lashsakula's blog

 Introduction

As an HPL on the Illustration BA and MA at Camberwell, I run individual and group tutorials with students facilitating crits and tailoring feedback to help individuals progress their ideas within the parameters of the course. One of my students, who did not have English as a first language, had brought in a long form essay that was clearly heavily researched and must have taken her a long time to write but it did not fit the brief of a critical practice project. She redid the project as an interactive website, which gained her an A at assessement but she subsequently burnt out and had had to go into a residential mental health facility over the holidays. Within the context of the course, I gave her the right advice as her grade improved significantly, but at what cost to her mental health? 

Evaluation: 

Looking back on the interaction, I probably was not as careful with the way I worded myself as I could have been particularly since I had been seeing students all day and was tired at this point. In future I want to be more intentional about how I give feedback to all students as I cannot know what is going on for them behind the scenes. 

In this interaction, think I created a “controlling discourse” as Barrow describes:

“the framework built on the basis of Christian confession enables the self to be subjected to a system of truth and to the authority of an authoritative individual (Foucault, 1983a)—whether this is theological and priestly, psychological and therapeutic, or disciplinary and tutelary (Rose, 1996a). This framework leads individuals to develop a manner of conducting oneself in the various aspects of one’s life (Rose, 1996a), and forms a controlling discourse so that people become individuals of a certain sort (Marshall, 1996).”

This is something I want to absolutely avoid in my teaching in future.

Challenges:  

• As an HPL, I often don’t have time to get to know the students as individuals as I only see them every few weeks, and often for very short amounts of time.  
• Even in situations where students have ISAs there is very little information that can help me contextualize what they might be struggling with.  
• Student mental health is at an all time low across the UK, many of my students are extremely anxious and depressed.  

Opportunity:  

I want to reframe not only my feedback but the whole idea of assessment to students who are struggling with mental health issues. 

Context:  

In her introduction to Joy Centered Pedagogy, Camfield  states:

“The statistics are alarming: rates of anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation on college campuses have never been higher (Flannery, 2023), with 46% of faculty members saying their students come to them with a mental health concern multiple times a month or more and 55% of college students saying their mental health is their top stressor (Mowreader, 2023).”

The cost of living crisis, family pressures and a lack of job prospects, makes this a stressful time to be a student and as teachers we need to be prepared to support young people in our care. There is also a tendency for student to disclose to teachers either through their work or during tutorials which can be particularly difficult when we ourselves as teachers are facing these same challenges and often juggling teaching with other jobs and parenting means we have own mental health to contend with.

Plan of action in tutorials: 

After brainstorming with colleagues during PG Cert sessions, I have come up with some ways in which I will frame my feedback in future to help students struggling with stress and mental health issues: 

• When I speak to students, especially those I see struggling with stress and anxiety, I will remind them to always put their health ahead of their work and that no grade is worth burning out for.  

• I will reframe assessment as just a snapshot of a single moment in their wider creative lives. These grades do not reflect their creative ability or their future prospects, just where they are in the present moment.  

• I will remind them that a grade does not reflect on them as an artist or a person, and that it will have very little relevance after they leave UAL. I will refer to my own experience in which I did not achieve top grades in any of my degrees and yet I have a career as a working artist.  

• After assessment I will offer them the chance to talk through the feedback and query anything they are concerned about.   

• For students who do not speak English as first language, I will check in at the end of the tutorial to check they have understood what has been said, and that they know what to do next using translation software. 

Plan of action in crits: 

• Set up the space as a brave space that includes everyone and rewards risk taking .  

• Take a moment to recognise each other’s humanity: we are all stressed and anxious, how can we use humour through an icebreaker question to lift that and create solidarity 

• Send crit questions in advance so students can run them through translation software, and prepare answers if they want to.  

• Make space for less confident students: Have students talk in pairs, so that everyone has a chance to be listened to even if they don’t want to speak in front of the whole group. Give the opportunity to give written feedback not just spoken. Run sessions conversationally in a symposium style rather than going through students one by one so they aren’t sitting waiting for the axe to fall on them. 

• Give students something to do with their hands, a lump of plasticine to hold, a piece of string. 

• Remind students that anxiety and excitement can feel the same in the body, could they take a moment to recognise which is which.  

References/Bibliography: 

Camfield, E.K. (2025) ‘Introducing Joy-Centered Pedagogy’, in Camfield, E.K. (ed.) Joy-Centered Pedagogy in Higher Education: Uplifting Teaching and Learning for All. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 1–13.

Barrow, Mark(2006) ‘Assessment and student transformation: linking character and intellect’, Studies in Higher Education, 31: 3, 357 — 372

Introduction:

Teaching on BA and MA Illustration at Camberwell, I run regular group tutorials. These can sometimes feel formulaic: students present their work one at a time, then need to be heavily prompted to engage critically and feedback to their peers. Often they look to me as the teacher to give them feedback, ideas and references, and so the flow of learning can feel stilted and uneven and the sessions themselves dull. Bell Hooks states ” The first paradigm that shaped my pedagogy was the idea that the classroom should be an exciting place, never boring.” I want to apply this to my teaching.

Evaluation/Goal:

I want to create dynamic pleasurable engagement in my tutorials. The main challenges are:

• An expectation of hierarchy in which I am the expert who holds the knowledge rather than the facilitator who circulates it. This is further entreneched by students perception of themselves as customers there to be served with knowledge, rather than active participants in their own education.
• A lack of confidence among students: due to having English as a second language or a wide range of neurodivergences.
• The space: we teach in an open plan studio where there are often three or four other group tutorials happening simultaneously, it can be hard to concentrate and hear each other within these overlapping soundscapes. 

Opportunity:

I know it is possible to create learning spaces that are joyful, reciprocal and playful as I do this all the time in my practice as a community artist working in many challenging spaces with people from a wide range of ages, backgrounds and abilities. Most recently I have been working in Care homes creating a series of creative interventions and invitations in collaboration with residents late stage dementia. In those settings I am not the assumed authority, the residents and staff hold much of the knowledge, but I am instead seen as someone who brings a new perspective. Because these spaces are by nature somewhat chaotic, unexpected things happen all the time and these are opportunities for play and sillyness. I want to bring this practice of dynamic improvisation to my teaching at UAL.

Plan of action and context:

Here are some ideas to bring pleasure, reciporicity and playfulness into my teaching practice:

• Use Arao and Clemens idea of a Brave Space to discuss of the difference between comfort and safety and to encourage risk taking in the group, within a safe set of boundaries.
• Remind students that they are the experts in this project as they are actually doing it as opposed to teachers who are merely witnessing their practice. We are all creative practitioners here, everyone is the expert in their own work.
• Plan extra layers of accessibility into the session. For example: Exploring each other’s work non verbally through sensory research into objects that students bring in as a part of the practice.
• During the micro teach Katriona Beales gave us each a lump of plasticine to mould while we were listening to the discussion, could this kind of tactile intervention help take the pressure off and introduce a more embodied engagement with the topic?
• In the interest of tactile exploration: ask students to bring printed material or sketchbooks to session rather than everyone trying to see things on screens which can be really difficult to share. If cost was a limiting factor I could offer to print images as I have unlimited colour printing as a staff member. 
• Bring in an unexpected element to model sillyness. In their book Sweiker and Bayerdorfer invite us to try unexpected thing sin the classroom for instance:  

“Take off a sock and rub your foot with mustard. Pass the mustard around. Put the sock back on” 

Although we might not actually do this, it could be interesting to choose one and discuss it as a warm up at the beginning of each session? 

References/Bibliography: 

Arao, B. and Clemens, K., (2013), From Safe Spaces to Brave Spaces: A new way to frame dialogue around diversity and social Justice

hooks, b. 1994. Teaching to Transgress : Education As the Practice of Freedom, Taylor & Francis Group.

Bayerdorfer, M. and Schweiker, R., 2023,Teaching for people who prefer not to teach/ Learning for people who prefer not to be taught. AND.

As we were not able to find a time for Kwame to come in person, I sent him my lesson plan and slides for a workshop I taught to my year 3 students on BA Animation. The workshop was about diversifying character design. Workshop plan and slides below:

https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/key/aAc9tP1wtac6P4

Kwame’s feedback:

Your lesson plan has an amazing projection of thinking that is situated in the Lynda Barry syllabus approach and Lynda Stupart body concept. Both concepts of art creation are about the limits of what one draws and based on self-perception. You started the session with a collaborative drawing which is an interesting approach that most students may not have experienced before. On most occasions in art education warm up drawing is about centring the artist’s own production. It would be interesting to understand the rationale for this warm up and whether there was an intended learning.

The plan presents a really good progressive workshop in which activities encourage participant collaboration and support (in the form of feedback and discussion). It would be interesting to know if you had an in-session plan for managing time between activities. This is because when engagement is extensive amongst peers it feels like it should continue because a lot of learning is acquired during that period (Peer Learning: an Overview – Keerthirathne, W.K.D., 2020. Peer learning: an overview. International Journal of Scientific Engineering and Science, 4(11), pp.1-6)

As this is only a workshop plan, even though it has significant detail, I would like to know if there was the need to walk around the room to support or encourage any student as part of running the workshop? When you know your students very well, as an educator, your instruction is often understood clearly without any additional prompt. In short it means you are in the zone!!

My responses to Kwame’s questions:

I use collaborative drawing as a tool to take the pressure out of creation. Drawing a character together, especially as in an exquisite corpse when you cannot see the whole character until the end, allows students to be less precious with their work. Being silly together builds trust, encourages support and allows students to have a go and take the idea of “failing” less seriously. This then loosens them up creatively for individual work later on in the session.

I design sessions to be reactive and flexible to what is happening in the moment. If a particularly good or useful discussion comes up, I will make space for it to continue and cut down the time on another task. Keerthirathne argues that peer learning needs both space and structure in equal measure, as a facilitator I gage responsively which is needed at a particular point.

During the afternoon in this session I will make myself available for questions and occasionally circulate around the room. I find there is a delicate line to be trod between actively engaging with student work and standing over them which can cause anxiety. If students are not actively seeking my advice or support, I will sit down and do the task alongside them which allows me both to model the task and to enter a more collaborative learning environment, where we are all working on the same project rather than creating a more hierarchical power structure where I watch while they work.

Introduction 

As an associate lecturer on the BA and MA at Camberwell, I teach students with a wide range of backgrounds and learning needs. I don’t see them regularly or for very long, and I don’t have any paid planning time, so I can sometimes default to a one size fits all didactic style of teaching. This has not been effective at supporting all students, some have struggled to understand briefs, or to focus on tasks, others have become overwhelmed and fallen behind on the fast moving curriculum. I want to think about how I can not only improve access to my sessions but also offer extra ways to support and challenge to all students in my teaching. 

Challenges: 

• As a precariously employed HPL, it is challenging to build the ongoing relationships with students that allow for me to know them well enough to tailor my teaching to their individual needs.
•  My students learning needs vary widely: English as an additional language, a range of neurodiversities, social issues, mental health issues, unequal access to resources including time. 
• The curriculum (that I have no control over) demands a lot of work very quickly from students who are sometimes struggling to balance their studies with jobs, long commutes and caring responsibilities.

Opportunity:  

I want to make my teaching universally accessible (if such a thing is possible) in the hope that if I cast a wide enough net, no one will fall through. Having read a range of innovative pedagogy techniques I want to think about how I can apply them practically in the classroom to improve the inclusivity of my sessions. 

Plan of action:  

• In Celebrating Silence, Winek argues that starting sessions with a short moment of quiet reflection, enhance equity in the classroom, allowing everyone to arrive, ground and prepare themselves for the discussion ahead: “

I now see one way that I can attempt to “even the playing field” for students, both those exhausted by long work hours and those more well- rested due to less required labor outside of school, is to offer them all quiet time for processing important course content in class. […] Breaking the cycle of performative rigor (i.e., busywork for the sake of being busy) and instead endorsing effective reflective resting as a valid form of rigor is something that instructors can do to help students find balance, meaning, and deeper learning as they navigate their undergraduate experiences (Bowen, 2021).”

I will start sessions with 10 minutes of quiet time in which I have the questions we will discuss written up for students to reflect on. This will hopefully allow students time to ground themselves as they arrive from busy lives and create more equity in group discussions as everyone will have had time to consider discussion questions. 

• In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks argues:

“We must return ourselves to a state of embodiment in order to deconstruct the way power has been traditionally orchestrated in the classroom, denying subjectivity to some groups and according it to others”

Bayers suggests that embodied learning is not only useful cognitively for learning but makes the classroom a more inclusive place:

“a classroom environment that enables bodily movement by way of fidgeting, doodling, knitting, or other embodied activities that might be seen as inappropriate in traditional academic settings enhances learning accessibility. Suppressing the urge to move as we learn, as “whole body listening” protocols ask students to do, pulls on energy reserves and increases cognitive load (Murphy Paul, 2021). A fidget- friendly classroom recognizes that varied bodies learn differently and that many bodies think better while moving.” 

I will encourage movement in the classroom, whether that is giving students something to do with their hands during discussion, getting up to share thoughts with a partner, going for a discursive walk, or doing a body grounding exercise at the beginning of the class so that we challenge the mind body division that is so inherent in many classrooms. 

• Hill argues in The Joy is in the inclusvie (teaching) journey is that

“One of the most important and critical steps that you can take toward expressing care and fostering inclusion (and its byproduct joy) is by simply insisting that you and your students learn each other’s names and how to pronounce them correctly.” 

• I will make intentional time at the beginning of the year on name games that get everyone comfortable with remembering and pronouncing other students names.  This will hopefully prevent the othering that students feel when their names are constantly mangled by staff and students alike, which can intefere with their learning and their sense of being in community with each other.

I hope that applying these three new teaching strategies: quiet time at the beginning of a session, movement breaks during a session, and an insistence on learning and getting people’s names to show respect and build community will help all my students to engage in my teaching with more ease and pleasure.

References/Bibliography:

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge

Hill, L., (2025) ‘The joy in in the inclusive (teaching) journey’ in Kogl Camfield, E., Joy Centered pedagogy in Higher Education: Uplifiting teaching and learning for all. New York: Routledge

Bayers, L., (2025) ‘The Joy of Embodied Learning’ in Kogl Camfield, E., Joy Centered pedagogy in Higher Education: Uplifiting teaching and learning for all. New York: Routledge

Winek, A., (2025) Celebrating Silence: Making Space for Quiet Joy in the Classroom in Kogl Camfield, E., Joy Centered pedagogy in Higher Education: Uplifiting teaching and learning for all. New York: Routledge

Some of the best learning I have got out of the PG Cert so far has been in interactions with peers. The session I enjoyed the most was the microteach: observing and participating in other people’s practice, I picked up so many techniques I want to integrate into my teaching. For example:

• Tactile teaching tools: Katriona gave us each a piece of plasticine to shape into a container during The Carrier bag theory of fiction by Ursula Le Guin. By linking making with the text, the learning became embodied and thus more engaging.
• Breaking down a complex text by reading aloud as a group.
• Simplifying teaching tasks: Andrea ran a session where we stamped a repeated pattern on a piece of cloth for the whole 20 minutes and I learnt a lot about pacing and focus during this process
• Using unstructured play that leads to complex outcomes: Eva gave us coloured blocks to play with and then used the shapes we made to create costume designs.

During the PG Cert sessions, I particularly liked the practice of collaborative reading to cover a lot of theory in a short amount of time, this is something I will definitely start applying in my teaching.

Body doubling (a practice where two people work on a task in the same room, though not necessarily together) with Fred Anderssen has also been invaluable part of this experience. We spent two afternoons together writing up our blog posts and just having Fred in the same room to pick apart certain points, or sharpen our ideas helped me be so much more productive. This is a practice I will recommend to my students for getting work done.

In 1984, in her essay The Uses of the erotic, Audre Lorde states:

The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference

Ten years later, Bell Hooks asserts

The first paradigm that shaped my pedagogy was the idea that the classroom should be an exciting place, never boring. […] Neither Freire’s work nor feminist pedagogy examined the notion of pleasure in the classroom.

This year Camfied, has edited a whole book about Joy Centered Pedagogy which she argues:

joy-centered pedagogy promotes intellectual vigor and disrupts those aspects of traditional notions of rigor that suggest learning should hurt.

All three of these women are hugely influential on my teaching and facilitation practice, I strongly believe joy enhances the possibilities of the classroom becoming the equitable utopian space that it has the potential to be. There are currently so many challenges to bringing pleasure, excitement and joy into our classrooms: noisy open plan spaces, exhausted students and staff, rigid curriculums. An art school should be a space full of excitement, play and curiosity, but so often it is instead one of stress, deadlines and anxiety. The art school, and perhaps universities in general have become professionalised to such an extent that it is hard for students to feel free to play when there is so much pressure to perform. The opposite of joy isn’t suffering; it’s numbness, sometimes inviting joy into a space is to invite all feelings. Creating a space where students grief and anger is also welcome opens the door to joy.

I want to look in one of my case studies into strategies for making my teaching more joyful.

Reference:

hooks, b. 1994. Teaching to Transgress : Education As the Practice of Freedom, Taylor & Francis Group.

Lorde, Audre, 1984. “Uses of Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister Outsider. The Crossing Press

Camfield, EK, 2025. Joy Centered Pedagogy in Higher Education: Uplifting teaching and learning for all, Taylor & Francis Group.

My object based learning microteach involved the following objects from my home: a crochet chicken, a plaster cast of my thumb, a piece of obsidian, a square of orange neon perspex, a tiny model of mango sticky rice, a maze game from a christmas cracker.

Session plan: Museum of the future 

Warm up (5 min) 

1. Lay out a selection of objects on the table – none readily identifyable for a particular use. Invite peers to choose the one they feel drawn to. 

2. Ask participants to explore the object they have chosen using all their senses sight, sound, touch, smell, taste (if they are feeling brave) and movement without speaking for two minutes. 

3. Ask partipants to pair up and show their partner the things they have discovered about their object, non verbally for two minutes. 

Task 1 (5 mins) 

Tell peers that I have brought back these objects from the future and that it is, contrary to all expectations, a great place. Climate Change has been solved, war is over, we live in communities of care, the arts flourish, humanity is saved.  

Give each peer a couple of note cards. Ask them to imagine their object is in a museum of the future write and to write an explanatory label for it. Explain that the label could contain the following or anything else they think is relevant:

• Where does it come from? 
• What is it made of? 
• What is it used for? 
• Does it have any sacred or magic properties? 

Task 2 (5 min) 

Curate the museum of the future. Arrange the objects in the space with their labels and go on a visit. Read each other’s stories.  

Discussion (5 min) 

• How did it feel to imagine the future as positive? 
• Did engaging sensorily with the objects ahead of time help you to write your sci-fi labels? 
• Did you discover anything that surprised you?
• How much of a difference did this particular selection of objects make? 

Feedback and reflection:

• Participants found writing positively about the future challenging, as we are so much more used to dystopian imaginings than utopian ones. Using a text prompt such as Adrienne Marie Brown’s chapter on Science fiction could have helped peers engage with the premise that we can’t make a better world if we can’t imagine it:

Science fiction is simply a way to practice the future together. I suspect that is what many of you are up to, practicing futures together, practicing justice together, living into new stories. It is our right and responsibility to create a new world.

• Spending time physically exploring the objects “dethroned the cerebral over the bodily” as one participant put it, and allowed people to think about the future in an embodied pleasure seeking way rather than a rational fact based way. Perhaps giving students some time to write down some of the things they experienced while exploring the object immediately afterwards could have fed into their museum labels later on.
• Participants enjoyed asking the objects to speak back to us and giving them a voice, separate from ourselves. I would like to read more about puppeteering and giving objects life and a voice, so that I could bring some practice exercises into this section of the session.

Overall I was pleased with how the session had gone, I wish I had put more effort into documenting it and producing more beautiful resources to go with it, ie ready made museum labels would have made the final layout more aesthetically appealing and perhaps made the objective clearer to my participants.

References:

Brown, A. (2017). Emergent strategy. AK Press.

• Session/artefact to be observed/reviewed: Unit 9 Festival – Graphic Design Yr3 
• Size of student group:  20 
• Observer: Lily Ash Sakula 
• Observee: Ana Teles 

Part One: Context

• What is the context of this session/artefact within the curriculum? 

Unit 9 Festival – Graphic Design Yr3. I’m not one of their tutors, but I’ll be supporting students with their work and events. The studios will host workshops, an exhibition, and presentations simultaneously. 

• How long have you been working with this group and in what capacity? 

This is my first time working with the entire BA Graphic Design Year 3 cohort. I already know some students from their previous exhibitions and events at Peckham Levels. 

• What are the intended or expected learning outcomes? 

Students will be expected to present work and exchange ideas with peers; lead workshops to gain professional-relevant skills; practise articulating and communicating design concepts; learn to display work professionally in an exhibition setting. 

• What are the anticipated outputs (anything students will make/do)? 

There’s a workshop at 11:10 on Crafting Chinese New Year Traditions and another at 12:20 on Create n Share, with outputs produced during these sessions. Presentations will also be happening simultaneously. As the space is open to the public and all CCW students, other activities may take place as well. 

• Are there potential difficulties or specific areas of concern? 

There are no specific areas of concern, but I’m not sure how well students have prepared for these activities or how familiar they are with the space. My role will be to support them in making the most of this time and environment. 

• How will students be informed of the observation/review? 

I will let them know orally on the day. 

Part Two: My observations

• Ana takes time to make Peckham levels space warm and inviting to students, welcoming everyone who enters and keeping biscuits, tea and coffee topped up.  

• Ana offers a wide range of expert technical and practical support to students while I am there: including obtaining a step ladder, offering advice on how to hang a display, and talking a student through how to write a risk assessment. She has a lovely way of being supportive of student enterprise while not assuming knowledge. 

• Ana also acts as a connector, constantly offering students ways to extend their practice. For example, she tells students who are running a workshop to apply for a workshop festival that is being run at Peckham levels next month. Her wide knowledge of the people, space and schedule allows her to constantly be making connections between students, spaces and events. 

• In a meeting with a student, Ana is very encouraging – she compliments student on how her proposal for an exhibition is “well written and designed”. She offers multiple ways for the student to promote the show and including an offer to format the info for the Peckham levels website. 

• She has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the available equipment and offers student different options for sound and hanging technologies and tools. 

• Ana makes herself available to help in professional and boundaried ways to the students she works with, including giving her working hours and phone number so they always know how to reach her.   

• Session/artefact to be observed/reviewed: Group tutorial 
• Size of student group: six students 
• Observer: Ana Teles 
• Observee: Lily Ash Sakula 

Part One: Context

• What is the context of this session/artefact within the curriculum? 

Group tutorial 6 students, BA Illustration, Yr 1, Unit 2.  Students were asked to create a poster(s) that reflected their interpretation of a film. They were provided with four film options to choose from. 

• How long have you been working with this group and in what capacity? 

Lily first met the students on their first day last year and is now returning from parental leave. 

• What are the intended or expected learning outcomes? 

The intended learning outcomes for this tutorial are for students to refine and develop their work to meet the two-week deadline. To help students to critically reflect on the decisions they have made throughout the process, including their choice of subject matter and creative approaches. Students will be encouraged to think creatively to address challenges and overcome obstacles and be encouraged to give feedback to their peers. 

• What are the anticipated outputs (anything students will make/do)? 

The anticipated outputs for this project include students finalising and refining the posters they created and presented during this session.  

• Are there potential difficulties or specific areas of concern? 

The possibility of anxiety among students as they received their assessment feedback in December.  

• How will students be informed of the observation/review? 

The feedback of their work will be given orally.  

• What would you particularly like feedback on? 

My facilitation: Is everyone in the group able to particpate and does the conversation flow in dynamic and exciting ways

My Feedback: Is my feedback fair and accessible? Is it equitable? Are there ways I could make it more inclusive?

• How will feedback be exchanged? 

Written in the form

Part Two: Ana’s Reflections 

• Lily engaged with students on a personal level, establishing a welcoming and inclusive atmosphere as they joined the tutorial. By initiating casual conversations, Lily connected with students, making them feel more comfortable and setting a supportive tone for the session. 

• At the start of the tutorial, Lily facilitated introductions by asking everyone to tell their names. This worked as an icebreaker and helped create a sense of connection as not all students knew each other. It also encouraged an environment where students felt more comfortable participating. 

• When it came to presenting work, Lily invited a volunteer to begin, as a way to give a sense of agency and involvement. After each student presented their work, Lily prioritised peer-to-peer dialogue by asking the group for their thoughts before sharing their own feedback.  

• To guide students in reflecting on their work, Lily used open-ended questions and prompts, for example, asking them to consider the reasoning behind their choices or to explore alternative possibilities (“Have you thought of…”). This helped students articulate their decisions and develop their critical thinking skills. 

• Lily was attentive to students’ confidence. For example, when one student expressed doubt about their presentation skills (“I’m not explaining this very well”), Lily immediately reassured them with positive reinforcement (“You certainly are”) and encouraged them to continue.  

• Feedback from Lily was constructive and framed to encourage further exploration. For instance, when something could be improved, Lily phrased suggestions thoughtfully, using prompts like, “You might want to explore this in [a different way]” or “Have you thought of how to…?”  

• During the session, Lily provided feedback that invited students to examine their aesthetic choices, formal solutions, and interpretations of the film. Lily expressed enthusiasm for the students’ work and maintained a respectful and professional attitude towards both students and colleague. 

• Lily was also mindful of students’ technical capabilities and timelines. For students who presented less work, Lily acknowledged time constraints and still engaged with their ideas, and discussed their intended formats, colours, and visual language choices. This approach motivated students and helped them feel valued, regardless of the stage and level of their work. 

The tutorial seemed to have supported students in reflecting on their projects. They engaged critically with their peers’ work, giving feedback and drawing connections between their own posters and their peers’ choices. Students were encouraged to consider how their decisions regarding materials, format, composition, and colour contributed to the overall message and identity of their posters. The feedback they received from both Lily and their peers was constructive and encouraging, with Lily setting the example. 

Part Three: My Reflections 

It was really helpful to have Ana, notice and note down many specific things that I do naturally, without thinking. My teaching practice is very much developed on the back of my community facilitation practice, and I see many of the values I find important in those spaces: ie making everyone feel welcome and comfortable, bringing encouragement in the face of doubt and being attentive to the pressures on people’s lives and time – coming through in Ana’s feedback.

It is also really helpful to have my practice reflected back at me and broken down into constituent parts because it allows me reflect more consciously about which parts I doing consciously and which I am not. This is important as if I am not consciously aware of certain aspects of my teaching practice then these could slip if I have less energy or am having a difficult day. In order to teach equitably across all my students, it is really important to be aware of exactly what I am doing so that I can make sure I am bringing this level of energy and attention to all my students equally.

I found the conversation about social justice in our first PG Cert session useful in terms of sharing experiences and solidarity with other staff. Many of our discussions came up against the idea that it is impossible to create socially just teaching within a system that is so rigged against those who live at the sharp edge of the capitalism. For example, students who have to work at the same time as studying are materially disadvantage in terms of how much of our teaching they can access even before they walk through the door of the classroom. International students, have to learn in a language that isn’t theirs while dealing with the micro and macro aggressions of a racist society. In this context I was thinking about Arao and Clements idea of a brave space and whether it can create a more equitable base to teach from. This passage in the chapter felt perhaps like the most useful:

The collapse of “Safety” into “comfort” has been a hugely problematic swerve for those of us who want to embed social justice principles into our teaching. The idea of a brave space that can be defined by it’s participants, feels to me too inward looking to be particularly helpful, particularly in the current political context. In her new book Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture war, Ash Sakar argues that the right wing has used social justice language, to victimise itself and justify a backlash against actual material benefits for oppressed groups. For example, trans people (such as myself) have materially gained very little from the increased representation of trans people in the media and the language of inclusion that has begun to spread in universities. However the backlash to that representation has had very material consequences: including legislation that specifically targets and discriminates against us. This is true across a wide range of minority groups. We need more than brave spaces to turn this around.

References:

Arao, B. and Clemens, K., (2013), From Safe Spaces to Brave Spaces: A new way to frame dialogue around diversity and social Justice

Sakar, Ash (2025). Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War. Bloomsbury Publishing.