I’ve had a bit of a rocky start to this course. I went to the induction in the middle of my parental leave and felt completely lost. Couldn’t really follow what was happening or talk to fellow students. I felt a bit overwhelmed by the amount of work I was taking on and the pressure to do this course now even with a new baby because I might not have a job at UAL next year due to HPL cuts and so would no longer qualify. A tailspin. It made me think about how my students must experience arriving at the beginning of the course, sometimes from another country/education system and being given all of these somewhat incomprehensible course structures and assessment briefs. It is hard to maintain an excitement for learning and creating amidst the admin.
The first PG Cert session has got me thinking about my teaching practice as it currently stands and who and what has formed it. I learned many of the tools and practices I use now as a facilitator in community organising and creative projects. This has influenced the way I see my role as a teacher, less as someone imparting knowledge and more as someone holding space for conversation, encouraging making and maintaining (as far as possible) non hierarchical structure to learning.
My teaching practice has also been hugely influenced by the following texts:
Syllabus by Lynda Barry
An illustrated syllabus of Lynda Barry’s comic course that she teaches at the university of Madison. She takes you through every class from introduction to end of term assessments in a series of comics exercises. I love her use of humour as well and her demand for strict artistic discipline, and would love to bring these into my teaching practice.
Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks
I read this a few years ago before I was teaching at a university, and am excited to reread it with my current practice in mind. One of the things that resonated with me is her assertion that “Excitement is generated through collective effort. Seeing the classroom always as a communal place enhances the likelihood of collective effort in creating and sustaining a learning community” Sometimes I struggle as a teacher not to feel like I am responsible for bringing all the energy to my sessions, however if I could create a more communal space where everyone shared responsibility for learning rather than to me to deliver it, that would be a much richer experience for students and tutors alike.
Leave Me Alone – Power Control and resistance in a primary School by Joanna Stephanie Gore
Although the university is very different from primary school many of the same mechanisms of control and hierarchy exist in both and so do the resistance to these from students. Joanna Stephanie Gore asserts that “The education system is an institution of social control that reinforces the status quo.” Can we as educators, create spaces within the university that challenge this?
Teaching for people who prefer not to teach/Learning for people who prefer not to be taught
A collection of reflections from self employed artists. The introduction sets forth the rationale behind making it this manual:
“Being a zero hours contract teacher is extremely isolating. You just come in, deliver, go home. There’s no safety net, no continuity. You will have very intimate conversations with people you’ll never see again. We started compiling this manual because we became afraid that we were losing our ability to care.”
This is a fear I share, and one I want to fight by doing this course.
Poor Artists by The White Pube
An eviscerating exploration of the art school industry that made me shudder with recognition, but that ends with a utopian fantasy of what being an artist could (should?) be, and gave me hope in students and artists to imagine our way out of the current arts sector.
Bibliography
Barry, L., 2014. Syllabus. Drawn and Quarterly
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge
Gore, JS. 2004. Leave me alone: Power, control and resistance in a primary school. Libetarian Education
Bayerdorfer, M. and Schweiker, R., 2023,Teaching for people who prefer not to teach/ Learning for people who prefer not to be taught. AND.
Muhammad, Z., & de la Puente, G. (2024). Poor Artists. Penguin Books Ltd.