PGCert Good Stuff

Although reflexive and ethnographic research are the foundation of my research, I will also use visual research as a method of investigating my question. I intend to do this in the form of a small quiz, which is intended to be a game that enables me to introduce the subject of citation to the students in a fun and inquisitive manner. There will be “citation characters” based on characters from Adventure Time (an EXCELLENT cartoon) that represent different citational practices, and by participating, the students will discover what citational character they are. Next to the quiz will be information about artists who use citation in a number of ways (visual, textual) in their practice, so the students are able to familiarise themselves with practitioners who engage with this methodology in visible ways. The quiz and artworks combine to make a graphic diagram that will act as a form of visual research. In keeping with my values and interest in anti-racist and inclusive pedagogies, all the artists shared will cover a range of positionalities and intersectionalities with regards to race, gender, sexuality etc. Sharing different examples of artists who use citation in their work will enable me to share the work of artists who I am interested in within my own practice. I’ll be able to use the space of the interview to discuss each artists approach to citation from a position of sincerity and confidence, as they are artists I’m conscious of due to my own research and interests in artists who explore identity politics, the existence of alternative realities/histories and questions of inclusivity in their own work.

Visual methods are often used in online and collaborative e-learning, and as the design of my interview is semi-structured, the addition of visual methods fits well with the collaborative nature of the interview that I have designed. My graphic diagram utilises the principles of using visual data to capture information (which will be used as primary data for my SIP) whilst also creating an oppurtunity for me to build a relationship with my participants. This can be described as visual elicitation and visual collaboration as a way for me and my participants to talk about citation in a way that mirrors my interest in critical and collaborative learning. As described by Janet Salmons in her paper on Visual Research,“…researchers collect visual data to give a deeper sense of the cultural or social milieu…” Using image based material in my quiz will allow me to add a layer of meaning and content with the participants. I hope that this will engender a discussion that is rich and full of information that sits outside what can be explained solely with text.

A question can be asked in a number of ways and this includes using imagery. With this in mind, it’s important that I use visual aids so my research is as broad in its accessibility as possible. I’m aware that people learn in different ways, and although the quiz is designed to create context for the interview and “break the ice” as it were, it’s also an opportunity for me to encourage alternative ways of engaging with my question of citation. Commenting on Prykel’s premise that researchers should consider the character of their questions as it impacts the type of knowledge generated, Salmon states, “Must questions be posed with words? Can questions be posed with pictures?” I am conscious that some students are visual learners, or have disabilities that mean they process information in neuro-diverse ways. In keeping with my belief in inclusive and social justice pedagogies, the quiz and images of artworks act as a graphic image that poses a question on citation that is explored through visual languages. As a graphic image the quiz contains text alongside imagery, so I will use the interview as a space to discuss the results of the quiz, so that if any students need support in completing it, we can do it together.

Above is an example of one of the artists that feature in the citational character quiz the students will complete before the interview. Deana Lawson has photographed two individuals in a domestic setting, wearing clothes that are indicative of American Black culture, and one figure has a gold contraption in his mouth. In the corner of this photograph is a historical document (in the form of an image) of George Washington’s teeth. As well as being citational, the photograph in it’s entirety is an example of creative research. As it is outlined in Creative Research Methods in the Sciences, Lawson’s photograph is ‘honouring, eliciting and expressing cultural ways of knowing.’ Lawson uses her photographic practice as a visual and creative research method, by demonstrating a knowledge of both contemporary and historical cultures and events that pertain to the lives of Black people. Positioning the teeth of a president who is said to have had false sets of teeth made from his slaves, within a photograph of two Black people, raises questions about the origin of information, context, citational practices, what is known and unknown within an image, how positionality affects the content within an image/the experience of the viewer…..the list goes on. I hope my graphic diagram will in some ways mirror aspects of what I think Lawson accomplishes with this photograph, as I intend to raise questions about positionality, the origin of information, and citational practices.

“Participatory visual approaches allow researchers to build relationships and rapport by ‘acknowledging participants as experts in their own lives, facilitating empowerment, valuing collaboration, and effecting change in the participant or community’ (Pain, 2012, p. 321)”

It is apparent how impactful visual research can be when investigating or exploring, and the quote above details how I can use my quiz and works by artists to create a collaborative and critical conversation that centres the students as experts in their practice, citational or otherwise. Using visual methods allows me to facilitate the conversation with materials that encourage the expression of individuality, emotions and self knowledge. I hope this will enable me to create a positive rapport with my students, making the conversation that takes place during the interview dynamic and reciprocal.

Providing visual examples of artist’s practices will also add depth to the content that is created during the interview, as I will be able to ask the students what they know about the artists’ practices, and depending on their responses, I will be able to either share information about them, or ask the students what they think about their citational practice, thus creating a space for explorative and open ended dialogue. One of my fellow peers (Annoushka) gave me an example of an online visual research database that she created with her students, where there is an amalgamation of imagery with captions to outline what the image is.

This approach to sharing information and discussing objects, artworks, ideas visually is a wonderful way to create inclusive and discursive content, and it encourages students to exercise their critical thinking skills in a playful manner (thinking of Gadamer again). It also allows students to respond to visual matter from their positionality, which means that everyone will have an entirely unique response to what they’re looking at, and encouraging this is an important way to develop student’s relationship to ethnographic and reflective methodologies. All of this is to say that there is an intricate and wonderful web that can be spun, all through using an image as a prompt for discussion. It is my hope that this blended approach of combining visual and creative research methods alongside my interests as a practitioner, will create a safe and dialogic space with my students, where I can share my expertise on the subject of inclusive citational practices with the students, and we can then talk about their own relationship to citation whilst studying.

When we met today we were asked to consider semiotics, and how we might find an image to sum up our ideas about research. I rarely think about the connection of images to words/thoughts/ideas, but the discussion around semiotics allowed me to think about how I relate to words/thoughts/ideas as an artist, as an individual and as a lecturer. In relation to the idea of what image might describe research I thought about how I consider investigating in terms of sniffing things out, or digging for something, so I found this video of Pluto climbing over (and under) a no. of things to follow the tiny effervescent creature in front of him.

We were asked to do this exercise because we were considering the role of analysis and how semiotics might be useful in analysing our primary data. However, I’m more interested in thematic analysis, and although this is the case I did feel an affinity to the image of Pluto using his nose to help him investigate something interesting. Instead of chasing a green creepy crawly, I investigated the question,

‘How Do You Use Citation In Your Practice As An Artist?’

and I was able to gather a lot of information about the different ways that students relate to and use citation within their practice. I used the (torturous) time transcribing the interviews to become familiar with the content gathered, and I’m now able to use this primary data to start my thematic analysis.

As described by Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke,

‘…..reflexive Thematic Analysis is a process that really prioritises depth of engagement, dwelling with your data, and spending time reflecting on what they mean, and what stories you can tell about them. Good quality Thematic Analysis is definitely not the result of a once over lightly process! You need to give yourself time for reflecting, pondering, and making connections. This means time to put your data down and let your thoughts about it just percolate away in the background. In some ways we can see reflexive Thematic Analysis as part of the slow academia movement – it’s a process that benefits from time and space.‘

What a lovely summation of what thematic analysis is. I’m able to see how a committed and patient approach to reviewing and engaging with my material will allow me to absorb the information that is most relevant and crucial. The open ended nature of where this will take me is exciting, as participating in the SIP and taking part in Action Research cycles has taught me that there is often an element of surprise involved with carrying out an intervention and reviewing primary data when you go through the process thoroughly. As the interviews were carried out over a period two weeks, I did indeed have time to reflect on them over a prolonged amount of time, and I have now created some semantic and latent codes that explore the themes and patterns that are prevalent in all three interviews.

When I first considered how to use thematic analysis to analyse my data it was difficult to understand how to interpret the vast amount of information I had as there were a lot of different things to focus on and consider, and each of the students responded in unique ways to the same questions. However, transcribing the interviews did highlight a lot of similarities in the way students felt about/responded to certain subjects, and one of the benefits of using semantic and latent codes is that I was able to clearly organise the inforamtion so that it was evident where the patterns and themes resided within the content of the interview. When reviewing Braun and Clarke’s writing on qualitative research, Professor Susan Luckman states,’

‘…successful researchers need to be constantly engaged in an active iterative process of writing, reflection, review and revision’

This was applicable to the process of combing through the interview material to draw out the similarities and differences in what students felt about citation, and after doing so I had a clear idea of what was most influencing/affecting their experiences of citation whilst studying.

Another part of analysing my data consisted of considering how to review primary data collected from the visual material. Below is an image outlining the process involved in crating visual material for the interview, and how it was then used to elicit conversation about citation with the students.

The visual communication that was shared with the students prior to the interview (quiz and images of artworks) was used to add to the depth of conversation around citation, and it was incredibly rewarding to see participants engage with the quiz and artworks in an inquisitive, thoughtful and critical manner. I used graphic communication to introduce ideas around citation via a game/images of artworks that may or may or not have been known. I then used graphic elicitation to listen to the students’ response to the material, discussing what they thought about the quiz and their results. and whether they were familiar with the artworks shared beside the quiz. In keeping with Nathan Crilly, Alan F. Blackwell & P. John Clarkson’s review on graphic diagrams, I used the quiz to provide,

‘…a common frame of reference to both parties, complex lines of questioning may be formulated more clearly. Similarly, involved answers or statements from interviewees can often be more easily expressed with reference to the representations.These exchanges might typically involve both parties interacting with the diagram, ‘animating’ it with gestures to convey flows, relationships or dependencies’

I was able to use the conversation of graphic elicitation to inform the analysis of the interview discussion and I have been able to see the connection between how students feel about citation and how this is impacted by their positionality, the role of university and their interest in citation.

I love watching interviews with musicians online, and one of my all time favourite interviewers is a guy called Nardwuar, who has a notoriously unique way of interviewing his guests. In the most impressive and mind boggling way, he does in-depth research on his interviewees, gathering information which he then reveals in the interview through half finished statements he prompts his guests to respond to. This is then followed up with Nardwuar either asking them a related question or presenting his guests with gifts that are tied to deeply personal interests and or/experiences the interviewee has had. Whilst this is amusing and a wonderful way to learn about the interviewee, it isn’t a method that would be appropriate for my SIP, due to the leading nature of the questions and bias towards steering the conversation in specific directions. Regardless of this, below is an example of this incredibly interview magic….

Although I won’t be mimicking Nardwuar’s interview technique, watching some of his videos got me thinking about texts I read by Alvesson and the different approaches to conducting an interview.

In the paper Alvesson discusses the different techniques that can be used in an interview, highlighting that there is also a question of ethics to consider with regards to how one might interview someone, where this might happen and the nature of the questions being asked. In my context, as a lecturer, it is important to consider the relationship between myself as the interviewer and the interviewee’s who will be students I have taught. I want to create as comfortable an atmosphere as possible when interviewing my students, and the quiz is an attempt to dismantle a sense of formality and hierarchy between myself and the students, but after reading this article I was also aware that I had to consider how the perceived power dynamics of lecturer students might impact how students answer my questions. As stated in BERA Ethical Guidelines For Educational Research, “Trust is a further essential element within the relationship between researcher and researched, as is the expectation that researchers will accept responsibility for their actions.”  

I’ll be conducting the interview in a digital space, so with this mind I decided to create rules of etiquette, that would be outlined at the beginning of the interview. I want to create a safe digital space that offers support to those I speak to and creates a sense of mutuality with regards to respect, consideration of the other and an understanding of reciprocity. By using an agreement of etiquette I am able to create an agreement about the terms of my behaviour and intention for the interview, whilst also asking the interviewee to join me in this space, knowing that they will be met with empathy and respect. These rules would be followed by an omission from myself that I’m not speaking to the students as a lecturer, or from a position of ‘power’. Instead, I’m speaking with them as a researcher, a practitioner, and as a student who is engaged in a study that hopes to understand more about the practice of citation in a students time studying. I will clearly state that I am there to listen, learn and share, in the hope that this will start the interview off with a tone of openness and collaboration.

Another thing to consider amongst this, is the interview techniques I might use. Alvesson talks about Neo-positivist, romantic and local interview techniques and I intend to use a combination of the Neo-positivist and romantic methodology. Neo-positivism creates a sense of structure and a clear motivation for the conversation, focusing on a clear outcome for the discussion, which in my case will be to learn about the students’ relationship to citation, and the romantic technique allows for the discussion to have nuance and to evolve in a way that is collaborative and emphatic to the situation of the person I’m speaking to, which will allow subjectivity and to become a part of the discussion. Combining these two methods will allow me to create an interview that is focused in its design, but is open in its exploration of the questions I intend to ask.

With all of this in mind I compiled a trial list of questions to use in my interview on citation, and I tried them out on two of my fellow PGCert students in the most recent workshop. Unlike our friend, Nardwaur, all of the questions were open ended and were designed to encourage the participant to respond in a way that wasn’t led by my biases or expectations.

So they understood the nature of my SIP, I explained the context for my project with my peers by sharing information about the Afrotectopia video that featured three female producers, singer/songwriters, DJ’s citing Toni Morrison in a live musical performance. This created a point of relationally between me and my peers with regards to how I’m investigating anti-racist and inclusive alternative citational practices and we were able to have a discussion about their experience of citation as lecturers and practitioners. Below is an excerpt from our discussion around what Lauren and Ching-Li think about the word citation, and both refer to the musical citational practice I used to give my project context, and how this compares to more familiar ideas of citation…..

lauren – it takes you out the norms of looking stuff up, sharing things, it removes itself from that and becomes a really stuffy old thing, set ways of working. if you open it up like you’re doing students can see it doesn’t have to be that rigid and scary, it’s about doing it in a way that’s not scary 

ching-li – it’s just about making it more accessible. even cite right*, it’s not inspiring in any way, and even that’s really rigid. you’re not starting from a place that’s very fluid or gives you any opportunities to expand your knowledge. the world’s changed so much, how can this not have changed.

lauren – share information that you’re interested in and students can share things, student led and you connect with some things they’ve said, build on the conversations and connections. it’s more like a conversation

ching-li – i agree with lauren. it’s part of a conversation, it’s sharing knowledge. it’s the basic human need to share things with each other. when you say the word citation it makes it seem more academic and serious, but really it’s just sharing and passing information on. it’s a way of indicating who you are through these things.

This rich commentary allowed me to have a better understanding of how my questions may or may not prompt oppurtunities for students to talk openly about a range of topics relating to citation and their positionality. Below are examples of the questions I asked Lauren and Ching-Li.

What were you interested in when you were growing up?

Are any of the things you were interested in when you were younger visible or cited in your practice now?

What/who do you cite?

Why do you cite these things?

Do you cite things outside of this? If so, what and why/why not?

Do you see a relationship between your positionality and how you cite?

When Ching-Li was asked to speak about her positionality, she was incredibly open and shared how her Chinese heritage played a role in her experience of growing up in Australia, and this lived experience plays a role in how she approaches teaching.

“i always have it in the back of my mind, you need to read the room to see what students you have and make sure that you’re speaking to those people, cos i know what it’s like and everything in australia is so white, there’s no diversity at all. so in my work i try to include a good mix of everythings and make sure everyone’s addressed in what im talking about”

This generous response encouraged me to understand the benefit of combining a structured Neo-positivist and romantic approach to my questions. With Neo-positivism and romanticism I’m able to approach the interview, as philosopher Gadamer would put it, as a form of “play”. Although I am using the structure of a set list of questions, I’m also creating a space for dynamism, in the sense that the romantic interview technique allows me to be responsive instead of didactic, and responding to the students in the moments that’s being created by the interview makes the discussion one that is alive, and a form of play.

Another thing that was discussed with Ching-Li and Lauren, was where the interview would take place. As we see with Nardwuar and Young Thug, an impromptu conversation with the interviewee in transit isn’t the ideal way to have a meaningful interaction, so I have used this trial run to finalise my plans for the set up of the interview. I will be conducting my interview digitally, so I’m able to share content (information sheet, agreement, quiz) with students prior to the interview itself. Working digitally allows me to create a time scale that allows the participant to familiarise themselves with the research question and introductory material (flow chart quiz) in order for them to understand the parameters of the interview, whilst managing their busy schedules as students. This also gives them an opportunity to ask questions or make requests that make the experience as comfortable and enjoyable as possible, prior to the interview.

Following on from this (based on Alvesson’s questions of how to conduct an ethical interview) I also considered how to monitor the accuracy of the information gathered from the interview, and decided to give students the opportunity add further commentary on the questions asked during the interview by sharing the transcripts. It was important to give the students an oppurtunity to review what was said in order to allow them to represent themselves as sincerely and as accurately as possible.

*a website that offers resources that help students cite

**** Updated on 22nd December

In earlier parts of this blog I outlined that I would be using a combination of neo-positivist and romantic interview methods, but after presenting my project to fellow PGCert students and my tutor there was a discussion about the nature of using a neo-positivist/romantic approach to interview my students, as positivist thinking operates within the realm of creating and considering a hypothesis instead of investigating a question (which is what I’m doing). As it is my intention to use interview questions to create an open and fertile discussion with my participants, I’m purposely avoiding the use of a hypothesis as a basis for my research because it’s important that the interview is an oppurtunity to learn from the students in as much of a non biased collaborative discussion as possible. Further research in interview techniques has helped me realise that I have instead been using a semi-structured method to create a conversation with the students I’ve interviewed. As detailed in the following description of what a semi structured interview is, Glynis Cousin states, ‘Semi-structured interviews are so-called because the interview is structured around a set of themes which serves a s guide to facilitate interview talk. Unlike the structured interview, the interviewer is expected to adapt, modify and add to the prepared questions if the flow of the interview talk suggests it.’ This is a perfect description of how I have designed my interview questions, in the hope that as a result the interviews create a space for responsive and engaged critical dialogue.

It’s important to consider how using a semi-structured interview space to gather information requires the gathering and interpretation of information, which can present problems when considering how to do so without instances of misunderstanding, misinterpreting, clashing with or coercing my interviewees. As Alldred and Giles say, the interview is ‘the joint production of an account by interviewer and interviewee‘ and this creates what Cousins describes as a, ‘ “third space” where interviewee an interviewer work together to develop understandings.’ With this in mind it is important to emphasise my interest in/the importance of creating a safe dialogic space with the students I’m interviewing. My terms of etiquette and practice run with Lauren and Ching-Li helped me to consider the practical means of how to plan/carry out the interview and there is a much needed emphasis on meeting my participants where they are, in order to create a reflective and safe discursive space.

It is my hope that combining a critical paradigm framework with a semi-structured interview will enable the interview to create a conversation that is focused on critically engaging with the student’s knowledge and lived experiences both within and outside educational settings. This will enable both myself and my participants to consider how these experiences impact their relationship to/knowledge of citation and how these things might impact their studio practice.

Methods of research. This was the topic for discussion today, and it’s one that I initially found intimidating. When the word research is used, I often think about someone with expert investigative skills and knowledge delving into books and journals to unearth untold gems of information. I also think of someone who like Sponge Bob, in the picture above, is extremely academic and lives with their nose in a book. In the context of the SIP project however, this isn’t exactly the case, but there is an element of unearthing and digging involved. A digging and unearthing of the self…..

In the earlier post I mentioned the different forms of research I wanted to use, and the two that are most significant to me are the ethnographic and reflexive. I believe that teaching students to be critical and reflective of their work, but also of their positionality, is crucial in order to create an engaged, dynamic and fluid relationship to their practice and those of their peers. However, many students are somewhat reserved when it comes to centring their life experience and knowledge as a means to learn and develop their artistic endeavours.

A chapter called Heart to Heart in bell hooks’ book ‘Teaching Community – A Pedagogy of Hope’ covers the role of love within a teaching context and how from a position of love, it is important to encourage students to engage with education via the process of dismantling hierarchies of what is “valuable”, ergo from the teacher, and what is of “little value”, what comes from the student. The below excerpt details the importance of dismantling hierarchies between student and teacher, that prohibit both from being part of a fluid and evolving learning process.

‘In our nation most colleges and universities are organized around the principles of dominant culture. This organisational model reinforces hierarchies of power and control. It encourages students to be fear-based, that is to fear teachers and seek to please them. Concurrently, students are encouraged to doubt themselves, their capacity to know, to think, and to act. Learned helplessness is necessary for the maintenance of dominator culture. Progressive teachers see this helplessness in students who become upset when confronting alternative modes of teaching that require them to be active rather than passive. Student resistance to forms of learning that are not based on rote memory or predictable assignments has almost become the norm because of the fixation on degrees rather than education. These students want to know exactly what they must do to acquire the best grade. They are not interested in learning. But the student who longs to know, who has awakened a passion for knowledge is eager to experience the mutual communion with teacher and subject that makes for profound engagement.’

Whilst studying on this course, I’ve had first hand experience of teaching students who have admitted to prioritising receiving a good grade over fully engaging with things that might seem alternative but are relevant and interesting to them. This fear of exploring the personal (ie ethnographic) is an example that students believe that leaning too much into what is ethnographic, sits outside of ‘normative’ learning structures, and leads to a potential point of failure. As Paulo Friere states in ‘Pedagogy of the Opressed’,

‘The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them.’

I am interested in opposing this, and my practice is built on incorporating critical, reflexive and ethnographic methodologies into the foundation of my work in an attempt to engage students in critical self-led learning . This type of critically engaged pedagogy is reflected in the teachings of both hooks and Paulo Friere and I will therefore be using a critical paradigm to develop the content for my quiz (graphic diagram) and interview questions.

Friere’s work on using social justice as a basis for critical educational pedagogies has aided me in my attempt to create relationships with my students that centre their knowledge and positionality as part of how they might understand how to develop their practice. As detailed in the diagram below, I am interested in how my SIP can start to begin engaging students in discussions about their practice in the context of how the individual relates to the collective, and how this then impacts the intersectional and the expansion of knowledge, which can then be manifested in the self actualised, engaged and conscious individual.

I will use a critical paradigm as a basis for my enquiry as it reflects the interests in my practice as an artist, social justice activist and lecturer and enables me to develop my project in a way that is in keeping with the pedagogies that I am most interested in. With a positive paradigm there is an attempt to find a truth, with the belief that everything you need to know/discover is somewhere out there, it just needs to be found, and with an interpretivist paradigm, meanings change depending on context.  As my approach to teaching is based on the premise of critically engaged, inclusive and self-led learning I will be using a critical paradigm to form the basis of my interview questions and research.I will couple this with the ideas explored in the feminist Ethics of Care movement, where engagement with another is based on being emphatic and meeting them where they are at that moment in time, creating space for them to lead the teaching experience alongside you.

I have described how critical engagement with ideas around positionality and intersectionality foreground my exchanges with students I teach, and it is with this in mind that I thought about the fruitful role this could play in an interview. Or as I’d like to put it, a conversation with intent. Speaking to students with a combined approach of interviewing and discussing the role of citation within their practice will help me create a dynamic and critical space with those I speak to.

What does this have to do with ethnography and reflection? Well, after reading hooks I considered how speaking to students allows me to share a space with them where we cultivate a conversation about citation, but how does my experience as Rachel alter or impact that interaction?

One of the things that’s been said to me repeatedly throughout this PGCert, is that I should consider how my practice and interests can be shared with my students. I never really understood the relevance of this, until students themselves started to ask me in tutorials what my work is about, what I make/the type of things I’m currently making, if I had work in shows…. I think this interest in my working life as an artist was a result of the positive relationships I built with the students, and the open manner with which I would communicate with them about their interests, their practice and their general well being. I finally absorbed what fellow PGCert students had mentioned to me and realised that there was space for me to use my work/interests as an artist, within my teaching practice more explicitly. As Dr Clarrisa Pinkola Estés states in Women Who Run With the Wolves, ‘We must strive to allow our souls to grow in their natural ways and to their natural depths.’ and instead of compartmentalising my interest in social justice/anti-racist pedagogies and my artistic practice, I realised how they are inextricably linked, and it was important to bring this forth with intention during this project.

So, that’s why this post features a picture of me singing karaoke, living my best life 🙂 The aforementioned image is from a show I did this July, called ‘Blessings Pon Blessings’. I organised a pro black karaoke, in a project space where I performed/invited people to perform songs by artists that are black/identify as black, and only black people or those who identify as black were allowed to sing. The show also featured an installation, where I decorated the space with balloons, lights, foil curtains and images of nature, writers, artists, intellectuals, singers, family and friends (of whom all were black, and the majority women) to make the things that influence my work visible. This aspect of the instillation was important, as I saw it as a visual citation. I was thinking about how citation could be used to make parts of my practice more accessible/my interests in inclusivity visible, so I decided to use images to cite things that are important to me historically, culturally, musically, personally and politically, in order to give context to my work, and another layer of meaning, which was simultaneously implicit and explicit.

The action of making visible the things that influence me/linking my practice to things outside of myself that are tied to me, allowed me to demonstrate citation as a visual, artistic and ethnographic device. I was able to share things that are relevant to me and shape my existence, in a way that is both critical and meaningful to the development of my work, but also allows others to engage with a radical demonstration of self love and love for the Black community, a community I belong to. The idea that citing POC (especially women who are POC) is a radical act, is one that is prevalent in the practices of many intellectuals, one of whom is Sara Ahmed.

An Academic who predicates her work on citation practices, Ahmed considers important questions about what impact non inclusive citational practices have on not only a text, but the reader and the histories connected to these things. Below is an excerpt from a blog post where she discusses her decision not to cite white men in her most recent book as a way of redressing the gendered and racial biases at play in many people’s citation practice.

Ahmed’s positionality as an Asian feminist academic, affects her relationship to how she cites, and she uses the ethnographic to influence her citational practice in her written work. Similarly to me, Ahmed uses her creative output as a way to critically engage with and discuss conversations about intersectionality, racial politics and feminist ideologies. This is something that is also mirrored in the work of many critical race theory scholars, such as Shirley Anne Tate, Sylvia Wynter and Kimberlé Crenshaw, and it mirrors the attempt I made in my karaoke performance, to make visible those who are often rendered invisible. The karaoke performance coupled with the installation was a demonstration of an anti-racist and radical citational practice that validated the breadth of my knowledge, life experience, and the cultural, historical legacies I belong to as a Black woman.

There are examples of feminist and anti-racist citational in many places, and Ahmed’s practice has been a source of inspiration for many women. For example: below is an excerpt form a conversation between Helena Rickett and Gabrielle Moser who discuss the importance of Ahmed’s approach to citation in the context of feminism.

The discussion between Rickett and Moser shines a magnificent light on contemporary feminist thinking around the radical and regenerative nature citation can afford individuals, and this is inclusive of those who are cited, and those who do the citing. The admittance by Céline Condorelli of belonging to a legacy of many individuals who have built what we stand upon, is the consideration I myself think about in my citation practice within my work as an artist, and it is part of the foundation that my SIP is built upon. It is what I hope to evidence with the artists I share with the students in the quiz, and especially in the work of Rosie Hastings and Hannah Quinlan, who similarly to Condorelli, name a work after their friend ‘Gaby’. Reflecting upon the work of feminist academics and artists like Ahmed, Condorelli, hooks and Hastings & Quinlan, has enabled me to see the broad and inclusive scope within which I can exist as an individual, educator and an artist.

This work is ongoing and important, because it moves us further forward in decolonising the curriculum and critiquing pedagogies and practices that are exclusionary. With UAL’s recent commitment to creating an anti-racist curriculum, it is evident that considering the role of citation is a way to utilise the strength of the positional, the alternative and the personal. It is within this broad scope that I wish to investigate the relationship students have to citation in my quiz and interview.

The end is nigh! And to celebrate, above is a picture of Toni Morrison looking like she’s living her best life. Her inclusion in this thoughts and feelings reflection isn’t entirely random though. I’ve been thinking about citation a lot, and the role it plays in a student’s life whilst studying.

I began to get a good idea about what I wanted to do for my SIP project when I was doing the Inclusive Learning & Teaching Unit and we were asked to review an artefact that demonstrated inclusive learning practices.

 I designed an artefact that was a workshop which explored how,

“…engaging with citation through explorative and critical thinking, can shift students’ perspective on the use of references/citation, from being a reductive assessment process to an ontological one.” 

I became interested in this because of feedback I’d received from students, revealing that they weren’t always comfortable around the subject of citation and how they might use the activity of referencing in their artist research file. I therefore decided to explore ways in which I could create safe spaces that investigate how citation can be used. One example of this, was a pre task (an activity for students to engage with before the workshop) that asked the students to look at/listen to a video of three women cite Toni Morrison in a live musical performance.

This activity was designed to engage with people in a way that was as accessible as possible. It didn’t require reading something, and highlighted the cultural histories and connections that citation offers, when used outside of an academic context. This example led me to consider how I could develop a series of workshops for my SIP, reviewing the outcome of the workshops as a way to help me understand students’ relationship to citation.

In the book ‘Teaching Community’, Bell Hooks writes about the multiple ways we can radically usurp existing systems of oppression within education and reshape societies, our students’ and our own understanding about the power of education to liberate and empower. As part of this strategy she dedicates a chapter to the question of ‘How Can We Serve’. 

‘At its best, teaching is a caring profession.’ 

What a wonderful declaration of duty. It expunges ideas that to teach is to dominate and proclaim one’s superiority to knowledge and understanding above others’, it is a confession of humility that demonstrates that to teach is to nurture, empower and grow. This is applicable to both student and teacher, and it is with this in mind that I became interested in using workshops to create spaces for discussion around how citation could be used within a students practice, to create anti racist and inclusive methods of working.

To give our thoughts a little more clarity, we were asked to do a mind map during our first meeting on the SIP, and after completing the mind mapping exercise I realised that the question of citation could be approached from several different angles. I found it hard to figure out exactly what I should focus on, as we only have a limited amount of time to complete our project and I want to make sure that what I do has a positive impact on the students I work with. With this in mind I’ve been thinking about something a fellow student (Petra) asked me during our breakout groups.

‘What are your values?’

This was an important question to ask. Although I understood the subject I warned to explore in my SIP, I hadn’t outlined the values surrounding the project, and this information is crucial as it grounds the work in a position of clarity and focus. I therefore began to create a statement that could outline what I would be investigating, a SIP Synopsis if you will, which can be seen below.

I’m interested in exploring the significance of citation and how it can be utilised within a student’s practice to critically engage with positionality and inclusive anti-racist practices. I intend to design workshops that engage students in conversations about the importance of understanding their positionality, and the role this plays in relation to how they might cite/reference others, creating space for discussions around the intersectionality of race, class, gender, ability, sexual orientation, belief etc.

I believe in the power of social justice and the need for anti racist work within educational spaces, so when I consider the role of citation I always wanted to focus on how citation could be used in an inclusive and anti racist manner, and the relevance of this to students. I therefore started to design an action plan and workshop materials that contained the necessary content for the project.

However, after filling out the Ethics Form and considering the ethical connotations of carrying out workshops to gather content, and the sheer amount of time and organisation required to deliver a no. of workshops, I started to realise that maybe my initial idea of using activities as a way to interact with the question of citation wasn’t practical, given the time constraints. I therefore started to use the questions posed on the Ethics Form to reframe my thinking around how to interact with the students. It would have been wonderful to have the time to research my subject with students via activities and surveys (for feedback), but I realised that I could approach the topic from a different angle, instead using interviews and a quiz as a way to work with the students.

This development in thinking shifted the research methods I was considering, and I’m now focused on:

Textual analysis – Reviewing texts

Auto ethnography – Postitionality 

Thematic – Reviewing and reflecting on data

Reflexive – Reflective enquiry

Each of these research methods will allow me to use the personal, historical and contemporary in unison with one another. I’ll be able to utilise my knowledge as Rachel the individual (auto ethnographic), the artist (auto ethnographic/reflexive/thematic/textual analysis), the lecturer (auto ethnographic/reflexive), the day dreamer (reflexive) and investigator (reflexive/textual analysis)

Instead of organising and reviewing workshops on citation, I plan to interview students on the role citation plays in their practice, using the SIP to gather information on students’ relationship to citation and how it impacts their practice as artists. The important shift here, is that instead of presenting workshops that presume to know what students should be considering when they cite, I will be creating dialogue with the students and actively considering the topic of citation in tandem with them. As a starting point, this is a great way to learn more about my interests in citation from my perspective as a teacher, researcher (in this instance) and an artist.

**** Updated on 7th November.

After having time to reflect on the shift in my project, I was able to process my ideas on Action Research and the premise that it is an ontological practice. Jean McNiff puts this aptly…

“Action research is an enquiry conducted by the self into the self. You, a practitioner, think about your own life and work, and this involves you asking yourself why you do the things that you do, and why you are the way that you are. When you produce your research report, it shows how you have carried out a systematic investigation into your own behaviour, and the reasons for that behaviour. The report shows the process you have gone through in order to achieve a better understanding of yourself, so that you can continue developing yourself and your work.”

Thinking about the cyclical nature of going through a process of

thinking, looking, acting, reviewing

back to thinking, looking, acting……made me consider how I was immediately involved in this process as soon as I started the unit. As stated above, I became interested in citation as a result of my engagement in the Inclusive Learning unit, which was a unit which really asked us to look at our subjectivity and the subjectivity of others in a teaching context, with an emphasis on creating inclusive learning spaces that lean into and absorb the multiple specificities we embody as people within learning institutions. As a practice used within literary and studio spaces, citation is part of this, and I started to think and look, using this SIP as a moment to develop action.

However, the scope of what I wanted to achieve was too broad in spectrum, and I was also entering the research from a position of proposing a solution to a problem. Comments on my Ethical Enquiry form made by my tutor helped me to understand this. The synopsis I entered earlier is in some ways a closed circle, in that I have expectations for what my research will highlight. Once this was pointed out to me, I started to think about McNiff and the statement that….

“Action research is open ended. It does not begin with a fixed hypothesis. It begins with an idea that you develop.”

I had forgotten that although I’m considering the ethnographic, I’m also interested in the reflective and therefore, reflexive approaches to the way I approach my research must be evident in the way I conduct, said research. I therefore decided to use a specific question as a starting point for my research, and this led to an opening up of ideas and space for me to learn as I read into my subject, but also for students to bring their positionality and knowledge forth in the interview, without me presupposing what they might or should say when I ask them questions about citation. This also helped me to understand the importance of considering how I ask questions, and this is further discussed in my post on my pretend interview.

So below is my SIP project question. It’s realigned my understanding and practice, and enabled me to engage with action research with a truly inquisitive and curious manner.

‘How Do You Use Citation In Your Practice As An Artist?’

We all have different ways of processing the world around us, and for some (especially creative thinkers and practitioners), looking is a mode of learning and communicating. In the classroom this activity can be manifested through OBL (Object Based Learning), and this was something we had to engage with in our 20 minute micro teaching session. When we were asked to create a lesson plan around an object I immediately thought of music. In some ways I was trying to make the object I used in my class as accessible to as many people as possible, because it’s hard to know what students have access to in their immediate surroundings and I didn’t want the students to have to worry about needing to search for the object required for the class. There can be a very real lack of tangibility to the OBL sessions if students don’t have the objects they are asked to bring to the lesson, so using a sound which can be accessed via the internet can resolve this problem. But a huge part of my motivation was led by my passion for and belief that music is a universal language, and I wanted to use it to build an activity that was predicated on the specificity of the chosen song being contextualized by the student’s own perspectives and experience of it. I realised that my teaching pedagogy of self led learning could be explored in this lesson, encouraging students to develop their ability to use self knowledge, enquiry and lived experience as a tool to learn and express themselves.

From a critical and theoretical perspective, OBL can have a positive impact on the experience of learning. The use of objects in a lesson can ignite imaginative and critical thinking. It encourages a constructivist approach to learning, building a picture of how the past experiences/knowledge of an individual might relate to their present, and in this case, the object they’re looking at. These skills are crucial and useful in art design settings because they encourage both critical and creative thinking, allowing students to develop their practice as artists. OBL can enable students to contextualise their interests and practice, making space for interdisciplinary discussions about materials, processes and histories.  

In an article by Yifan He, called ‘The Disillusionment of Art Education During the Pandemic’, He asks ‘what is left, when art teaching has dissolved all of it ‘physical aspects’? This statement belies the negative impact coronavirus is having on the experience of students, who aren’t able to engage with the physical matter and aspects of making work, something which up until this point has been a significant part of art school. He’s comment begs the question…how do we make teaching in digital contexts exciting and relevant to the experiences students are facing during the epidemic?

In this regard I think that OBL can be incredibly useful in the current climate of learning on digital platforms. It can encourage group discussion, which is important for students who are making work in isolation and away from the communal activity of the studio. They can also develop and understand the role emotional awareness has when looking at objects, and when making art. Philosopher Stephen David Ross’ idea that “there are forms of knowledge that plumb the depths of the human condition and the world – forms, like art, which can tolerate ambiguity and indeterminateness in nature and truth…” is relevant when considering how OBL can encourage students to explore personal and emotional responses they have to objects, during a time when the digital learning experience can sometimes perpetuate the nightmare of passive and detached learning environments.

Often, the most engagement students will have with OBL will be in the form of a crit. Looking at and offering comments/feedback on a fellow student’s work, is the most common form of OBL in art/design contexts within the learning institution, but there is an opportunity for this to be pushed further. I have therefore designed a sound workshop where the students will guide their own learning experience by sharing a sound with the class that is relevant to them/their artistic practice, after which, discussion groups will form to share thoughts/opinions about the sound. Enabling students to contribute to the content of the lesson means that the floor is open for students to learn about the diverse array of perspectives, cultures, experiences, philosophies and knowledge bases embodied by the demographics and positionality of those within the classroom, enriching the learning experience of those present, whilst simultaneously creating an inclusive learning space. In 2015, The Higher Education Academy’s ‘Embedding Equality and Diversity in the Curriculum’ (EEDC) project presented five discipline specific practitioner guides, with the hope of firmly positioning equality and diversity as the cornerstone of learning institutions. The premise of these guides is to reposition the pedagogies currently at play within institutions that don’t address the importance of inclusive teaching and learning practices. “Inclusive pedagogies, as David et al. (2010) explain, involves creating individual and inclusive spaces, developing student-centred strategies, connecting with students’ lives and being culturally aware.” OBL can be used as a tool to achieve this, giving students the ability to use their positionality to contribute to class content, sharing objects that are meaningful to them, whilst developing a sense of agency and validity within the classroom.

There are however restrictions to the effectiveness of OBL if we consider the issues surrounding digital exclusion. Writing for Shades of Noir on COVID and digital exclusion, Rayvenn Shaleigha D’Clark states “there are many groups of people who remain at high risk of being excluded from access and use of digital technologies.” Asking students to use online digital resources in the case of my sound workshop means that they have to have enough data and a good internet connection to load pages that share video/sound content, but from my experience of teaching, technical issues like not being able to download or load a page with source material are common. These problems disrupt sessions and can prevent students from looking at the necessary content but they can also make people feel excluded from the wider experience of their cohort who are able to engage with the required material. With regards to instances such as these, using everyday common objects that students might have around them to guide a teaching session provide an important alternative, and my earlier thoughts on the accessibility of the internet need to consider how to make allowances for students who may encounter internet access/digital exclusion issues.

After planning my micro teaching session I was also slightly concerned about the amount of time the students had to discuss the sound amongst themselves/with me, as I was conscious that hearing something for the first time can require frequent listens in order to appreciate or understand what is being heard. These fears were realised in the feedback I received from the students in their evaluation of the session. One person said that when they listen to music genres they aren’t familiar with/don’t listen to, it can take them a little time to adjust to what they’re hearing, and this therefore had an impact on how they engaged with the activity. I was worried about this being an issue and I tried to combat this by providing lyrics so that students could follow the lyrical aspect of the sound as it was being spoken, and I thought it would help them to understand what was being said as MIKE speaks in a dialect, uses slang and mumbles slightly when he raps. However, this comment helped me understand that this wasn’t enough for some students to be able to fully take in everything that was happening in the song, so I think that going forward it’s important that I design activities around sound where there is enough time for people to engage with it in a way where they feel that they can fully absorb what they’re hearing, in order to process and reflect on how it makes them feel in relation to the activity I’ve asked them to complete.

I also received feedback that the session felt a bit rushed, and I think this was due to the division of time set for each activity. This comment echo’s the earlier observation about struggling to engage with the sound within the time given, so it’s important that I find ways of managing the sessions so that I’m not asking the students to do more than is viable. I’m conscious that if students feel like they don’t have enough time to complete a task they rush through it and this changes their ability to enjoy the activity, and as Gadamer discussed, I want to create spaces that encourage play and exploration as a mode of learning, and that’s only possible of people are given the space and time to do so.

I am, however, encouraged by the responses both verbal and written, that relayed how enjoyable it was to listen to a sound in a learning context. Some of the students’ personal interest in music and hip hop as a genre of music allowed them to enjoy the task and this was important to me because one of the reasons I chose this object was because I’m interested in decolonising the learning space students work in. Hearing students say,

“I used to make music, used to be a rapper

Love lyrics, love discovering new music”

allowed me to see how using a piece of music from a young black man created a space for discussion around under represented and alternative practices. Sharing the work of a young African American rapper who uses language in a way that isn’t rooted in colonial history was a way for me to introduce new subject matter, and concepts about geographic and personal histories in a way that was explorative and participatory. 

Overall, using OBL in the classroom creates opportunities for building a sense of community via the activity of sharing thoughts and ideas, which is crucial when considering how to deal with the social aspects of learning on digital platforms. OBL can help students understand that when engaging with the activity of looking, the process of questioning is in and of itself an action of learning and development that isn’t based on needing to provide concrete or ‘correct’ answers. It is about exploration and self expression via the simple act of looking, and it can create dialogues that encourage students to think about how this process can influence their research (enquiry and knowledge) processes.

Asking for, or giving someone feedback can be difficult. It requires an openness, humility and vulnerability that even on a good day most of us would struggle to fully embody. Whether you’re the person receiving feedback, or giving it, there is a need to understand how best to communicate to another person in a way that helps them to develop and grow.

In our study session with Lindsay she mentioned that old adage that ‘people don’t remember what you tell them, they remember how you made them feel.’ If we use this as a premise for how to deliver feedback as teachers, we can think about how to use the criteria that UAL uses to assess students’ work to help us form advice and feedback that is honest, uplifts students and helps them to consider how to use assessment (be it formative or summative) as an oppurtunity to grow.

One way to do this is to consider how to use the assessment criteria UAL has created as a building block for creating a clear picture of how students can accomplish their desired grades. Working within the clear parameters of five criteria, the assessment process is broken down into clear sections that cover how students:

Investigate through research, imaginative thinking and making – Enquiry

Develop initial research by demonstrating an understanding of the chosen subject through clear practical decision making during the act of making work, gathering information and necessary skills to create work and contextualising the practice by further researching relevant artists, philosophers, writers, cultures, societal influences etc. – Knowledge

Make work displaying various examples of experimentation, demonstrating a clear development of initial ideas through to more sophisticated pieces and a consistent building up of work – Process

Provide evidence of their ideas and knowledge about their subject and collates/presents it. How cohesive is the development of ideas and how have they demonstrated this? – Communication

Complete and present final pieces that portray a level of skill and knowledge, both materially and conceptually. What is the connection between enquiry, knowledge and process and is it shown? Critical analysis of their own work and processes. – Realisation

Having the assessment broken down and explained like this enables me as a teacher to clearly outline to a student what is expected of them, whilst offering students a simple and clear way to critique their own practice. In addition to working with the enquiry, knowledge, process, communication and realisation criteria, when delivering feedback it’s important to do so holistically, understanding each student has different needs, responsibilities and challenges outside of the course, and ways of processing information. Taking all of these things into consideration allows you to have a broader understanding of a student’s needs and how to support them. For example, we can use assessment as a tool to give voice to marginalised individuals and build power. Safe space crits that are run by UAL lecturers can be used if students feel they aren’t receiving feedback that’s enabling them to develop their practice and are being affected by negative interactions with their work. These spaces allow fellow students to give feedback alongside lecturers and can offer reflective spaces where feedback is shaped by group discussions and conversations.

Lecturers can use the crit space as well as tutorials and summative assessments to practice ‘feedback forward’  (information that can be used to support and help a student for future endeavours) to build on feedback given, by asking three questions:

What steps are you taking?

Why are you taking those steps to get there?

What have you learnt and how do you intend to move forward?

Following this, it’s important to provide key terms, artist resources, people working with relevant material/ideas to contextualise the feedback given. Practical examples of how to meet learning outcomes can then be used to reinforce prior comments and observations made about work, creating a useful and practical way to help students develop a positive relationship to feedback.

How do we, as lecturers, receive feedback though? When the shoe is on the other foot how do we respond to critique of our pedagogy, lesson plans and interaction with students. In Macfarlane’s case study, the character of Professor Stephanie Rae has a multifaceted reaction to feedback. She appreciates how much is learnt from observing others and how offering feedback can help one grow, but she is reluctant to embrace feedback from her students for a no. of reasons. ‘She certainly did not have the time to spend ages rewriting the course with her research workload.’ ‘Her busy professional life left her little time for other things.’ ‘The research methods course was her only formal teaching commitment, in addition to working on various projects, speaking at conferences, writing for publication and editing a major journal in her specialist field.’ Stephanie has a lot on her plate, to say the least, and her response to feedback in part might be affected by the sheer amount of work she has to do outside of her teaching responsibilities. Theorist Laura Berlant explains how it is important to interrupt “the flow of consciousness with a new demand for scanning and focus…To be focused into thought is to begin to formulate the event of feeling historical in the present.” Reading this we can see that although it can be comfortable and convenient to coast through teaching methods we are familiar with and have planned out, if students provide feedback that contradicts the effectiveness of our approach, then we must engage with that feedback in the here and now and, “jam the machinery that makes the ordinary appear as a flow.” (Laura Berlant)

With this in mind, we can see how important it is to use feedback as a way to learn and improve the experience of our students. We can work with students and speak to them about subject matters in ways that are relevant to them by asking questions and creating group discussions. We can show relevant content and use inclusive language and course material whilst providing students with a breakdown of what will be covered in the session before the lesson, sharing resources that’ll prepare them for the class before and after it occurs. We can also think about how to learn from peer observations and advice given by fellow practitioners as a way to broaden our teaching techniques. For example, when I spoke to fellow PGCert students we came up with suggestions for how to receive feedback that prioritised students collaborating with lecturers in a way that centred their needs and gave them agency: “Ask them for feedback, get a student representative to send suggestions for what they would like to cover, things they need to be explained differently or further.” Suggestions such as these demonstrate what sort of action can be taken to positively respond to students and the feedback they offer. As discussed in prior blog posts, the ontological relationship of being requires both the student and teacher to work together, creating reciprocal interactions that are beneficial for both the person giving and receiving the feedback.

Part of Stephanie’s difficulty with her students’ feedback is that she’s doing a lot of work outside her teaching commitment and she doesn’t have time to address the criticism by changing the course because she’s too busy. If we think about taking up teaching then, we have to ask ourselves the questions of why we want to teach? What are our goals? What are our priorities? If we focus on using assessment and feedback as a place for personal and professional development, then we can utilise these oppurtunities and look at them as steps in becoming better communicators and support networks for the students we work with.

People don’t tend to feel great hearing that they could have done better, but it’s necessary to make mistakes in order to learn. Mistakes don’t define you, they offer the potential to grow, improve and become better. With regards to assessment, mistakes provide both the student and teacher the perfect oppurtunity to evolve and work dynamically. As Audre Lorde put it at a keynote presentation to the National Women’s Studies Association, “Guilt and defensiveness are bricks in a wall against which we all perish, for they serve none of our futures.”

Who runs our institution, and what are their principles?  In some respects this question could be answered with a simple fact check exercise. A quick search on google will reveal who the president of UAL is, and potentially the names of course leaders, visiting lecturers, technicians, librarians etc. 

But providing information about the principles and teaching pedagogy of those that make up the staff of the universities is a lot harder to evidence, and when you think about it, this is where the truth lies with regards to what sort of learning environment a student is entering. Is it one of love? Should it be? Do those in charge value love as a necessary part of education? Is it visible in the teaching practice of staff and policies of the universities, and if so what does love look like in a pedagogical scenario? How does it change a student’s experience of learning?

Quite simply, 

how is it felt?

I ask these questions as a result of a conversation I had with my friend Franca. I was explaining what I’d been studying on the PGCert (Franca is a fellow educator and theatre performance artist, and her interest was piqued when I told her I was studying again) and I went into detail about the workshop we covered on love, care and belonging. Franca knows how interested I am in social justice work, and I was explaining how interesting it is to consider the use of love in a social justice and institutional context when the idea of ‘the institution’ can be intimidating, impenetrable and sometimes quite abstract.

In the context of learning institutions, in recent months there’s been a stampede of universities rushing to release anti racist statements in support of the BLM movement that reignited discussions about the need to address the persistent racism inflicted upon the lives of black people. As someone who has spent eight years in higher education as an ethnic minority student, I am very aware that public declarations of commitment to addressing racism within an institution rarely translate into changes that directly improve the experience of the student cohort at large let alone those who are BAME. So, as I was wondering about all this to my friend, I started to think about the word institution, and how it is used to define so many different organised structures. If I had to describe the word as a picture I’d probably end up drawing some sort of building. 

A monolithic entity. 

A structure crystalized and formed as an unequivocal whole. 

But really, the whole that I speak of here is made up of several moving parts, specifically, individuals who are from different backgrounds, who have different thoughts and experiences, who believe different things, and who have different interests and understandings of how to teach. This means that when the ‘institution’ releases a statement declaring a commitment to anti racism, it is in fact the people who make up the body of the institution who are committing to that promise. This is a simple deduction, yes, but at its essence it’s truly mind boggling, because this wish for an anti racist university to succeed requires each individual who passes through the university to be responsible for actively participating in the act of personally and collectively decolonising themselves, in service of a little thing called

love. 

Described by feminists as ‘The Ethics of Care’ it means developing a self that is connected to others and wants to remain connected (and through this connection) developing an understanding of the injustices that others suffer. It is not possible to demonstrate love for another if you aren’t interested in them being treated justly/receiving justice, as ‘Justice is an extension of caring, ergo caring about and caring for.’ (Starting at Home Book). The ethics of care believes that with the hard work of acknowledging and addressing biases, and developing an open and receptive relationship with others, we are able to develop self reflection. This is a key component in enacting love as it requires vulnerability and introspection, providing us with the opportunity to understand and correct power inequities and oppression. 

An example of how failing to engage with these activities can have a harmful effect on students occurred during my tutorial group discussion. A fellow student provided a personal anecdote about his experience of assessment, and how “Students from Asia often fell through the assessment criteria cracks as they were reviewed from a Western perspective.” The student went on to explain that when he first started teaching years ago, his method of marking wasn’t able to fairly assess work by international or BAME students if the student’s work didn’t adhere to the brief in a way that he understood/was comparable to their fellow classmates. Looking back he said that he could see that he’d marked students down simply because he didn’t understand their work, and he realises that this was a result of the criteria he was using to assess work, which was inherently biased.

It was encouraging to see how this student had started to engage with the principles of ‘The Ethics of Care’ by critiquing his own teaching practice, and it was evident that he’d been able to reflect on the unconscious bias he had as a lecturer, and the negative effect this had on his ability to mark all of his students’ work fairly. These considerations tied in with another comment he made. He explained that his experience of BAME students having to contextualise their practice before their work is even looked at or discussed is evidence that when some students share their work with lecturers they feel that they, “Can’t freely associate because there’s a lack of mutual understanding.”

The above quote is taken from Claudia Rankine’s book “Just Us”, and although it focuses on education systems in America, it succinctly illustrates the issue of implicit bias and how it affects the way teachers engage with BAME students. Participating in a pedagogy that values love requires the constant self evaluation of how we engage with our students as teachers, taking responsibility for embedding within ourselves a willingness to learn and change behaviors that are harmful and racist, so that we aren’t inhibiting and limiting the experiences that our students have under our tutelage. This may mean having to do research into artists that we aren’t familiar with in order to understand references that students make in their work, reading books by poets, philosophers, theorists etc. who aren’t male/white/heteorsexual and included in the Western canon. In my case, I don’t know a lot about Asian practitioners, be they artists, writers, film makers etc. so after I realised that a lot of the international students are Asian I decided to commit myself to researching artists and reading works by Asian writers to diversify my references and teaching resources. Or, as in the case of the fellow PGCert student who revealed problems with how he used to assess students’ work, it sometimes requires admitting to mistakes and conditioning we may have about the way students should respond to a brief.

Whatever work it is that needs to be done, when we consider the question of how to attend to our students’ needs as tutors it can seem overwhelming. Yet, I can’t help but look at it as a MASSIVE opportunity!  (As you can see, Elmo agrees with me.)

As mentioned earlier, no two people are alike, we’re all very different and this means that we differ in our ethical decision making. According to ‘The Ethics of Care’ the way men understand and observe moralistic issues is based on rights, rules and justice, but it often excludes context, the intersectionality of individuals, the lived experience or background of an individual and how these things affect our ability to understand what could be classified as ‘objective rules’. It also means adhering to a policy that shows a lack of compassion and empathy with others, based on the principle that we start as individual moral agents, separate from others, that learn how to obey the principles of morality. Whereas “Women’s morality is partly, if not more shaped by responsibility and care,” Carol Gilligan. However, both men and women can reconsider how they make moral judgements and decisions, using ‘The Ethics of Care’ to develop a teaching practice that is demonstrative of love, care and belonging.

As tutors we can engage in self reflection, be open to/ask for feedback and objectively listen to the viewpoints of others. We can develop our understanding of biases, listening to those who experience it, being open to their suggestions of how to improve our teaching practice. Provide resources/lesson plans/material that’s relevant to the students, making sure what is shared doesn’t subjugate, stereotype or exclude. Listen attentively and respond thoughtfully and appropriately. Create a clear explanation of what behaviour is acceptable/unacceptable for participants that attend classes….the list is potentially endless, but the suggestions made above demonstrate how much can be done to forge learning spaces that emphasise the important presence of care, belonging and love within the university.

I then started to think about systems that prioritise and assess learning on a different basis. The popularised system by which students’ experience of university is assessed is TEF. Universities are graded on: student satisfaction with teaching on the course, academic support, assessment and feedback, retention and employment or further study/highly skilled employment six months after graduating. The highest honour a university can achieve through this system is a Gold Award, which accomplishes two things: the potential to increase student fees and an elevation of status for the university. This system is indicative of the neoliberal capitalist society we live in. In our first lecture James Wisdom shared information that ‘A UK citizen with a degree will earn 37% more over a lifetime than someone who left school with upper secondary qualifications.’ This information is a demonstration of how statistics like these bolster the government’s interest in education as a way to boost the economy, but it raises questions about whether the focus on higher education strengthening the capital of a country is appropriate, when several students today contend with mental health issues, the effects of immigration laws, environmentalism and all the other isms there are. Should universities also be judged on the impact they have on the emotional, spiritual and mental wellbeing of its students?

Through the examples provided in this writing I would suggest that focusing on creating a pedagogy of love as a basis for all learning institutions  is a criteria that would root universities in an educational system that both nurtures the student and teacher, develops inclusive policies and enables individuals to develop as mature and emphatic human beings. In “All About Love” Bell Hooks explains that the parameters within which it’s safe to publicly declare a belief in the power of love as a motivation and necessary part of social justice, empathy, self development, and a way to resolve a lot of the issues we contend with today (sexism, environmentalism, racism, the immigration crisis, poverty etc.)  are limiting, ‘Nowadays the most popular messages are those that declare the meaninglessness of love, it’s irrelevance’. She goes on to reference Harold Kushner who writes: “I am afraid that we may be raising a generation of young people who will grow up afraid to love…I am afraid that they will grow up looking for intimacy without risk, for pleasure without significant emotional investment. They will be so fearful of the pain of disappointment that they will forego the possibilities of love and joy.”

The fear of being judged and ridiculed for believing in the idealism of love can cripple people into believing that it is an ineffective tool in creating change. Yet the societal deficit of love we experience is proof that something needs to be done to change the course we are on. We need to be willing to have difficult conversations with others and ourselves about issues regarding race, gender, class, disability, sexuality etc. if we want to make progress as a society, and within the classroom.

So, I intend to use my position as an associate lecturer to teach with an awareness of my positionality and how it relates to the students I’m talking to. I will be conscious of how I use language as a tool; giving positive affirmations and using inclusive and relevant language. I’ll organise specific days for one to one sessions, where discussions can be about anything including mental health needs, essays, work, the latest movie in the MARVEL franchise (I meant it when I said they can talk about anything) in an attempt to develop a dramatic and meaningful relationship with my students. 

These are just a few examples, amongst the ones provided earlier, on the small yet significant steps I’m taking to be an active and responsible teacher, that prioritises love above all else, in the hope that it improves the experience of the students that I teach.

The idea that we can always be, and indeed are, engaged with the activity of play is great news for those of us who secretly felt like we never grew up. I found it particularly interesting, because it positioned the necessity of play in looking at and understanding art. Or as Gadamer calls it……

****!!! ‘TRANSFORMATION INTO STRUCTURE’ !!!****

In Vilhauer’s review of Gadamer’s approach to the meaning of play, ‘Human play reaches its ultimate consummation, according to Gadamer, in the work of art.’ Quite an assertion for those of us who’s relationship to the word play tends to conjure up images of Super Mario and Luigi, running around chasing a ball, or holding a deck of cards in your hands.

What does it mean then, if art is the means by which we reach the most supreme understanding of play, and how does this change the way we teach?

People often feel ill equipped or intimidated when asked to comment on a piece of art, as if there is only ever one way to consider a work, and interpreting it incorrectly renders the onlooker a philistine. There is an inherent fear of looking foolish as a result of saying something ‘wrong’. This is particularly prevalent when teaching in digital spaces, where students are often reluctant to speak. It’s hard to ignore the pressure of articulating yourself in a way that expresses an authentic self that translates to Microsoft teams, in addition to dealing with the deafening silences that fill online spaces. Talking about art in the online space of a crit or tutorial is understandably a daunting prospect for many. However, the propositions made in this text allow us to see that when encountering art in these contexts, the act of looking, thinking, considering, imagining, questioning, disliking, liking, probing, falls under the category of communicating with something through play. As Robert Lumsden declares, we have to encourage students to, ‘Never be afraid to ask questions; they do not reveal ignorance so much as a lively and enquiring mind.’ Through the process of looking at and interacting with art a nexus of a relationship is formed, and within that relationship there is a back and forth, a to and fro that leads to an accumulation of knowledge, which can then amount to a form of understanding.

This can be described as an ontological process, and therefore a process of metamorphosis, that encourages the participant to invest in being. An ‘ontological event’ takes place where the participant and artwork both have an opportunity to be transformed. The artwork is given a life! As such, it has the potential to live through the consideration of another and the other can reach a superior mode of being through considering the artwork. Gloria Dall’Alba’s paper on ontology further explains the pedagogy of engaging with students in a similar manner, raising several points about the effectiveness of actively engaging with the process of teaching as an ontological activity ie. a mode of being, instead of a spoon fed/hierarchical activity.

Dall’Alba’s writing about pedagogy was particularly stirring, as it reminded me of my experiences encountering this for myself. Whenever I signed up for tutorials on my MA, I would have seemingly nonsensical and rambling conversations with one particular tutor that visited the school frequently. Our discussions led to me forming realisations about my practice (and myself) that I hadn’t been able to articulate, or realise before, and the first time this happened I took it to be a fluke, but after reading this chapter about ‘The pedagogical relationship’ I realised that this tutor was in fact facilitating me in my learning. Our conversations were a perfect demonstration of Gadamer’s notion of play. The chats we had were a collaborative activity that allowed me to use the resources of both her knowledge and my own internal understanding of self to further my development, as both an artist and an individual. As Martin Heidegger states, ‘And why is teaching more difficult than learning? Not because the teacher must have a larger store of information, and have it always ready. Teaching is more difficult than learning because what teaching calls for is this: let learn. The real teacher, in fact, lets nothing else be learned than – learning.’ When engaging with this tutor, the simple act of active listening, and probing where necessary, broadened the scope of our conversations and therefore my perspective on how our tutorials were a place for me to play around with thoughts, ideas and emotions. I was able to take an active role in developing an understanding of how I learn and how to learn.

I have, however, also experienced the antithesis of this. As the only black student in a predominantly white class, when I informed my tutors of feeling uncomfortable and unable to fully discuss the racial politics and content of my work in group discussions/tutorials, I was often met with resistance. In her paper Dall’Alba addresses the reality of resistance to changing pedagogical ideas around teaching and used it as an opportunity to encourage collaboration with her students. Instead of deferring to a ‘teacher as authority’ model, she engaged students in a critique of their expectations of the traditional teacher/student relationship and challenged them to consider how to work outside of their initial understanding of this. She went on to state that collaborating with students in this way created a shift in perspective and allowed students to change the way they worked. This sort of revelation is meaningful because it enables me to see how I could have resolved some of the complicated discussions I had with my own tutors about institutional racism within the university and how it was affecting critique of my work in tutorials and crit discussions. It demonstrates to me the importance of using feedback as an opportunity to work with students to resolve issues or concerns, and it allows me to see how to tackle dealing with potential resistance to course content for ex.

So if I think about teaching, there is an opportunity to use the online learning space as a place for inquisitive, collaborative and open dialogue, and activities can be used in a way that prioritises play as the mode of learning.

One way this can be accomplished is by creating smaller study groups within the student cohort. For example, I’ve planned two sound workshops that explore themes around developing narratives and cultural histories through the use of sound. The workshops are designed to help students play with found material, personal recordings/discography, images/videos, in an attempt to encourage the students to see the important relationship between open ended exploratory investigation, narrative, discovery of the self and the relationship this has to an artistic practice. The students that take part will be kept to a small number, and they’ll be able to participate in a way that allows them to contribute content towards the workshop itself (via Object Based Learning), giving them a chance to shape and lead the conversations we have as a group.

In a warm up activity, I’ve asked students to find images or videos of artworks which they then have to find a corresponding sound to go with. The sound can be complimentary, contradictory, subversive, illustrative, quite literally anything they want. It’s an oppurtunity for them to play through the method of researching and experimenting with a range of different online materials as a means to produce something quickly and without the pressure or need for it to be fully resolved. I’ve provided an example below: play the song in the video beneath the painting of Miss Mona Lisa and listen to it in its entirety, whilst looking at the painting.

This activity is an example of how the pieces by Vilhauer and Dall’Alba have helped me consider my relationship to play, and its role in education and how we interact with art. Going forward I hope to use play in my lessons as a means for learning. It’s my hope that this will then allow students to produce work that encourages independent thinking/a way for developing self expression/actualisation via the act of making.

• 

In today’s class we each had an oppurtunity to speak about the principles and values that underpin our teaching practice. In light of this I put together a collection of slides that demonstrated how social justice is the foundation for my teaching pedagogy.

I’m interested in working with students to develop and deepen their understanding of different cultural histories, whilst encouraging a critique of the Western canon of art, archiving practices and philosophies. I therefore decided to read the article ‘Archiving Critically: Exploring the communication of cultural biases’ by Hannah Grout, as a way to delve into the subject of how positionality affects how we learn/teach others, and how this relates to the history of archiving, and how this can be considered through a social justice lens.

Grout’s article explored the relationship between what is archived and how this impacts people’s approach to learning from the material provided in the archive. There was disturbing evidence that if cultural biases dictate what/how/if things are archived, then those biases also influence the way audiences are taught to engage with and observe archives, leading to canon’s that uphold racist, sexist and ableist pedagogies. To correct this, it’s important for current pedagogic practices to acknowledge the historical dearth of archives that capture the histories of female, BAME, lower income, LGBTQI+ communities (to name but a few), and work towards changing this endemic biased behaviour. Grout argues that engaging with archives in a critical manner can allow us to use them in our pedagogic practices as a tool to interrogate and develop teaching and learning. If efforts are made to consider how to re-engage with archives through inclusive practices, we can consider the following questions during current and future archiving and learning practices.

How do we go beyond only critiquing institutional archives, to reshaping and diversifying them?

How do/can we dismantle cultural biases that archivists and institutions may practice? 

How do we encourage people who have been excluded from inclusion in archives to engage with this practice?

Should they create their own?

I contemplated these questions as I thought about how to talk about my teaching pedagogy with my fellow students via a five minute presentation. I soon realised that I could use my presentation to highlight archiving practices that work to address the imbalance of exclusionary archiving methods, and I shared slides that showed archive resources that were created by POC, LGBQTI+ and international students to demonstrate how alternative archiving can challenge the inequities of historical archiving practices.

The first example I shared of this is provided below in the image below.

A snippet from the artist’s website Danielle Brathwaite Shirley’s BLACKTRANSARCHIVE.COM, this image is a snapshot into the immersive experience available to those who decide to engage with the online archive Danielle created to gather and honour Black Trans lives. Via gaming software design, Danielle has created an interactive online platform that allows the participant to engage with the archive as either a cis (heterosexual), trans or Black Trans individual to create a space that acknowledges and honours Black Trans people and holds the memory of those who have been erased from history and forgotten. Before engaging with the archive Danielle herself states that, “your own identity will determine how you can interact with the archive”. Openly addressing the importance of positionality, Danielle has created an archive that functions in multiple ways, as it allows for people from different identities to participate in a way that takes into account the relationship between who we are and how this affects our behaviour, and in this case, how we access and engage with the pro Black Trans archive she’s created. It’s interesting to see how someone has taken action to produce an archive for a community of people as a form or resistance and celebration. Danielle has demonstrated the opportunities there are for individuals to create and produce their own archival material, and this is important as it helps us realise there are alternative histories and ways of including them in learning resources we share with our students. Merewether states in Grout’s essay, ‘concepts of the archive have been defined, examined, contested and reinvented by artists and cultural observers.’ As this quote demonstrates, Danielle is amongst many who are engaging with the task of undoing and repositioning the way we relate to and engage with archives, and this work is relevant to us as teachers as it asks us to question what/how we present material to our students .

Another example of such is an alternative archive that UAL student’s contribute to, called Tell Us About It. The archive is made up of artefacts that UAL students of colour have created and shared for students and teachers alike to look at and use as a contemporaneous learning resource. Shades of Noir (an anti racist platform) started this project as a way to produce learning material that could be used to develop people’s understanding of what UAL graduates had experienced during their studies and it’s a great resource for students who are looking to use research material that is eclectic, student led and wide ranging in theme and production. The archive acts as a way to create a safe learning space for those who engage with it, offering people who are from different circumstances a place to feel seen and heard, ”we’ve used it in student workshops for brand new students from overseas, to help them sort of settle in a bit and see what kind of things they might experience along the way, studying in London.” The desire to build an awareness of students’ needs and experiences is addressed by this archive, it acts as a tool to help bridge the gap between those who are unfamiliar with studying in London, whilst allowing others to better understand International students’ experience of studying in a new place. Creating an emphatic and open dialogue is a brilliant way to think about how an archive can exist and how it can be used by students to teach one another/their tutors. This work is exemplary of action being taken to produce archives that differ from traditional forms of archiving. The fact that it is digital, for example, makes it accessible to people in a way that isn’t always possible when considering how to access objects in museums or universities. It can be looked at anywhere, anytime.

Finally, Adrian Piper was the focus of my attention. A one woman band who is the epitome of a living archive, Adrian has spent many years of her life documenting performances and interactions with people in both public and private spaces, as a way to explore, critique, assess, experience the depth of her identity, and other’s reaction/relationship to it.

Working in a range of mediums (performance, drawing, writing, film, sound) Piper is a great example of creating a living archive as a document of a practice that engages with identity in both a public and personal way. Piper has worked performatively throughout her career, and considering how she records these public/private actions helps us to think about how we can document our practice as a form of archiving. She presents the idea that artists themselves can record their work as an ongoing activity. This is an important example for students, as it can be used to help them consider not only the importance of documentation when it comes to assessment, but also for their practice outside of art school. By keeping a record of what she made, Piper took control of a situation, demonstrating how POC who are underrepresented in museums, galleries, universities etc. can create their own alternative histories, using archiving methods as a tool for this. Piper is an important reference as she provides another example of someone forging their own path, centring their experiences as something valid and real.

The premise of Grout’s article is that, ‘In the same way that scholastic institutions teach critical thinking skills to students, in order to develop their work and learning, these same skills would enable those delivering and facilitating teaching to identify points of bias and presumption in their respective practice.’ These artists and archives are examples of people using their positionality within society to provide examples of alternative practices/experiences/perspectives. They show us how we can identify ways to challenge biases by consciously critiquing the material we share/the way we share archival practices and material with students. It was important that I shared the artist’s work above in my presentation as I wanted to show an example of inclusive learning material, borne from my desire to use social justice as the cornerstone of my teaching practice.

*For the purpose of this essay I chose the identity of a Black Trans person in order to demonstrate alternative archive perspectives

So I went to my first lecture today, and one of the things that immediately became a topic of conversation was how we could all adjust to navigating learning on online spaces, which is now the new norm. Touching and being physically close to one another now is an adage to a time that feels far far away (but in reality is only 10 months prior to where I’m sat right now). I did, however, have a useful conversation with three fellow PG Cert students who have already experienced teaching within these restrictions, and I got some great advice from them about how to tackle issues faced when working with students in virtual spaces.

1. Become friends with the emoji – Those little pictures can really help out with expressing emotions and thoughts.

2. Be aware of the pacing and rhythm of your speech – For those who don’t use English as their fast language, it helps to speak clearly and slowly. 

3. Be aware of translating colloquialisms and idioms so everyone understands the conversation and is included – Being more conscious of the type of language you’re using enables you to be inclusive and is an important part of creating a safe learning space.

4. Share language resources that students might find helpful – Students can use assistive technology to translate lectures or have them read aloud via software available through UAL and other websites.

Great tips, right? It was good to know that there are ways to stride through the quagmire of teaching via a screen, and it left me feeling like, ‘I got this’ 🙂

Not bad for a first day.

Amended entry: 24/02/2021

Since writing the above, I’ve attended a number of tutorial group sessions and cohort meetings that have further enhanced my understanding of exactly how intimidating online digital spaces can be to maneuver for students who have to grapple with difficulties regarding language, and it’s use. A lot of the advice I was given dealt with how to overcome problems with communicating online, and this led to me thinking about the differences between certain forms of language (academic, informal, colloquial, regional), it’s use in the learning environment, and the university’s role in decolonising it’s linguistic learning resources.

As a learning institution the ‘university’ is guilty of upholding systems and pedagogic values that are classist, sexist and racist. One of the tools used to accomplish this is language. The university, at its best, is a space that is resplendent with diversity, allowing its students and lecturers alike to utilise its libraries, workshops and learning resources, encouraging open and rigorous critical discussion. However, certain forms of language are prioritised within these spaces, while others are omitted from the classroom. For example, academic texts can be at fault for using language and theories that are exclusionary and require a huge amount of effort to decipher, let alone process and utilise as a form of useful knowledge. As Jean-Paul Sartre explains in his book ‘What Is Literature?’:

“the literary object has no other substance than the reader’s subjectivity; Raskolnikov’s waiting is my waiting which I lend him….his hatred of the police magistrate who question him is my hatred, which has been solicited and wheedled out of me by signs….Thus, the writer appeals to the reader’s freedom to collaborate in the production of his work.”

But, what if there are limits to the signs that are used to encourage this freedom. What if the subjective position you are asked to take is based upon deep rooted ideologies that hold unconscious biases, and therefore makes language an inaccessible space, that for many, is intimidating and used to prioritise and uplift some, whilst refusing the needs of others.

This is something that frequently has a disproportionate effect on BAME and international students. The feminist Adrienne Rich encountered this problem and tackled it head on when teaching inner city youths in New York. Confessing that she often had to restructure her lessons and the learning material she’d intended to use, in order to make her classes relevant and inclusive of the experiences her students had, Rich demonstrated how important it is to realise the limitations students can encounter when language is a barrier that prevents people from accessing or relating to the provided material. Accepting the truth of Sartre’s perspective, Rich reflects in her essay Teaching Language in Open Admissions, ‘But what if it is these very signs, or ones like them, that have been used to limit the reader’s freedom or to convince the reader of his or her unworthiness to “collaborate in the production of the work”? ” Understanding the urgency of this problem Rich asked the question, “Is standard English simply a weapon of colonisation.” It’s clear that instead of freeing the reader, language can fall into the realm of limiting and excluding those who do not see themselves in its territories. We can see, therefore, how vital it is for teachers, and those that run the university, to consciously engage with finding material that reflects diverse and accurate representations of language as it is used today as well as historically. Another example of this is evident below.

This video is of a song by MIKE, a rapper from New York. The song is a sound recording of archive material, and in it, an educator works with a young black female, helping her to read a text which has been written with different forms of the English language.

This video demonstrates the progress made with a student in her studies when she is given the oppurtunity to utilise language that is relevant to her (standard English) as opposed to the old English that the poem was originally written in, and it reinforces the work that Rich did with her students in New York. In acknowledging the positionality of students, you are able to provide them with material that is useful and impactful to them and this then has the potential to positively shape the way they engage with their experience of studying, and their relationship to language. The educator in the video proudly declares the validity of the “speech of the black culture of America,” stating that it “be recognised as a genuine dialect of English”. Considerations such as these help us understand the importance of acknowledging the evolution of language, and how that must be reflected in the teaching methods and source material used in educational settings such as the university.

Although, there are examples of how it may be difficult for all students to fully embrace the poetry of language that dialects, colloquialisms and idioms offer.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein writes,

‘The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated’.

This statement, a bold declaration of just how difficult it is to accomplish a conversation of equal footing between two people if one doesn’t fully understand the language of the other, demonstrates that it is a nuanced and difficult process to express oneself to another when using language that paints pictures, and requires an understanding of contexts which the recipient might not be familiar with.

In his book ‘Humiliation’ Wayne Koestenbaum details the bleak reality of unsuccessful encounters with language,

‘Think of the silent adjustments, and the subliminal toll they take on our equanimity, that we must make merely to understand how to behave in front of other people. And think of the humiliation undergone if these silent adjustments are not made.’

I referenced Koestenbaum here because this quote encapsulates how important it is that students engage with one another, and are engaged with by staff, in a way that acknowledges the work that must be done by both parties to create a conversation that is inclusive and addresses the needs of the other, when and if there is a barrier.

For example, I’m from Essex, and I use certain abbreviations and colloquialisms that someone from another part of Britain might not understand. If you then consider how this problem becomes a double fold issue when English isn’t necessarily a student’s first language, it is clear that when I’m in teaching situations, I have to be mindful to explain any phrases or regional colloquialisms I use, so that everybody is on the same page.

All in all, I think that it’s important to use language in a way that allows everybody to interpret and understand what is being shared in a way that isn’t exclusionary. I will apply this principle in the lectures/workshops/tutorials/crits that students attend, in the hope that everyone will be able to participate in a way that encourages them as artists and individuals.

My name is Rachel Jones and I’m an associate lecturer on Fine Art Photography at Camberwell College of Arts. I’m looking forward to working with students on my course and developing a teaching practice that is influenced by social justice pedagogies.