to the banking model of the education and I reflected that this kind of model is less common in a fine art course, my teaching context. However, a few months on, I realized that this way of teaching is more common than I thought. In one to one tutorials and during group crits, yes, this way of working is less common. But beyond that, I could name a few examples where existing teaching sessions or seminars still operate in this “teacher-talk-student-listen” kind of manner.
This way of working also spills over to other elements of teaching such as assessment. This sentence particularly resonates with me: “it does not take into account their realities, their “situation in the world,” especially in terms of social status”. A situation occurred during assessment of a student’s work: a tutor gave a lower grade because the student did not reference a theorist. The student in question is a black student from a different cultural background where the academy or cultural theories do not reflect her reality. The other tutor rebuked that the student has actually chosen to not engage with that. It’s a choice that the student made.
This discovery made me pay more attention to Freire’s preferred approach of both teachers and students engaging in habitual, critical reflection, a model that takes into account their identities, where learning takes both directions; that tutors are guiding them rather than leading and that students are assisting in the steering. Reflecting on how this can actually be done in a seminar or lecture situation, it is actually not so different from what is normally done in a crit or tutorial, which is to ask the students questions and respond to those answers, and see how what I know could be useful to their realities and gauge their responses to what I suggested, rather than leading them to think that what I know/say is higher in the knowledge hierarchy.
The Robber Cave experiment under the section Social Identity Theory reminded me of the merits of the traditional Madrasa system. The Madrasa is a place of learning and training for Islamic sciences where traditionally, judges and Islamic scholars are produced. The way of education and structure is entirely different from the modern education system. Firstly, students can be of different ages and from different backgrounds. You are placed in a class based on level. You could be learning arabic with nine-year-olds if you are a twenty-two year old Muslim convert, as was the case for Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, the renowned American convert Islamic scholar. A class does not progress to the next level unless everybody in the class achieves together. This promotes cooperation and learning together rather than competing for the best grades or seeing how one can outshine another. The provocation is, the education system we have is built for the sake of the capitalist society where zero-sum thinking dominates. The degree classification is a case in point. If we could change our degree to pass or fail, like in German art schools, perhaps this kind of cooperative learning could begin to sprout?
On reviewing Finnigan and Richards’ report, two points jumped out to me. Firstly on widening participation. The university has embraced widening participation to make art education more inclusive which is great and worth celebrating. However, as discussed earlier, if we do not change our curriculum and pedagogy and start to take into account our students’ realities, their cultures and backgrounds, we are setting them up for failure. Secondly, a poignant point made in the report is that on emotional value of an artwork versus intellectual value. Our current course, although has changed in recent years, still has a great emphasis on a particular type of intellectual engagement which excludes certain practices, such as artworks that rely on emotion, personal experience and to a certain extent, popular culture. To be truly inclusive, us tutors need to make sure we make space for all of these practices.
According to the report, in the UK in the year 2006-07, only 3.6% of Creative Art and Design staff are BME. I believe the figure in UAL is higher than that. However, this brings to mind what Josephine Kwhali shared in the witnessing unconscious bias video where she argues that the system has worked and improved for white middle class women but not for the rest of the minority population. It was also shocking and saddening to hear her speak about how she learned about racism at the age of four. This reminded me of an anecdote from a podcast host who experienced racism as a young child in a school playground when he was called the n-word. If a young child can produce such verbal abuse in a playground, is it not indicative that this bias is very much conscious? Maybe if we confront them head-on instead of sweeping them under the carpet, we could see more improvements.
The paper points out some obvious points about secularism in higher education and in the west and inherent contradictions. What jumped out to me was the discussion on freedom of speech and prejudices against certain faith groups within the heading Public Sphere. In my teaching context in BA Fine Art, topics of gender and sexuality are often discussed and contextualized within art practices. Some of these concepts are in direct contradiction to beliefs of a person of faith. As was discussed in one of the seminar sessions, problems can arise when one party tries to prove the other wrong and tries to convince the other side to accept their ideology. The recent incident of a chaplain being sacked from a Church of England School and was reported to Prevent for views on marriage and human sexuality that are based on the CoE’s cannon law, was a case in point. In a truly inclusive society, as was discussed in Modood’s paper in the section on multiculturalism, one’s values should be respected without expectation of being assimilated. How can an university be inclusive when the society at large is not?
Coming back to my teaching context, although no incident as extreme as the incident described in Calhoun’s paper of students wearing t-shirts ridiculing Jesue and the prophet Mohammed has occurred in my teaching college, there is indeed underlying pressure to conform especially when many of the theorists and theory texts discussed within the curriculum are French or continental theorists who are either secular and explicitly anti-religion. I have only encountered one student whose art practice is inspired by her faith. During our tutorials, she has expressed anxiety over “offending” others with her views in a secular university. Even though the views in question were mild and sometimes common sense in nature, I am saddened to hear that such fear permeates in the first place.
It is very telling when I read the case study of Aaliyah from the Little Book of Big Case Studies on Faith, when she found herself under attack by her fellow classmates on the drawing of hijab. This explains my student’s anxiety. Currently at college, there is very little understanding of religious faiths in general and unfortunately, a larger still misunderstanding and ignorance on the muslim faith, on the wearing of the hijab or other outer symbols of faith. One thing that stood out to me was how she had hoped the tutor could create a safe space for discussion.
The need to create space for discussion and learning as a tutor is also a big learning for me. I delivered a lecture this year where some of the content contradicted my own personal beliefs. It was a success and students came up to me and said how they really enjoyed that section of the lecture. I felt a sense of discomfort and unease after it. After speaking to a peer of mine who is also an art lecturer, she reminded me that as an art tutor, a huge part of my role is there to make space for different opinions. It’s not about me and who I am and what I believe in but how I can facilitate conversations and therefore learning and growth in the students regardless of difference and opinions. This is such an important point, reflecting on Freire’s approach to pedagogy, us tutors are facilitators rather than leading them down a path we think are “correct”. By extension, for an inclusive curriculum, one must not leave out content just because one is not familiar with or in total agreement with if it Is relevant and have significance for students’ journey.
The highlight of the film for me is when she said she wishes we could hear with the eyes. It was amazing to see how she uses different medium to translate one sense perception to another through performance. She was literally “making sounds”. This is important as it expands my thinking on perception. How sound, sight, touch can be way more than how they are come across through hearing, seeing and touching. And how people with disability have a more expanded field of perception. In fact, this is far from being “disabled” but “trans-abled” – having abilities transcending the normal perceived notion of perceptions. Although within my teaching practice, I seldom encounter students with sense disability, many of them have learning disability or are neurodivergent. Many of them are incredible in other modes of communication for example, a student of mine has severe dyslexia but is an amazing coder and made incredible robotic installations. This film demonstrates so beautifully that “abilities” come in many different forms and they are all legitimate and worth celebrating.
Responding to resources #DisabilityTooWhite article/interview with Vilissa Thompson & ‘Deaf Accessibility for Spoonies: Lessons from Touring Eve and Mary Are Having Coffee’ by Khairani Barokka (accessible via Moodle).
I’d like to combine my responses of the two resources as they are interrelated. The interview connects me back to what we’ve learned from session 1 and 2 about intersectionality and the complexity around having more than one or more disadvantages, one of which being invisible disability, that are prone to oppression. A particular shocking statistic about how less black children are diagnosed with dyslexia because their learning disabilities become normalised as part of who they are, which is an ugly symptom of structural and systemic racism so ingrained in our society.
Barroka’s piece hits the nail in the head on this issue. A particularly illuminating point is how she takes ‘the social model notion of disabled as the opposite of ‘enabled’ rather than ‘unable’, which is the view that disability is caused by barriers in society and how it is organised, rather than by a person’s impairment or difference. This speaks to the above point about a person being “trans-abled” rather than disabled. If she cannot perform standing up, she can perform sitting down. I feel that this notion is very empowering and will definitely apply this to my teaching practice. Perhaps I’ll spend time devising teaching tools that will empower students with dyslexia, mental health, neurodivergent issues in using their disabilities to their advantage in creating wonderful pieces of writing and artworks.
Crits is a central part of art school and often seen as a rites of passage. However, it is also a stress-inducing model. From my own experience and on reflection, I think the reliance on crits in art school for feedback has turned away a section of students. As I teach on Year 3, there’s generally half of the cohort who rarely or never turn up to group crits unless they are mandated for assessment. Who would blame them if this is a stressful, embarrassing experience from which they obtain little educational value?
Crits are an essential component of art school because it can be a very successful model for verbal feedback and a non-prescription style of teaching that dovetails the dialogical approach in art and design education especially on fine art courses. However, this modality might suit only certain types of students.
This is confirmed by the study by Peter Day from Wolverhampton University in 2012 (find it here). His research showed a) deep concerns amongst students towards being criticised; they expressed emotional and fear towards feedback, this is amplified by the public nature of the Crit. b) students who are struggling the most benefit least from the crit model. These students have nothing or little work to show or to contribute to the conversation and often feel ignored. The crit can therefore be divisive, splitting those students for whom the process works and those for whom it does not.
To be truly inclusive, art schools need to provide more different types of discussions of works to enable those students who do not tune into this type of learning to benefit from feedback. This can mean greater tutor contact and individualised support, smaller groups, more peer-to-peer feedback.
On reflection, it’s not necessarily the crit that is bad, but the timing and format of it. In my experience, the college have tried to change the name of crit into something else – “discussion”, “presentation of work”, “conversation about the work”, etc. Changing how you name it is not enough if you don’t change the framework or ground rules. Ideas to improving the crit could be, as suggested by the research, to explore the student role and voice as well as by providing clear guidelines relating to the role of subjective and constructive feedback.
However, the format won’t necessarily address the psychological and self-esteem related to the fear of “being criticised”. Many art students use their artworks as conduits to externalised their trauma. Sometimes the art school environment that emphasises criticality in their art practice is simply not the right place for the artist to feel seen, heard and supported.
My former classmate and a veteran art lecturer Geraldine Snell has just launched “heart school“, a holistic, person-centred and wellness focussed approach to nurture creative expression. This really filled the void and a urgent need that I see in art education. Of course, this sits outside of the critical framework art schools around the world endorses. This however does not mean that us as tutors cannot glean from other more wholistic and healing approaches to coaching and adjust our methods for certain groups of students.
It was a fruitful day today. I am grateful for the diversity of teaching practices that my cohort presented. I learned a lot from observing my fellow classmates’ teaching. I have compiled a summary of feedback from the sessions. I have taken out names and any relevant contexts but distilled them down to universal teaching tips which I hope to use as a resource to refer back to for planning and designing.
Verbal confirmation: It is good to verbally confirm that what the student has done is okay, good, reaffirming the right process. For e.g. “you’re doing great there”, “there is no right or wrong, don’t worry.”
Co-teaching: to co-opt people in the room to teach with you, verbally rewarding responses from students. For e.g. say thank you to somebody who gave you an answer.
Admitting mistakes: whenever confusion arises from students, or mistakes being spotted, be very relaxed about the imprecision and confusion. Admitting own mistake has a group bonding and relaxation effect.
Set ground rules: state your preferences down / set the ground rules, in the first session and early on. For e.g., no phones during session, leave questions at the very end of the session, etc.\
Accessibility: be mindful of accessibility and inclusivity, in particular invisible disability. Students may not be able to engage in the way you want them to. Always ask before hand and don’t assume.
Balance: learn to strike a balance between theory and practice. Too much theory makes one lose touch with the practice but practice only without theory lacks substance.
Physical handouts are a good way of anchoring the sessions
Timing: think about the time of day or time of year, stage of the students and tailor the balance between interactivity and quiet passive learning.
Notes from “Innovative pedagogies series: Wow: The power of objects in object-based learning and teaching” by Dr Kirsten Hardie, Associate Professor Arts University Bournemouth
Why OBL?
to develop students’ knowledge and understanding of, and the ability to use, the language and approaches that are used to define, decode and decipher how we communicate and read and judge the visual across a variety of contexts (AUB 2012). i.e. The use of objects enables learners to communicate visually.
Students are encouraged to interpret the objects: “interpretation is the process for constructing meaning. Interpretation is part of the process of understanding” (Hooper-Greenhill 1999, p. 50).
Objects can be particularly stimulating in relation to learning processes when handled and studied closely. Objects can act to ground abstract experiences, can enable recall of knowledge, and can arouse curiosity. (Hooper-Greenhill 1999, p. 21).
How? one way of doing it could be to request all students write a detailed consideration of the objects that includes related sketches, photographs and quotations.
Answer questions such as: (within the design context) what is its function, age and target audience? Who designed and manufactured it? Is it ergonomically designed? What does the object communicate and what values do you think it has? (E.g. financial, social, historical or cultural). To understand objects beyond the obvious issues of function and purpose
Based on the article I read (notes below). My proposed object-based learning exercise will be tailored to first year fine art students. I would like them to be able to view and analyse an (art) object based two approaches – the heart-centred approach and the head-centred.
Part 1: If it is a 3d object small enough to be handled with two hands, I’d like them to feel it under the table with their hands. Describe how and what they can feel. Shape, surfaces, weight, texture,
Then I will ask them how they feel about the object by only feeling them. Not physically describing it but how the object makes your feel. Can you feel something by touch only?
They will then draw it on a piece of paper without looking at the object based on the descriptors and feelings they have just shared with the group.
Part II: Then I will reveal the object. They will now use a head-centred approach to describe the object in as much detail as possible (visual analysis).
Objective is to be able to analyse an object with as much detail as possible based on visual analysis.
Then we move on to heart based analysis. How does this object makes you feel?
And the second and final drawing exercise is to draw the object without representing the object but based on how you feel about the object, thinking about the feelings and description from part I. this is a Heart-based approach to drawing and representing.
The Allan Davies article on learning outcomes (LOs) and assessment criteria (AC) in art and design provides very good food for thought for designing learning outcomes. (Article link.)
The article essentially offers a critique of traditional academic LOs and AC, referencing Biggs (2003) as the main argument. John Biggs’ book, Teaching for Quality Learning at University (2003) is highly influential, has been used subsequently as a key reader on most courses for new teachers in universities throughout the UK. Assessment criteria in most universities were derived from Bloom’s taxonomy (1956)(see below for graph of Bloom’s taxonomy) which is outdated and unsuitable for art and design curriculum. (See also Hussey and Smith (2002) for valuable critique of learning outcomes).
In the case of art and design, sometimes LO can be ambiguous but students understand what is required of them. In a Fine Art degree, in particular, such implicit understanding is perhaps most prominent amongst other art and design courses. As davies writes, “Indeed, learning outcomes, ambiguous or otherwise, appear to be no substitute for established learner support systems and other frameworks that help students understand what they have to do in order to successfully complete a programme of work. Briefs and briefings are familiar in art and design along with tutorials, interim crits and feedback forums. It is during these supportive scenarios that art and design students formulate their intentions and actions and come to understand what ‘imagination’, ‘creativity’, ‘risk-taking’, etc, (the very terms regarded as potentially ambiguous) actually mean for them.”
And I agree with him in the point that insistence that learning outcomes should be sufficiently clear ‘to be measurable’ has not helped subject areas, such as the creative arts, in which articulating outcomes that involve the development of intuition, inventiveness, imagination, visualisation, risk-taking, etc, is challenging.
In terms of meaningfulness, they equate to the notion of ‘understanding’, a cognitive term which is regarded as too complex and which should be substituted by other, more measurable, terms such as, ‘explain’, ‘analyse’, etc. Another drawback in the use for these terms, acknowledged by Biggs (2003), is that they are regarded as ‘divergent’ and as such do not invite one appropriate answer but a range of possibilities.
I really like the concept of a “quarry” rather than a defined set of outcomes. He writes that for art and design students, formulating and finding their own quarry is an essential part of the discovery process. They do, nevertheless, need to know the ‘landscape’ and the ‘boundaries’ when they are in full pursuit. It might be that these are better articulated in the form of a discourse than in specific outcome form and more usefully manifested in project briefings, team meetings, etc. This resonates with my experience teaching fine art students. they intuitively know what they have learned from attending crits and absorb the knowledge through contributing to the dialogue, listening to responses from other students and teachers. Slowly this is how criticality is developed and LO achieved implicitly through dialogue, discourse and process.
Allan Davies’ conclusion is that in art and design whilst it is important that students know what they have to do on any course of study, it is not necessarily through published learning outcomes. Learning outcomes might be seen as necessary for administrative purposes but they are not sufficient in helping students develop an idea of what they will be learning and how they will go about it. Indeed, in a highly supportive context, learning outcomes might be so generalised as to only define the landscape and the boundaries of their intended learning. The knowing of what to do becomes developmental and personalised. Rather than measurability the focus should be on meaningfulness. It is better to provide a structure for discussions with the students to enable them to begin to engage in the discourses of the community in which they are joining than to assume they understand how they will perform against ‘measurable’ outcomes.
This is completely my experience but that doesn’t mean designing LOs and AC are meaningless, instead, they are good for teaching staff to check back against when planning and designing a class, workshop or a teaching activity. There is definitely pedagogic value but perhaps not to measure the students progress but for the teachers to reflect upon their own teaching’s effectieness.
Some definitions:
SOLO taxonomy – Structure of the Observed Learning Outcome, is a means of classifying learning outcomes in terms of their complexity, enabling us to assess students’ work in terms of its quality not of how many bits of this and of that they have got right.
Constructive Alignment : “In constructive alignment, we start with the outcomes we intend students to learn, and align teaching and assessment to those outcomes. The outcome statements contain a learning activity, a verb, that students need to perform to best achieve the outcome, such as “apply expectancy-value theory of motivation”, or “explain the concept of … “. (From John Bigg’s blog. https://www.johnbiggs.com.au/academic/constructive-alignment/)
I had a nice conversation with a colleague and also a fellow PGCert student, about conversations in tutorials and crits. He agreed with the primacy of this in our teaching. He also remembered Victoria Odenyini, a researcher who was studying conversations with multilingual students who observed his teaching. He commented that it is very interesting how she’d picked up linguistic nuances which are very important within conversation-based learning. For example, pauses within statements, pauses after questions, speed of speech, etc, etc. This all make a big difference in the teaching session.
I know that I have a tendency to speak too quickly and speak my mind too quickly. And also feel the need to fill silences. I need to let silences breathe and live within a teaching session as this will allow time for quieter students or students whose english is not their first language to respond.
