Following on from the breakthrough I had whilst delivering the workshop on sound environment a few weeks ago (see blog entitled: “Workshop on Sound Environment – A new chapter in my practice”) I was asked by the same unit leader to deliver the same workshop, except to Stage 1 students.
This time I would have quite a few more students, about 30.
I was also in need to record this session for an observation opportunity.
So I suddenly felt that my delivery had to be much more formal than the first time round.
My somewhat unplanned conversational experience with the stage 3 students that gave me a great deal of hope for having hit a breakthrough, now felt quite remote. I felt the pressure of heading back to PowerPoint slides, me at one end of the class, students at the other and delivering in passive mode, i.e. where the students passively receive the lecture.
But why did I feel that formal was better? Why did such rigid structure seem the way forward? Of course I would interpolate examples from real life industry experience, but why the need to cling on to the slides, to the theory, to the talking…
Perhaps this has to do with my upbringing as a learner. I come from Italy where, at least when I grew up, learners are expected to sit down and receive lectures, then go home study on books what the teacher explained, learn it (ideally elaborate and not memorise, but some students memorise and do very well…) and repeat it back when interrogated (“interrogation” is how we call our viva exams, which happen regularly throughout the year, not just at the end of a term) in front of the whole class by yourself (or two of you if you were lucky) “surface learning” anyone (Biggs, 2007)? Also, one was never asked for their own opinion. One was expected to analyse texts and thinking through the lens of critics, professors, established writers, etc. not their own. I appreciate one should have a broad understanding of the knowledge that’s out there, but somehow it felt a bit restricted to never be able to express one’s own opinion.
This was turned upside down when I was studying for my undergraduate degree in New York: there we were in fact encouraged to criticise, analyse and express our opinion.
How about a happy medium?
Nonetheless, whether I was allowed to express myself or not, my experience was of a passive learner, during lessons anyway. In my own time I was always quite curious and tried to get to the core of what I was learning. This may also have been the effect of being a professor’s daughter…
So I suppose this is why I find some kind of security in delivering a lecture:
I can prepare
I can know what to say all the time
I could even rehearse every move, every tone, the level of my voice (this may be coming from my acting training)
The session can be predicted
So of course, an informal session is scary, it’s like improv: one has to ‘yes…and’ everything (Halpern et al, 1994), acknowledge the situation as it comes and respond to it in real time. But that is much more real and much more engaging and much more effective and liberating! The proof is in how well that previous session went.
But how can one reproduce that? Not just for repeat teaching, but for the years to come? There are a lot of variables, mostly to do with people and combination of people.
Perhaps this is the point, that we mustn’t aim at reproducing teaching. Perhaps teaching is ever evolving and we evolve with it as students do and we learn from each session improving on the next one. This does not seem fair, but it possibly highlights how teaching is then a dialogic process where teachers merely contribute to knowledge creation and sharing; where knowledge is in the interpretation and creative application of theory just as much as the theory itself.
All that said, I have been reflecting on the difference between Stage 1 and Stage 3 students and on whether, perhaps due to confidence, experience, maturity, Stage 3 students are able to navigate an informal session more successfully or at least more comfortably than Stage 1 students would.
Perhaps Stage 1 students still need some structure in their taught sessions. Structure here though, shouldn’t mean passively receiving a lecture. If Stage 3 students can take unplanned conversations, for Stage 1 students the teacher could provide some structure, offering prompts, activities that stimulate critical thinking, opportunities to discuss challenges.
From this reflection, it seems that I need to break down my lectures and find opportunities for practical activities that allow students to experience the theory I’d like them to learn, whether this is through the use of equipment or in response to real life scenarios. This would allow me to keep some of that safe structure, whilst allowing students to co-create the session with me and construct their knowledge along the way.
Bibliography
Biggs, J. and Tang, C. (2007) Teaching for Quality Learning at University (Third Edition) Maidenhead: Open University Press
Halpern, C., Close, D. and Johnsonn, K. (1994) Truth in Comedy. The Manual of Improvisation Colorado Springs: Meriwether Publishing
I find data quite a reassuring part of the research process. Once I get to the data, I feel the hard work is done. Now I can play and see what story the numbers tell me. The hard part is generating the data: putting together questions that are meaningful and most of all that provoke meaningful answers.
In the cross programme session, part of this PGCERT Academic Practice in Art, Design and Communication, I was hoping to learn a lot about how data is used at UAL, how it is collected, what sort of questions are asked, how students are reached and most of all how it is analysed.
I completely appreciate the session is quite brief and not everyone is so keen on data, but perhaps in the attempt on demystifying it, we ended up spending more time on creating poetry about it than on looking at the data itself. Don’t get me wrong I really enjoyed brushing up on the limerick anapaestic tetrameter and learning about haiku.
We were presented some diagrams about attainment at UAL with data shown with different degrees of granularity, but still possibly not granular enough. The bottom line was clear: white students have a higher level of attainment. However, the information we didn’t have was to do with how many students were in each category, what method of evaluation was used to determine how some students were deserving of a 1st or a 2:1 vs others, what age were the students with higher attainment level and so on.
With the information we had was very hard to answer some poignant questions like “what would you do to address the attainment gap?”. All that was possible was to make generic statements, such as:
Diversifying staff (to reflect student body)
Student body to be diversified
Tuition fees to be made more accessible so as to facilitate greater diversification in the student body
Enforcing a 5-year shift in positions of power
Of course the above points are absolutely sacrosanct, but I understand these are already being worked on. Are they not? Am I being naive in thinking that since I find these points so obvious and so often raised they must be worked on? Let’s assume they are not then and that our suggestions were indeed useful. Still there is much more we can do to get to the core of this problem and bridge this gap.
Is it really that simple? Is it really that under-represented students don’t identify themselves in their tutors and so they struggle to succeed because they don’t feel supported? Have we asked them? Aren’t there any other avenues to these under represented students’ learning that we can explore? Can we do some research on that? Can we perhaps ask some pertinent questions or observe how these students learn or test different techniques and see which has the best results? Is this a patronising approach? Is it even ethical for a white tutor to even think they have the authority to do this. Should this be explored by a tutor of the same minority group as the under-represented students? As I go on writing this blog I feel like I am digging myself into a deeper and deeper hole and instead of finding answers, I find more questions and I feel less entitled to offer suggestions.
How does one earn the right to investigate these matters if one does not belong to the minority they wish to research? Perhaps before starting the research on the effect of different teaching approaches on under-represented students and their learning styles, one could conduct some research on how under-represented students would receive a member of the over-represented group conducting research on them…
Allan Davies’s article on Learning Outcomes (LOs) gave me some interesting points of reflection.
Even as a student, I have often found LOs quite difficult to understand and felt they were more of a box ticking exercise rather than a tool useful to students to understand what they would learn and teachers to verify that the content taught was actually learnt. It seemed that the wording was too generic and too abstract to be helpful and offer the insight needed to fully understand students’ progress.
Interestingly this is exactly what the article was about. It looked at this very challenge of finding the right balance between LOs being too specific and therefore limiting students’ initiative and too broad and as such unclear. Especially in the creative arts sector, Davies (2012) argues that: “the over-specification of outcomes for the purpose of measurement can be counter-productive in art and design and other creative disciplines. The more specific the learning outcome is the more specific the ‘quarry’ will be and the greater the constraint on whether the most appropriate quarry is caught or not.”
To my surprise the article suggested that especially in the creative arts sector, lack of clarity in LOs “does not mean students are unclear about what they have to do” (Davies, 2012). This is to do with the fact that students have other more informal channels of communication that help them navigate the course requirements and the related LOs. Although I appreciate that formally written LOs may go against a more informal creative mind, such as that of creative art students, my question still stands: why should we write LOs if they are not helpful? Davies (2012) states himself that: “[LOs] might be seen as necessary for administrative purposes but they are not sufficient in helping students develop an idea of what they will be learning and how they will go about it”. I feel it is important to find a good balance, so that students can have a comprehensive handbook that gives them some structure to follow the course and guides them toward a successful completion of it.
This idea of a balance between formal and informal or to a certain extent creative and rigid seems to tie in with the other challenge that I have been experiencing at CSM whilst supporting performance students. Students have complained that they are not taught technical skills: they feel they will be not employable once they graduate.
Our experience until very recently (things seem to be finally changing somewhat) is that indeed students may have the conceptual understanding of the piece of work they’d like to bring to life, but no skills to do it and no understanding of those skills to practically interpret and translate their ideas into a fully-fledged piece of work. In other words they cannot communicate to the technicians what they want and so the technicians end up creating their own version of the students’ work for them.
The argument from the academic staff had been that students are not training to become technicians and if they are taught skills these would limit their creativity as the skills would dictate how their ideas can develop. So how do we support students’ employability without limiting their creativity and imagination?
Although I completely appreciate that technical skills should not be taught as methods, i.e. they should be presented as a pallet of tools students can use to create their work as opposed to the only way of presenting it; I also feel that, now more than ever, skills especially those that go hand in hand with technology are part of the creative process as opposed to a means to an end.
Until quite recently, we have often found that artists who use technology tend to develop an artistic concept, but then rely heavily on technicians to bring it to life. Even artists who create visual content, such as still photography or moving images, tend to be happy to see such content projected on a basic screen at one end of a room, in a generic two-dimensional display. This seems to somehow suffocate the concept itself and certainly limit the impact that the content could have on the audience. Should the surface we project these images on not be part of the concept too? Does projecting on a 2D screen not make a statement as opposed to projecting on a 3D sculpture or on a different part of the exhibition room? Similarly, when artists produce sound content, should this be output at one end of the room or should it be surrounding the audience creating an environment of its own to express the artistic concept more fully? And how should all these elements integrate with each other to convey the full artistic vision? Surely the picture is not just visual.
These are a few of the questions that came to mind when thinking about the impact of technology in art and the role of the technician in its realization: technology is no longer simply the vehicle to express the artistic concept, but it is part of the concept itself. Just like a painter would choose oil as opposed to water colour, a videographer may choose projection mapping as opposed to a TV screen or a sound artist may choose to dot the space with loudspeakers as opposed to playing through a boombox. No approach is wrong, but it’s important it is considered and that a decision in keeping with the concept is made, since any approach is a statement not a coincidence.
There are of course artists that do embrace this and now more than ever there is a strong rise in ‘immersive experience’ work. These are perhaps by artists that have focused on technology throughout their careers more that those that include some elements of technology in their more analogue art pieces.
A poignant example of full integration of elements is the work of Brian Eno who tends to create a 360 experience for his audiences and incorporates visual (colour, light, still and moving images) and aural (music, soundscapes, sonic environments) presentation elements to stimulate emotional and physical reactions.
An example is ‘Bloom: Open Space’ (2018). Described as “mixed reality”, the installation, which took place in Amsterdam’s Transformatorhuis, from February 21st – 25th 2018, takes further the app developed by Brian Eno and long-time collaborator musician and software designer Peter Chilvers ten years ago. ‘Bloom’ – part instrument, part composition, part artwork – allows anyone to create elaborate patterns and melodies by tapping the screen (or the air in the VR world of the exhibition), creating an infinite selection of compositions and accompanying visualisations. It uses the gesture controls from Microsoft “HoloLens” virtual-reality headsets as the interface for participants to create colourful “blooms” on the projected walls of the space. The blooms created by each user are seen and heard by everyone in the installation, turning the app into a shared experience.
A couple of more recent examples are:
Shilpa Gupta’s ‘Sun at night’ installation at the Barbican Curve, from 7th Oct 2021 to 7th Feb 2022. This piece, taken from the project For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit (2017–18), is the climax of the exhibition, and it presents, in a dim lit room, 100 microphones hung from the ceiling, which are actually loudspeakers (hidden in the mics) that output voices chanting, whispering, singing and reading fragments of verse written by poets incarcerated for their beliefs, their identity or their work, from the 8th century to today. The excerpts also appear on single pages, pierced by metal spikes which sit beneath the microphones.The multilingual words echo around the room both suggesting solidarity for the censored artists and highlighting the intensity of the widespread abuse around the world.
Another example is the Lux Exhibiton at 180 The Strand, from 7th Jan to 20th Feb 2022, an immersive site-specific audio-visual exhibition by 12 audio visual artists, where creative decisions were made to literally bend technology to their expectations. We see curved OLED screens, transparent screens showing content as well revealing adjacent rooms with yet more content reflecting the environment shown on the screen itself, projection on all surfaces amplified by the use of mirrors and more.
These artists clearly have a close relationship with technology and/or collaborate with artists that do. However, for those artists that incorporate technology in their work, the role of the technician is still vital and here is where we wonder how that is changing, evolving. In the past technicians, especially those in-house to a venue receiving the exhibition, were considered inferior to artists, more like executors rather than creators, but it has become more apparent that this is absolutely not the case. The technician is at least an artist and more. The technician has to understand the artist, interpret their concept and together find a technical language to express the artists’ concept without leaving anything to chance: the technician is like a translator who needs to understand the culture as well as the language they are translating and have a complete mastery of their own language, in this case technology, at the same time. There’s those that believe translation is an impossible job, a lost battle, is this the case for technology and technicians?
So the remaining questions is, how do we teach this in art school? How do we help students acquire a palette of technical skills without imposing on their creativity? How do we teach technology as an artistic material vs a scientific means to an end?
All that said, we cannot expect artists to know all that there is to know about technology since that is an infinite realm. Therefore, we still need to embrace the need for technicians, for specialists that can interpret the more technically specific aspect of an artistic concept. We should encourage students to learn about technology and also encourage them to team up with technicians who can help them with the more challenging aspects of their work. It seems that in this case the role of the technician is getting closer to that of a collaborator more than an executor.
Bibiliography/References
Davies, A. (2012) Learning Outcomes and Assessment Criteria in Art and Design. What’s the recurring problem? In: Networks, University of Brighton Faculty of Arts. At: http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/projects/networks/issue-18-july-2012/learning-outcomes-and-assessment-criteria-in-art-and-design.-whats-the-recurring-problem (Accessed on 20.01.22)
Eno, B. Shilvers, P. (2018) Brian Eno’s AR experience lets you play synth in mid-air In: Wired magazine. At: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/brian-eno-amsterdam-bloom-open-space-installation-reflection (Accessed on 10.01.22)
Gupta, S. (2022) Sun at Night Installation At: https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2021/event/shilpa-gupta-sun-at-night (Visited on 28.11.22)
Lux (2022) Exhibition At: https://lux.seetickets.com/timeslot/lux (Visited on 15.01.22)
As part of the ‘Process week’ for a unit on one of our BA courses, I was asked to lead a couple of workshops on sound for live performance and an introductory session preceding them.
The introductory session was held on line.
I had already held a few sessions online, so I wasn’t particularly worried.
I had prepared a PowerPoint presentation to share and was ready to go.
However, a few challenges occurred before and during.
First of all the session was on Collaborate. I had taken sessions on Collaborate, but had never held a session alone.
I quickly learnt that you cannot use the PowerPoint “presenter view” feature and that if you embed links to videos to share you can’t use them. Luckily I was prepared about the “presenter view” issue. So I ended up printing my presentation with the notes (I know it’s a shame in ecological terms, but I had to be able to deliver my session!). The links however were a problem I only discovered during my delivery. A student suggested I copied the link in the chat, send them to watch the video and then come back. A good idea, which I took. But at what cost?
Another problem was the internet connection: I suddenly had to leave my office because I was no longer alone and needed a quiet space to deliver my session. So I relocated, but in the new location I could only use WiFi, which crashed mid-way. Luckily I was able to find a hard wired connection near by and only lost a couple of minutes. And luckily all the students were still there, but at what cost?
First of all as a technician I was incredibly embarrassed about not having foreseen all the potential technical issues and not having solved them well in advance. That said, because of my experience, I also felt very calm about them and knew I could solve them quite quickly. So I communicated the problem to the students and proceeded by making sure we would be back on line quickly in terms of the internet issue and navigated well around the video links inconvenience.
But the problem, the cost, is how did this affect the students?
This opens up the wider question about how is on-line learning received by students? What are the challenges the encounter from this distant platform? How can we still get through to students without making eye contact, without reading their body language, without showing our body language?
Since I haven’t (yet) interviewed students to seek their feedback on this matter, perhaps the first step is to consider my experience of teaching through a screen/camera (in the case of Collaborate here). I usually do a lot of preparation by reciting the presentation out loud, sometimes in front of a mirror (old acting training habit) to see how I may read to the outside, to others. This helps me when presenting on line, especially if presenting by sharing slides or images of some kind and therefore not being able to look at myself during the presentation. By preparing in front of the mirror and in any case saying the presentation out loud helps me learn how to trust the effect of the presentation and so, when in front of the computer camera, I can carry on without doubting myself too much. This is key because when delivering a presentation in person the students’ responses are the feedback necessary to know the effect of the presentation, something that is completely missing when lecturing online.
The other option is to limit the lecture aspect as much as possible and to break up the session in as many activities as possible to try and engage students and tease their participation to ensure they are indeed taking in what is being taught. Asking for feedback in the chat is also a good avenue, however it lacks the immediacy that speaking in real time has. Hence splitting students into groups to focus on a particular activity or discussion and asking them to report back may be better as I have experienced lately in our online sessions on this PGCERT Academic Practice course.
All of this changes dramatically the structure of a session compared to how I used to approach them in person. That said it forces me to think a lot more actively about students’ participation, engagement and so it could be just the necessary push that I need to improve in-person sessions too.
As part of a staff development initiative I took part in a series of meetings aimed at developing a public-facing exhibition that would showcase the work of PhD students at CSM.
A little context:
These students’ work emerged from practice-based research methodology.
The exhibition ran at the Lethaby Gallery from December through January and was called: ‘(In)Visible Processes’. The exhibition was also accompanied by a series of events ranging from panel discussions to workshops. Myself and a colleague ran one of these workshops.
The meetings were between CSM staff (mostly academic) and the PhD students.
Examples of group discussion topics were:
Rigour and Intersections – here we discussed how rigour is followed or not in an academic realm and how it’s interpreted through practice-based research methodology, i.e. how can we maintain rigour when research is situated at the intersections of practices, spaces and academia?
Hybrid Languages and In-between Spaces – what kind of languages does practice-based research mobilise? What kind of spaces? What languages, experiences, feelings, ways of being develop in the interstices between research practices? And can we value them?
Agencies, Accesses, Audiences – how can we articulate the inter-relationships between agency and access in research? How can we define agency and access when considering research practices? What is involved in addressing (or involving) a wider, non-specialist audience?
My experience:
I got introduced to this project by a course leader from our programme. I thought it would be a great idea to get involved and see how I could contribute to helping students put on an exhibition, since, as a Production Manager, I felt I could offer practical ideas on how to translate their projects into a (possibly) multi-media installation or at least into an impactful audience experience.
I also thought it would be a great opportunity to get a sense of how PhD students think since I am planning to pursue one myself.
Finally, it seemed extremely interesting to learn more about the result of practice-based methodology, since I am interested in a practice-based PhD myself (or what I have now learnt would be a practice-based PhD I should say). I wanted to understand how academia and artistic practice could interlink to produce new knowledge presented in a way that to me was very new, i.e. not (solely) in written form.
However, I didn’t realise that the meetings were going to be conceptual discussions; I didn’t realise that we were going to actually discuss how practice-based methodology, academic practice and audience experiences were going to interlink and culminate into an exhibition. I thought this process had already been explored as the curatorial approach and that the meetings were going to be about constructing the exhibition.
At first I found the language of the conversations a little daunting and feared I couldn’t contribute much: as a non-PhD holder and given that my current job is not formally/usually academic, I felt under-equipped.
I soon realised it was actually very positive to be able to contribute from a different perspective. I noticed that for many students technology was a means to an end as opposed to an integral part of their concept. I was able to make some suggestions about how to incorporate technology in the showcasing of their work to enhance the audience experience. For instance, instead of projecting images on a 2D screen, why not create a projection surface out of the materials used in the student’s practice? This would help the audience be more immersed in the work, rather than having to bypass a medium non intrinsic to the language of the practice, such as a TV screen.
The other aspect I realised I could contribute on was my specialism, sound. I realised that the students had not thought about sonic environments at all. They had focused their attention to the visual aspects of presenting their work. This was incredibly interesting as it opened up a series of conversations that helped the students think about a fuller audience experience and a more complete way to showcase their work. It also helped me feel more positive about my contribution to the project.
On the whole, I found that both the PhD students and the other members of staff were very generous in sharing their practice and ideas and this gave me tremendous inspiration and put me at ease in my desire to share too.
So much so, that I put forward an idea to put on a workshop as part of the events that went alongside the exhibition: I was interested in offering audiences the opportunity to experience what practice-based research is, since this was very new to me too. I also thought this workshop would help to demystify what academic research is and make the idea of taking on a PhD more accessible to those who thought a PhD is solely based on the more word and number-based research approach.
The idea was (to my surprise) very well received and in fact another member of staff offered to join forces and put on the workshop together: great!
Together we decided that in order to make the workshop doable in the limited amount of time (2.5hrs) we should find an approach that would somewhat simplify the research process, whilst still give a flavour of what that would be like.
We chose three of the students’ works as inspiration, but then we borrowed the IDEO method cards to give the participants some prompts and help them through the practical aspects.
The method cards have been invented by a company called IDEO who focuses on a user-centred design approach to develop products, services, experiences, spaces.
The cards are divided into 4 categories (Learn, Look, Ask, Try) each offering several approaches and prompt the designer to help them empathise with the user:
Learn helps analyse the information gathered to find patterns and insights
Look encourages to observe people in their daily lives to understand what they actually do vs what they would say they do
Ask gets people to participate and test out offerings in order to see how they respond to them
Try has the designer try the offering themselves to see in first person how it works
For the workshop we chose 3 categories and one method from each that somewhat tied in with the PhD students’ research questions and methods without attempting to be too exact and possibly inaccurate.
We chose:
ASK
Observe how the environment is influencing a member of the public’s physical portrayal. Ask “Why questions” (IDEO, 2022) to investigate your observational perspective.
This method forces people to examine and express the underlying reasons for their behaviour and attitudes.
2. LOOK
Capture pictures of someone’s character through the eye of the camera. Collect information on each other exploring a narrative of secrecy and desire.
This method generates visual evidence to uncover patterns of behaviour and perceptions related to a particular context and informs conclusions.
3. TRY
Create a silent group walk focusing on the intuitive responses prompted by the physical environment and the proximity to each other.
This method helps to quickly generate and test many context and behaviour-based concepts.
We then divided the participants into 3 groups and sent them off for 45mins to complete the tasks.
Once back we asked each group to share how the experience went and what they got out of it, what they had discovered.
We also proceeded to ask a few questions to see how they could connect this practical experience to academic research:
How can these methods relate to academic research?
How can these methods help you interrogate your research in relation to others in the field?
How can practice-based methodologies be documented and articulated for an academic context?
The participants were of quite varied backgrounds: some thinking about taking on a PhD, some Master’s students, some BA students, some non-academic.
The two aspects that struck me as most interesting were:
How the practice-based research saw the participants focus on the practice itself and on how this brought back not only theoretical findings, but also physical and emotional connections that contributed to those findings.
The debate we had about academia vs practice.
From that discussion, many questions came to mind: why should the main channel of academic communication and presentation of findings be the written word? Why can’t the practice speak for itself? Is this the difference between art and academia? Art can speak for itself, but should artistic practice in an academic context be analysed and relayed back in a coherent form? Is this necessary in order to contribute to new knowledge that we all equally and somewhat objectively understand? But is there such a thing as objective understanding? Isn’t artistic practice subjective by definition? Should academic research be scientific and so objective? Is it simply that academia is based on written communication and anything other than that should be called something else?
This past week has been quite exciting in terms of reflection opportunities and teaching practice.
As Production Manager/Specialist technician, I don’t normally do much structured teaching. I find myself offering tutorials or supporting students in developing their design ideas and together find solutions to realise them. However I don’t regularly hold lectures or deliver workshops.
This passed week I was invited to hold a workshop on sound to film students.
I was asked to focus on sound as a concept to help the students think about how sound can help them tell a story, more than how they can achieve perfectly recorded dialogue or prepare naturalistic soundscapes, i.e. not sound à la Hollywood.
Well, the fact that I was asked only a few days earlier made it a bit nerve wracking: how would I be able to prepare thoroughly in only a few days? I started jotting down a few ideas and realised that I had way too many ideas to be able to read all about them too (I wanted to have some validation to hand)…not even staying up all night every night all the way to the day would have sufficed!
So, I opted for a more efficient and practical approach. I prepared a PowerPoint presentation, which was to start off with a brief intro to sound where I explained how it can be used in live and captured realms. It seemed only fair to give some context. I then proceeded to explain the physical nature of sound and how it behaves in a physical environment. It seemed fair also to introduce some key technical vocabulary. Finally, I explored how sound in its very physical nature can affect us and the ways in which we can use that to tell stories and create experiences for our audiences. Feeling vs hearing. Listening vs hearing.
Great!
On the day, whilst chatting to the unit leader as we waited for the much delayed students, I realised that my approach to the lesson was way too formal, but still I was confident that what I had prepared was a good stepping stone. I was ready to improvise: I never felt like that before. Not nervous? Ready to improvise? Ready to let go of all my preparation and actually enjoy what I had to say? It seemed mad. I never really gave myself permission to let go in that way.
So we all sat around a large table and I started. I didn’t project my slides, but just shared directly from my laptop (we were close enough to see and I have a large laptop) and I only needed to show key images not all the slides.
It worked out really well.
I found that the students were engaged, they were taking notes, they asked questions. The unit leader contributed a few times too, making the whole session very conversational, which gave me a great sense of ease: suddenly teaching felt more like an exchange of ideas, a sharing, rather than an imposition as it sometimes felt in the past. I loved it!
The students, most of whom I already knew (they were stage 3 students whom I had recently worked on a show with) introduced their pieces to me. We discussed ways in which they could explore what we had just spoken about, there were questions, answers, debates and so we all learned a lot: I was inspired by the diversity, the content and context of their projects and the students learnt new ways to think about sound.
I’d like to explore more this idea of “letting go” and being able to trust myself in what I can offer, rather than feeling like I need my notes as a crutch in case I forget some words. I suppose this confidence is coming now, after many years of having worked in the industry, having taught sound in different environments and having many stories to tell, sharing what went right and wrong and what I have learnt from all of those experiences.
When I first started I was asked to teach sound having had no experience in the field whatsoever. I had barely finished my qualification. It was not a pleasant teaching experience. I felt like I was cheating the students. It didn’t seem fair to talk about a subject purely from a theoretical point of view. I couldn’t pretend to know something I had no experience in. And not only that, I felt that teaching that way was incredibly boring to the students: I couldn’t bring anything of mine to the table, I couldn’t share any experience and so all I was saying to them felt dead, it lacked the vividness of real life, the application of the theory I wanted them to believe was true. I quit after a few months and started sound mixing in a venue.
Then I got a job in another university as visiting lecturer, as I was still working in the industry. It was already better: I realised that the practice had to supplement the teaching. And so it seems my life carried on that way: a few years in the industry, a few years in education, sometimes both at once, the two practices feeding off each other.
But now it feels like a new chapter has begun, now it’s different, feel I am giving myself permission to trust my knowledge and my experience; on one hand I feel I have validated all those ’empty’ words and perhaps what I can share with students is more meaningful. On the other hand, I have made peace with not knowing. The more you know, the more you know what you don’t know… So it’s ok to share what you know and carry on learning as you go.
During our second cross-program session, we were presented with a case study extracted from Bruce Macfarlane’s book Teaching with integrity (Macfarlane, 2004).
Here, apart from discussing how the teacher in question could improve on certain approaches to her teaching, what struck me the most was the conversation our group had when we were asked to discuss what we thought the most interesting questions this case study had risen.
After some brainstorming, we settled on the relationship between research and teaching and how the two can co-exist.
Some people in the group, with experience in both (either personally or through having worked with researchers who teach) pointed out that this is a particularly difficult balance to strike: the two practices require very different skills, aptitudes and traits. Someone pointed out that often researchers don’t have any motivation to teach, that in fact are often not good teachers and that the two (researchers and teachers) often have negative opinions of one another.
But shouldn’t the two feed off each other? Shouldn’t researchers want to share their research and indeed inform, complement, enrich their teaching with it? Likewise, shouldn’t teachers want to inspire their teaching with new material?
I suppose teachers could be happy to teach other people’s research and still be great teachers, but researchers surely would want to research to contribute to new knowledge somehow and what better way to do it than through teaching.
Universities could perhaps encourage researchers to teach by supporting their teaching practices more and celebrating their importance. Although we are lucky to be on the PGCERT Academic Practice in Art, Design and Communication here, I don’t know that there is much effort from UAL to celebrate how important it is to teach. It would be great to see regular workshops and seminars or observation opportunities, that encourage teachers to improve their skills, learn and try out new ones, explore different approaches to how their subject is taught by possibly observing others and generally creating more of a community where a teaching discourse can happen.
Bibliography
Macfarlane, B. (2004) Teaching with Integrity. the ethics of higher education practice London: Routledge
Following on from thinking about the inherit lack of boundaries that sonic environments have, I have been thinking about examples at UAL where this may affect students’ and staff’s work.
One of the most recent examples is the Fine Arts classes that happen on the street at CSM: mostly drawing classes with background music, but also lectures animate the space at the north end of the street where many students and staff pass through to get to their classrooms and offices.
I always thought it was cool that these were happening; they were making the space vibrant, they were (albeit inadvertently) making students’ work and their course visible and generally they were also demystifying the traditionally more austere classroom set up, making it perfectly ok to climb over students in order to get to the canteen…
Now I question whether this is indeed a positive experience or not. Is it a hindrance to those who try to get some tranquillity between classes/on their break? Or are they offering positive and creative energy that, regardless on a passer by paying attention to them or not, still feeds our souls and intellects?
I vote for creative collisions always…
P.S.
Although it may have seemed like a cop out to have presented the videos so raw and noisy, I did do that on purpose to try and illustrate the challenges and the discomfort that an invaded sonic space may cause…
Another very inspiring session. Another session that generated (at least for me) more questions. Another instance where I started off thinking answers would be straight forward, but I soon realised the plethora of points of view and approaches made it rather the opposite.
Insider research.
Naively I thought it would of course be a grand idea to research your own institution: taking one for the team, finding the problems and solving them for everyone else!
In fact I have been through this exact scenario during my MBA for my final research project.
Following Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Experience Sampling Method (ESM) I conducted a research on work motivation at the institution I used to work for. As part of the team, I had sensed we had some problems and thought it’d be interesting and useful to identify which problems we had and how to solve them or at least move forward.
During yesterday’s session I realised that it’s not as simple as that (and already conducting a research project, especially an ESM one, is no easy thing)…
There are of course positive aspects. Being aware of a malaise and understanding the mechanics and politics of the institution can be an advantage. As it can be very useful if one is a well received team member: one could be more easily given consent and participation (paramount in my instance) could be greater if the participants trust the researcher to be on their side.
Unfortunately there are many not-so positive factors that can actually get in the way of the research and its success. For one of course if the researcher is not well received or perhaps the boss is the team being researched, participation and consent may lack.
More importantly thought factors such as bias and being too immersed in the politics of the institution could influence the researcher in their method and interpretation of findings.
Still, the idea of being able to improve aspects of one’s own institution appeals to me and perhaps I need to reflect on how I could set up my methodology to make it water tight against the negatively influencing factors, should this be even possible.
Food for thought.
The second part of the session also raised many questions, in particular when analysing the scenario our group was tasked with, scenario 1:
“In your observations you’ve come across practices that you believe may be under-serving some students (you are uncertain)”.
The discussion was very interesting, especially since another group had the same scenario and their approach was completely different.
In essence this scenario was tackled from two points of view: the more impartial researcher with a specific mandate approach and the more ethically influenced one where the researcher is trying to sustain social justice.
The first instance makes the approach to the scenario much more complex and almost without an answer: would intervene be relevant to the research, would we have a mandate to do that, would we have the authority, who could we ask permission to?
The second instance makes it slightly easier: is the under-serving a breach to ethical duties, such as ensuring equality? If so it has to be addressed and possibly done so independently from the research. But does it?
The question of bias comes back here and with it the need to set up that water tight methodology that can navigate independently from it.
Very interesting 1st session on the PGCERT Academic Practice in Art, Design and Communication!
I was impressed by the variety of experience we all have and the context which we are teaching in. In fact the word teaching feels much too structured and rigid. Perhaps experience or even knowledge sharing would work best. I could stretch it to educating, but this feels much too imposing to the style I feel I have when interacting with students…more reflection on this is required from my part I think.
Everyone shared some very interesting articles and images, which were triggered by their background and practice as opposed to some theory of pedagogy, which would have made it much too standardised. I found this very inspiring and eye opening. My background as a students, growing up in Italy, is very old fashioned and traditional: one would read the history of everything and learn from theorists. Expressing one’s opinion was never allowed let alone drawing from practitioners’ experiences.
A quote that resonated a lot from one of the presentations was:
“Artists drew on their own experience as creative practitioners to instigate a learning process” (Pringle, 2009).
This feels like a collision of ideas that inspire and kindle learning: an approach I find would help sediment learning a lot deeper than receiving education in the passive manner I was used to.
That said, possibly because it’s in my imprinting, I am still interested in the history of everything as I feel it helps me put what I learn into context. Then I can move on and question it to hopefully understand alternatives, a way forward.
I found inspiring our discussion on diversity and on inclusivity as well as compassionate pedagogy. I don’t know much about pedagogy in general and realising how much I have been looking at it from a single, white European, perspective makes me feel very ignorant and yet I look forward to expanding my point of view and learning different teaching styles to fulfil diverse learning needs.
Another aspect that I thought was particularly interesting and a bit of a chicken and egg dilemma is the question about whether education affects and can change the industry or the industry dictates how future practitioner should be trained…
I look forward to the sessions ahead and to try and find some answers to these questions although I have a feeling I’ll only be able to scratch the surface of this huge subject and that more questions will arise first.
Pringle, E. (2009) The Artist as Educator: Examining Relationships between Art Practice and Pedagogy in the Gallery Context In: Tate Papers no.11 [Online]. At: https://www.tate.org.uk/research/tate-papers/11/artist-as-educator-examining-relationships-between-art-practice-and-pedagogy-in-gallery-context (Accessed on 10.01.22)
