Workshop 1a and 1b served as an introduction to the PG Cert unit – it was great to meet all the other participants and see such a wide breadth of participants from across job families and colleges. Despite being the online group, we were able to interact in activities in Teams breakout groups and on Miro, which was eye opening to me having a full time in-person job, with little experience of hybrid learning.
Our initial activities included creating a timeline of [primarily UK] education history and adding in additional important dates. We discussed and defined social justice and what this could mean and look like within a higher education setting. Most agreed this could be addressed by diversity within staff, decolonising the curriculum and providing equal opportunities to students, such as hardship funds.
I was given a chapter from ‘Signature Pedagogies in Art and Design’ (Orr & Shreeve, 2017) to read prior. The reading establishes a number of methods and techniques that teaching might occur in, but of most interest to me was the thinking on the ‘studio’ as a space for learning. They highlight the important of in person spaces for students to discuss, experience peer to peer learning and how ideally it is an ‘active, busy place’ (ibid). Orr and Shreeve also speak a lot of the ‘stickiness’ of teaching within higher education, specifically within the arts. One way this manifests in studios is the increasing lack of permanent studio space, leading to students becoming ‘migrants across campus’ (ibid).
This relates to my role as a technician, where our workshop acts as a studio for most of these students. Through this we end up having high contact hours, and teach them necessary technical skills but also help with individual support (Sams, 2016). We also offer pastoral and medical care when needs arise. Sams notes that while most technical staff feel appreciated by students, they can often feel undervalued by the wider university and discontented with the lack of support for personal practice and career progression – the lack of progression indeed being one of the reasons behind me starting my PG Cert to widen my other job options.
Berger (2009) puts forth that some objects or artefacts can only be understood ‘through the knowledge… created by their use’ – which I believe links to the physical technical skills we teach in our in-person roles.
Going forward in the PG Cert I am interested in exploring how our roles as technicians can be thought of more as being as equally valuable in terms of teaching as the academic content taught to students on their courses.
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Orr and Shreeve (2017) ‘6 Teaching practices for creative practitioners’, in Signature Pedagogies in Art and Design.
Sams, C. (2016) ‘How do art and design technicians conceive of their role in higher education?’, Spark: UAL Creative Teaching and Learning Journa, 1(2).
Berger, A.A. (2009) ‘What objects mean: an introduction to material culture’. Walnut Creek, California: Left Coast Press.