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.