Above: I am an avid note-takerAbove: Powerpoint slides presented in the peer to peer session - with responses notedI was nervous about the peer to peer session with Jade, Jess and Daniel. I had met them all previously but we hadn’t actually spent much time together. I had heard both Jade and Jess make comments in the IP sessions, and if I’m honest was a bit in awe of them. Both coming across as well-informed, critical thinkers and articulate experts in their field. I often feel like I’m not upto scratch in terms of thinking critically (imposter syndrome? my brother once described me as being as deep as a puddle. We were teenagers at the time). I have never enjoyed the theoretical academic portion of work in any of the studies I have done. I don’t see it as an area of strength for me.
In my tutorial with Victor. I was pleased with the feedback I received. I was honest with him about my initial intervention piece and how I had asked a friend (with whom I was on holiday at the time – she is a midwife who has a teaching portion within her role) to read it. Her feedback was very direct, she didn’t hold back; she said it was just waffle, focused more on my positionality and she couldn’t understand what I was actually proposing. Hmph. Back to the drawing board (well, iPhone as I decided last minute – stupidly – not to bring my laptop on holiday!) and I critically tore my intervention apart. Putting my practitioner’s hat on, I wrote the intervention as though I were writing a planning design report. I supported my thinking with some research, and ran the new piece through Grammarly to check spelling and grammar structure. And then I tentatively handed it back to my sunbathing friend. This time she said. ‘Well done, very clear & I can understand what you are proposing. Now get me a cocktail!’ phew!
In Victor’s feedback, he genuinely seemed interested in the intervention I had proposed and he gave me insightful suggestions and research to follow up on.
I prepared my intervention piece, ready for the peer-to-peer session, which sadly looked like the world’s blandest PowerPoint presentation.
Jade gave her presentation first, and WOW. It was amazing. The presentation started with her positionality, which clearly set out her personal journey to learning and the connection to her practice. The intervention focused on enhancing the technical handouts that go to students. She was reflective about her practice and had been able to identify where she (and her colleagues) could build more inclusivity within the technical information offered to students. We offered her constructive feedback on testing this – perhaps using anonymous questionnaires to gauge how students felt about the support for technical tasks. Daniel, suggested it might work better as an analogue rather than digital tool and Jess, agreed that students love a handout (my experience too!) but that Jade may want to consider the sustainbility aspect – by only printing out the minimum and laminating them and locating them in clearly visible places in the studio space.
Daniel presented his intervention next. He admitted to struggling with academic references, as he came to teaching through being a practitioner. Dan’s invention involved rethinking a workshop that he delivers to BA students, in which students create a poster. His intervention would include an exhibition of the posters, which he said was difficult to visualise, even theoretically at this point, due to the course moving location, stating that it would be difficult to test (although I believe the intervention can be hypothetical). He included a great range of research and reference points. I think we were all very excited by Dan’s proposal, maybe because he was looking at ways to improve an existing piece of curriculum, and also, he showed outcomes from the previous workshop. Jess made a great suggestion that this could be a ‘guerrilla exhibition’, and leading from that, I suggested that he could pick a location (Peckham? culturally diverse), hence avoiding the uncertainty surrounding where the course would be located. Jade questioned whether there would be great value in the workshop if it was run across the 3 years of the BA, resulting in an evolution of ideas from the same students, enabling them to reflect on how their positionality might change.
For Jess’s intervention, she set out her positionality stating that she actively … TBC