lashsakula's blog

My positionality at UAL is informed by my experience as a white, queer and trans, precariously employed AL. As a member of the LGBTQ+ community, I have first hand experience of the importance of community solidarity as a bulwark against the hostility of institutions, the media and the state. So as an AL, I am keenly aware of how little time and energy have been put in to including ALs at UAL. I have been working at Camberwell for four years and every term my contract has been up for question. This is not only a nightmare for scheduling and budgeting as a freelance artist, it also creates a gulf between me, the permanent staff and the institution. I have never had an induction to UAL and even my managers are unsure of my rights to sick pay and parental leave. This lack of belonging in the workplace makes me a less effective teacher: if I don’t feel included how can I make my students feel like they belong?

My initial intervention plan was to create a resource for ALs clarifying their workplace rights, as a start to building a community of solidarity. In my peer feedback session, my colleagues were excited by the idea and gave me many more examples of times they had felt excluded as ALs:

• Not being included in meetings or email chains
• Never being invited to staff parties
• Expected to help to create curriculum and to mark assessments without being paid
• The idea that ALs are here for a short time and not worth investing in, when many ALs work at UAL for decades
• The lack of induction for ALs and general confusion about their workplace rights.

Most of the conversation can be summed up by one colleague saying: “We’re not really heard” which reminded me of the opening line in Sarah Ahmed’s Complaint!: “To be heard as complaining is not to be heard.” ¹. The institutional deafness felt overwhelming, there was obviously a need for an intervention or several but I wasn’t really sure how to approach it. 

Then my course leader was off sick and I was asked to oversee the MA Illustration show in her absence. Over the course of the week we spent installing, I was shocked by the lack of community and shared purpose among my students. The curation group had not made any decisions because “we can’t speak the same language” despite being on a visual communication course! Home students suggested doing a shop that excluded international students, as visa requirements complicated the system. Students put up their work and disappeared, without contributing to the communal beautification of the space. Students suggested individually printing name labels. Students had tantrums about the space assigned to them, and refused to engage with the bigger curatorial picture. Students were regularly rude and demanding towards technicians and lecturers who were trying to help. (In all fairness, this was during a heat wave and the studios were baking, so no one was their best self.)

Noticing this fragmentation, I realised I could have more impact by shifting my community building intervention from ALs to students. I decided on a day-long workshop based on principles of mutual aid giving students the tools to create a community of practice. I want this to not only spark a sense of belonging and solidarity among students, but also be a touch point for tutors to call back to if we see students bedding down into individualist silos. The aim of the workshop is to encourage greater collaboration and cooperation between students, across boundaries of language, not just for the final show but through the course and beyond. Speaking to my tutor Amberlee, I realised that this interventions is very much aligned with my artistic practice: making collaborative work that link different generations and communities; creating space for “chaotic fertility and collective brilliance”².

In planning my intervention, I leaned heavily on two books: Mutual Aid by Dean Spade and Do Your Own Thing by Richard Phoenix both, in part, manuals for building and sustaining communities of practice. The workshop will start with a reflection question “Why work in a group? What can we gain from this way of working?” in the context of these two quotes: 

“Do your own thing has been an important space for me, it doesn’t exhaust me like the rest of the world sometimes can, and I feel like I’m able to act like myself more than I ever can outside of it. It’s a space where I’ve realised my own differences and the way my mind works. I’ve learned so much about the way I want to approach making art and music and how I myself can do my own thing.”³

“Most people work or go to school inside hierarchies where disobedience leads to punishment or exclusion. […] But collective spaces, like mutual aid organising can give us opportunities to unlearn conditioning and build new skills and capacities. By participating in groups in new ways and practicing new ways of being together, we are both building the world we want and becoming the kind of people who could live in such a world together.”⁴

I would highlight the way these authors argue for both the personal and practical gains of working collaboratively.

The workshop would then be divided into three sessions: People, Culture and Practicalities. 

• Session 1: People – How can we meet individual needs in our group?

Activity: Each student writes their own access rider with a template of questions and shares it with one other person.

“We can acknowledge differences in our capacities, talents, desire and difficulties and still aim to create a culture where we support each other in the work, learn new skills and are connected and kind to each other.” ⁵

• Session 2: Culture – How can we nurture a culture of compassion?

Discussion: Share the Bare Minimum Collective Principles and discuss in small groups. Which do we agree with? Which challenge us?

Activity: In small groups, students illustrate what they like best about the groups they are a part of (friendship groups, families, sports teams, workplaces). They consolidate these into 5 to 10 key principles. Two groups join together and consolidate their principles. The groups keep joining together and getting bigger until we have one set of principles for the whole cohort. Go back to original groups, and each group takes one principle to write up and illustrate together on a large pieces of paper.

Spade argues:

“There is no one correct or perfect group culture. […] Ideally we want a group culture that supports participants in doing the work they came together to do, to be well and to build generative relationships.” ⁶

Reinforce to students that each of these last points in bold (emphasis mine) are equally as important as each other, the work, our mental and physical health and our relationships all need to be held in balance when building community.

• Session 3: Practicalities – How do we make decisions and divide labour?

Discussion: Talk about the beliefs and values we are bringing into the space, as Spade argues:

“Reflecting deeply about our own orientations toward work – what it feels like to participate in groups, what ideas we are carrying around about leadership and productivity  – is crucial to building a practice of working from a place of connection, inspiration and joy.”⁷ 

Activity: Using the World Cafe method⁸: a simple flexible format for hosting large group dialogues. Groups of students will carousel around a number of different scenarios. The scenarios would illustrate the following questions:

• How can we work together with language differences?
  • How can we work together with clashing schedules?
  • What are some ways we deal with conflict?
  • How can we hold each other accountable?

I originally had these as direct questions for students to discuss but after talking to my colleague Jhinuk Sarkar, she suggested changing it to scenarios as this might make it easier for students coming from cultures that are less accustomed to non hierarchical decision making. She also suggested finding a way for this to be done visually or through acting the scenes out, rather than verbal discussion. It was a good reminder that despite the seriousness of some of these topics, silliness and play is a huge part of my practice and I want this workshop to be enjoyable rather than didactic. Perhaps props and wigs could be involved?

How will I know if this intervention has worked?

It will take more than one workshop to change the culture of not just the course but the entirety of individualist late stage capitalism in which we are steeped. However, my hope is that having this workshop right at the top of the academic year will plant the following seeds in students minds:

• I know my peers’ access needs and will try my best to meet them
• I can think of many ways to communicate across language barriers
• I am part of a peer group who have my back 
• My ideas are stronger when I collaborate with others
• My work shines as part of a collective

Throughout the year, I will check in with students about these questions and how they are feeling about the cohort. I will make myself available to mediate when students encounter collaboration challenges and conflicts. I hope in this way to evaluate the impact of the workshop and to use my findings to refine it for the following year.

Describing the teaching community she wants to create bell hooks argues:

“If we really want to create a cultural climate where biases can be challenged and changed, all border crossings must be seen as valid and legitimate.”⁹

I think crossing these borders will challenge many students, but I also believe that we must push ourselves and our students into community, as alone there can be no hope for change. 

1. Ahmed, S. (2021), Complaint!. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ↩︎
2. brown, a.m. (2017), Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. Chico, CA: AK Press ↩︎
3. Phoenix, R. (2023), Do Your Own Thing. London: Rough Trade Books, p.164 ↩︎
4. Spade, D. (2020), Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next). London: Verso, p.17 ↩︎
5. Spade, 2020, p.74 ↩︎
6. Spade, 2020, p.71 ↩︎
7. Spade, 2020, p.12 ↩︎
8. The World Café Community Foundation (n.d.) World Café Method. Available at: https://theworldcafe.com/key-concepts-resources/world-cafe-method/ (Accessed: 14 July 2026) ↩︎
9. hooks, b. (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge. ↩︎

Bibilography:

• Ahmed, S. (2021), Complaint!. Durham, NC: Duke University Press
• Herrero, E. (2023) ‘“Were they nice people? Were they asking good questions?”: Searching for an ethics of love in the history of communication research’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 26(5), pp. 644–659. https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494231187599
• Spade, D. (2020), Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next). London: Verso
• Phoenix, R. (2023), Do Your Own Thing. London: Rough Trade Books
• brown, a.m. (2017), Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. Chico, CA: AK Press 

Yesterday, I taught a day of workshops in a secondary school in Whitechapel on making comics. During the day I taught in seven different year 9 classes, and oversaw the creation of comics that ran the gamut from interstellar battles to fashion school rivalries to a manifesto against gentrification. All of the girls in these classes were wearing hijabs – and yet in the over 100 different student comics I read over the course of the day, not one contained a character wearing a hijab. Even when making up their own stories, these teenagers did not imagine themselves or their faith into their stories.

As an educator both in schools and on the Camberwell Illustration course, I think often about how to diversify character design. There is a balance to be found between representation as a vital way of sparking student imaginations yet simultaneously not nearly enough by itself to create inclusion. My students are often afraid of creating contextless tokenised characters, which can create even more alienation, and so often revert to what they have been taught to see as a “neutral” whiteness. This fear and discomfort is something useful to challenge white students to grapple with, but when it came to these muslim teenagers, I wasn’t sure if it would have been appropriate for me in my position as a white educator to question the homogeneity of their characters. Although if I had had more time with the students, and the space to build a trusting relationship, it is definitely something I would have broached. It made me think about how many, if any, of these students might end up in my classes at Camberwell and how creative inclusion needs to start long before students enter the doors of the university.

Ibtihal Ramadan argues that “British Muslim women, are more likely to experience a ‘triple penalty’, where religion, gender and colour intertwine (Berthoud and Blekesaune 2007)” and “Ahmad’s research (2011) emphasizes how British Muslim women pursuing higher education are becoming well-prepared to weather the ‘pathologizing’ storm allegedly attributed to adhering to a ‘restrictive’ religion and ‘restraining’ cultures.”

Jacklyn Rekis discusses how the veil makes muslim women both hypervisible and invisible, as it is assumed as a mark of “restrictive religion” thus stripping her of her agency. This “pathologising storm” is created by an islamophobic society¹ where not a day goes by without negative news coverage, micro aggressions towards muslims in the public eye, and violence on the streets of muslim neighbourhoods. Over the last three years in particular the way that Gaza has been covered in the media, where blame is often obfuscated, Israel apologised for and death tolls questioned – shows the lack of value the UK media and political class places on Muslim lives.

This may seem external to the institution, but the context of palestine is extremely relevant to students at UAL. The protests of staff and students and the silence of the institution shows students that no matter what social justice measures UAL may espouse, they are exposed as just words, when genocide is not condemned and students friends and families are presented as acceptable collateral for Israeli “safety”.

How can I as a white jewish educator living in this context create a safe (enough) space for my muslim students to thrive as themselves at Camberwell ?

• Be visibly and loudly supportive of Palestine at work: whether that is wearing a keffiyeh, showing up at protests, bringing it up where relevant in lectures and tutorials, or backing up students and staff who are being targeted by the institution.
• Become more informed about the illustration contexts of my muslim students, learn about the illustrators they love and bring them into my lecture slides and tutorials.
• Research strong well informed representation of hijabi characters by hijabi artists.

Ibtihal Ramadan (2022) When faith intersects with gender: the challenges
and successes in the experiences of Muslim women academics, Gender and Education, 34:1,
33-48, DOI: 10.1080/09540253.2021.1893664

Rekis J (2023). Religious Identity and Epistemic Injustice: An Intersectional Account.
Hypatia 38, 779–800. https://doi.org/10.1017/hyp.2023.86

1. Rawnsley, J. (2025) Anti-Muslim hate at record level in UK, charity says. BBC News. 19 February. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyjlx2e4l8o (Accessed: 14 July 2026). ↩︎

I found the Bradbury article (2020) a really interesting read, even though it centers on primary schools rather than universities, so much of Bradbury’s Critical Race Theory framework can be carried across. I found this idea particularly useful:

An acceptance of racism as endemic leads us to reframe the question of ‘Who gains?’ as ‘How do white people gain?’. This re-orientates the focus from proving that white people gain, to examining how they gain; this is a more in-depth question which is more likely to reveal and disrupt racial inequality.

Often in academia, people will liberally agree that of course the institution is racist and that even we the white people in the institution can be racist, but then it stops. The acknowledgement is enough, like going to a confessional to divest yourself of evil thoughts without actually changing your behaviour. But acknowledging our racism is only the very beginning of building an anti-racist teaching practice. Bradbury’s reframing of the question as “what do white people gain?” feels both confronting and useful as a way to talk about the UAL attainment gap between white and BAME students. It switches the focus from being a problem with the data (or the students) and makes it our problem as white educators/managers in the institution. So how do white people gain from the attainment gap? It reinforces the white supremacist belief that white people are inherently superior, more intelligent and harder working – and this in turn justifies investing less into non-white students who are seen as giving less return. Obviously this is flawed (and racist) logic: it is evident that having english as a second language, having to have an job alongside one’s studies, needing to spend vast amounts of time and energy negotiating visas or being alienated by an “outrageously white”¹ and western centered institution is going to affect students’ ability to pour themselves fully into the degree and thus affect their final results. As Bradbury states:

“Low results ‘prove’ that a particular intake is more challenging, even when teachers do not trust the scores.”

Despite understanding all the challenges students might be facing, the data creates this lower expectations of BAME students (a ridiculously broad aggregate of everyone not white used in the UAL data) which can have the knock on effect of these students having less rigorous tutorials, less opportunities extended to them and less access to UAL networks of employers. Rhianna Garrett argues this has the arguably even worse impact of shrinking both staff and students imaginations of what is possible:

“The potency of imaginations can be parallel with the imagination of race itself. As Fanon (1952) articulates, race itself is an imagination of colonial minds to maintain Western authority. Geographies of the globe are formed through banal projected imaginations, constructing the West as the enlightened superior to the inferior East and South (Nayak 2011). If imaginations have the potential to transform our political, social and cultural understandings of the globe and communities within it, they also have the ability to transform career trajectories in academia.”

In my teaching, I see Garrett’s dynamic most often in evidence when students have english as a second language and struggle to explain their ideas to me in tutorials, which in turn reduces the amount of useful feedback I am able to give them. During assessments, when students are asked to reflect on their experiments and research, the level of reflection is often at a more basic level than their peers who are speaking in their native language, and this can affect their grade. The intersection of race, nationality, language skills, disabilities such as dyslexia, can affect a student’s grade despite me being well aware of the added challenge the student is facing.

I am dedicated to developing a truly anti-racist pedagogy, as far as is possible within the UAL context, to mitigate this pattern. Here are some things I want to bring into my teaching practice moving forward:

• Asking myself “how I benefit as a white educator” from racist policies and practices? AND how do I challenge these?
• Taking students’ schedules into account, and being as flexible as possible to them, rather than labelling them as “not bothered” when they miss tutorials and seminars.
• Continuing to read and research outside of the western canon of art and theory, and put in work to become more familiar with the contexts and ideas of students whose cultures I am less familiar with.
• At the same time acknowledge honestly the gaps in my knowledge with students and be open to being corrected/contradicted. Explicitly invite a non hierarchical exchange of knowledge in my teaching.

References:

Alice Bradbury (2020) A critical race theory framework for education policy analysis: the case of bilingual learners and assessment policy in England, Race Ethnicity and Education, 23:2, 241-260, DOI: 10.1080/13613324.2019.1599338

1. 
   From
   Rhianna Garrett (11 Feb 2024): Racism shapes careers: career trajectories
   and imagined futures of racialised minority PhDs in UK higher education, Globalisation,
   Societies and Education, DOI: 10.1080/14767724.2024.2307886:
   
   “Inaya and Maira, who both described themselves as ‘visibly Muslim’, had negative experiences with predominantly white spaces and it intersected with their careers. Inaya described her spaces as ‘outrageously white’ and felt ‘on the margins of the school’ because of it. Maira described a similar space despite coming from a London-based institution and diversegeographical location ‘the second I walked in, it’s just full of white people, and I am just thinking to myself, what have I gotten myself into? When I tried to speak to other students, who were mainly white, no one wanted to interact with me’.” ↩︎

Outside of UAL, my creative practice engages regularly with disabled people – particularly adults with late stage dementia and young people with profound and multiple disabilities. I have always seen this work as fairly separate from my teaching practice but in this blog I want to apply my Inclusive Practices learning to this work and think about how I could bring some back into my UAL teaching.

For the last five years I have been developing Spark – a research project in collaboration with care home residents to design invitations and activities for people living with late stage dementia. While care homes are specifically designed around the needs of older people, the social model of disability is also widely exemplified. Many of the people I work with are excluded from regular care home timetabling by staff’s assumptions about their abilities and interests or the fact that the structure of activities can exclude residents who are non verbal, or who struggle with stimulating environments. My work is questioning these barriers, and designing alternative activities that are multisensory, age appropriate and create opportunities for connection, as these individuals tend to be extremely isolated.

I also work in SEND schools, with students who are disabled in a wide variety of ways. These environments are designed around students, but the wide range of access needs mean that inclusion is a constantly moving goalpost (as it should be perhaps). It is important as an artist coming into theses spaces to be endlessly improvising and adaptable. So every activity is designed with multiple entrance and exit points and flexible enough to pivot at a moment’s notice.

But however much thought you put into space design and activities, the real work of inclusion in my experience, is when I am in the room with people and I can be led by their interests as well as their needs.

The approach is difficult to apply in a university, which, as Cerys mentioned in her lecture, is an essentially ablist structure with academic barriers to entry. None of the students I work with in schools would be able to access UAL. In some ways it is a completely antithetical space to my other work places: SEND youth and people with dementia are – in the neoliberal imagination – entirely “unproductive” and exist only as a burden. This is a HUGE loss to our culture and society (but that’s for another blog). The university, on the other hand, is seeking to create and extract value from its students, in the form of good grades, which turn into good data, which turns into more money. This means the slow paced, exploratory nature of my practice would be hard pressed to fit into the learning objectives and assessment criteria of the course I teach on.

So how can I bring what I’ve learned from my experience of creating accessible, exciting spaces in which everyone is held to make their best possible creative work – into the university?

• An openness to communicate in many different ways. During tutorials I tend to draw as I talk and often the visual laying out of what I am saying helps students access it more clearly than my verbal cues. I would love to expand on this in my intervention.
• Flexible planning and delivery – being open to sessions going differently to how I imagined, creating moments for students to take the lead in where the session might go – following their interests rather than my own. I felt Cerys modeled this really well in her guest lecture on disability frameworks, often checking in with the room, asking for feedback, stating when she was unsure or open to changing her mind.
• Object based learning – I almost never bring physical things into the university classroom whereas in my other practice I am always lugging around huge trolleys full of very carefully chosen materials. Having multisensory ways of engaging with the topics would be something I would love to bring into my teaching more and could benefit both disabled and non disabled students.
• Nuturing a culture of compassion in my students and myself. Sometimes I have struggled with multiple access needs and the friction that can create. But, it is helpful to embrace this friction and instead of trying to avoid it, make everyone aware of it and the extra care and compassion it demands. Thus we actively work towards the “Cross disability solidarity” the Ten principles of Disability Justice demands. As Disability Justice activists – calling up have stated:

“the concept of access frictions emphasises the need for flexibility, collaboration, and open communication to find solutions that benefit everyone. This approach recognises that access needs are not in competition with one another but rather reflect the diverse perspectives and needs of different individuals and groups.While access frictions are primarily associated with disabled people, the concept is useful in non-disabled exchanges as well.”

Bibliography

https://beyondthescope.substack.com/p/navigating-access-friction-in-teaching

https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/view/29607/24772

Access Friction Explained

 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.