- Archive of Practitioners
BA Illustration and Visual Media (LCC) has a padlet page that is integrated on Moodle called ‘Archive of Practitioners’. Both students and staff can add to the pallet board, creating a diverse and polyphonic reference list that students can use. (I believe this was Rachel Davey’s Intervention for the Inclusive Practices Unit a few years back >> big love Rachel Davey). I love this intervention because it is subtle, open ended and non-didactic. It is there to be used by whoever needs it.
Yet sometimes, I feel like students do not use it because they might forget it’s there. So I was thinking as an intervention, finding a good moment with the Y1 / Y2 / Y3 cohorts to doing a session of exchanging visual references by using the Archive of Practitioners in which everyone has to add 5 references to the archive and find 5 references that are relevant to them. It could also be a good moment to talk about co-creating curricula, syllabus etc, and what it means to archive. This could also be supported by a talk by an archivist from the LCC Archives, or by friend and poet Rhoda Boateng who worked at the Black Cultural Archives as an archivist.
I also feel like sometimes, there is energy and labour put towards an action that then gets forgotten. I admire Rachel and would like to extend and support her work. How it would feel if we as teaching teams built together?
The Artefact would be the Scheme of Work (SOM) of the research session. It could focus on one year group or it could be modified for all year groups.
2. Society of Makers: Visiting Lecturers
When Francesco came to observe my teaching in the previous unit, he positively remarked that I asked students at the end of the session what other sessions / practitioners students would like me to invite for the weekly programme Society of Makers. He also extended the potential of this process by suggesting making an online Moodle poll that reaches all the students of the course rather than just the ones that are in the room in this particular session. I thought this was a beautiful suggestion and can enrich next years programme. I have taken this on and proposed it to my Course Leader. I would like to to push this further and potentially use it as the starting point for my intervention.
What would this poll look like? / What questions would it ask students and how would they be articulated? I think this would affect a lot of the answers.
In this case the Artefact would be the poll (its format and questions)
3. Society of Makers: Students Running Sessions
I have also been thinking that I would actually like to attempt that students contact the practioners they would like to invite and I support them to do that. Or that they run their own sessions? Maybe this sounds like quite a lot but in a program that had about 25 sessions this year, I think we could set aside 3 sessions for students to run / take over which I can assist.
How to organise that? Which students would partake? What commitment am I asking them to make? When / in what times is this being worked out? Can I support this and how?
This is difficult to know what the artefact would be??? It might be a combination of the invitation to students and how to structure the supporting sessions???
4. Society of Makers: Diverse Practitioners
This year I had the opportunity to invite visiting lecturers to run sessions as part of Society of Makers. I actively tried to keep the programme diverse both in terms of content and socio-cultural background of the guest practitioners. I also actively tried to invite practitioners—that have faced barriers in entering ‘academia’ due to their background— to teach an optional, small, low stakes session so they can get teaching experience. There is definitely more nuance to be found here and it would be very exciting to me to work with students and my peers to create a strong and exciting program.
In this case the Artefact would be a prospective programme of practitioners and activities with descriptions of the sessions.
5. Inclusive Tutorial Practice:
Drawing on some of the reflections on how I structure tutorials, I could make a guide for myself and potentially others on how to make tutorials inclusive.
It could contain a list of questions to ask / how to spatially set certain conversations / different places / archives to find diverse references etc???