(1649 words) [1]

For the fifth week in a row, my student sent me a last-minute excuse for why he couldn’t come to college. Every week, he emailed me or texted me at the last minute, tummy issues, headaches, and transport problems. By that point, they had missed all the initial sessions to meet their tutor group, me and their writing tutor, the year meetings, lectures, and all the parallel optional sessions we offer to students. After several attempts, we started a conversation texting via Teams. Because they found it so hard to communicate in English, they suffered from massive anxiety and couldn’t bear coming to college.

My proposal addresses a specific language barrier affecting some of our Chinese BAFA Y3 students. Over the year, my student and I tried many different strategies—first, one-on-one sessions on Teams, followed by one-on-one sessions in person. Once we developed enough access intimacy, and trust, we started using Google Translate on my phone, which allowed for a sustainable rhythm in our conversations. (Mingus, 2011) I would speak on my phone, and he would read the translated text in Chinese. He would then speak in Chinese on his phone, and I would read what he said.

I am a tutor group leader and 0.8 Y3 member of staff in the BA Fine Arts at the Chelsea College of Fine Arts. We have a large Y3 cohort, with 163 students clustered in Tutor Groups of ten or eleven students. I’m responsible for three of those groups as well as general sessions and administrative tasks. My tutor responsibilities include coordinating with writing tutors, facilitating one-on-one and group sessions focused on the students’ art practice, and providing pastoral care. Just under half of our students are international, which means that pedagogically integrating such a significant cohort has a massive impact on the learning environment. Although UAL Attainment Profiles do not cover Asian international students, we are very aware of the barriers and lack of institutional support these students encounter on a day-to-day basis. (Internal Access Monitoring, no date).

We identified a handful of students experiencing similar issues with English language access. This was confirmed by other tutors in the year and across the course in general. It was noted that team members had identified this cohort since Foundation as having lower IELTS grades for admission due to recruitment goals. It’s challenging to verify this information, but the Language Centre’s survey on English language proficiency levels of international students, carried out this year, suggests that this is a broader issue at UAL.[2] We scheduled support sessions with a staff member who spoke Mandarin. This intervention was very successful.[3] It had full attendance by students who hadn’t been present in the course, and the students were incredibly chatty, happy, and relaxed. However, we didn’t have a budget to pay for extra HPL hours to continue those sessions or resources that would allow this member of staff to support them throughout the year. 

By the time we reached my final group sessions of the year, which were smaller than the regular tutor group, we passed my phone around, and a student or I would read the English translation to the group. Over the year, my student’s mood and engagement with the course markedly increased; his writing and practice-based work improved considerably, and his marks improved by almost two bands from the previous year. Y3 requires a significant amount of writing, reading, and critical analysis, making it a very discursive program. A language barrier becomes incredibly prejudicial at this point. This is one of the reasons why most of the students who are diagnosed with Dyslexia or ADHD are only flagged and referred to Disability Services this year. Although these methods worked quite successfully in the end, “Academic life [..] at every university, is inherently social”. (Jack, 2019, p. 86) This method failed to address all the larger sessions, and it created a parity issue with my other tutor groups since our sessions were much slower.

My proposed intervention is to expand on the methods I developed with my student so that (1) I’m better prepared next time and can intervene faster and more effectively, (2) I can share it with colleagues, (3) I can have a solution better fitted for group discussions and crits that HPL and guests can quickly implement and (4) it can also be used in larger sessions like lectures and year meetings.

My proposed intervention involves collaborating with the Digital Support Team and the Language Support Team to develop a live captioning method utilising the technology and techniques developed during the COVID-19 pandemic to facilitate digital access. A few years ago, I attended a series of Digital Access trainings that included the use of Microsoft Teams live captioning translation features. These allow live captioning to be set for a meeting, with the option to enable live translation to a different language locally. This would mean that my student could have joined any group sessions from the beginning and followed the live, translated captions on his laptop. Ideally, we would find a solution that allows him to speak in Chinese on his Teams, and I or one of the other students could read the translation out loud. This will require additional tools, such as clip-on mics for improved clarity, which are available from the AV Team for lectures and larger sessions and can be booked from the Loan Store. I’ve contacted the Digital Support team to discuss potential alternatives, as the live captioning translation for Teams is now only available in the Premium version.

Image credit: https://www.knowledgewave.com/blog/live-translated-captions-in-microsoft-teams-meetings

This intervention would expand our access support for d/Deaf access.(“Friends & Strangers”, 2023) I’ve worked with supporting subtitling and closed captioning in a previous role and use some of those resources, such as audio description writing techniques, as part of writing pedagogical tools in the course. Through that period and my own experience as a non-native English speaker with a chronic illness that involves bouts of fatigue, I have come to understand that captioning, like most access infrastructure, can expand modes of engagement for a much larger population than the one it is initially aimed at.

As my PGCert tutor has pointed out, this intervention extends beyond my professional remit. As lecturers’ free support hours have been reduced over the years, these problems are likely to become more frequent. But I’m also a firm believer that the most effective interventions are always led on the ground and by the staff who are in direct contact with students. (Cussiánovich Villarán and Schmalenbach, 2015)

The efficacy of this intervention could be evaluated using both qualitative and quantitative methods, such as recording direct observations of engagement through attendance at sessions, workshops, and year meetings. It would also be possible, as we did this year, to routinely check with staff on the effect on their tutor groups. It will also be important to check with other students in the tutor group and attendance at open sessions. Part of the goal is to avoid alienating Chinese students by making them hyper-visible. Quantitative data can be collected through attendance and by mapping grades at the end of Year 3, as well as comparing them with the grades from Year 2. We already do this every year to identify biases in our teaching.

“Peruvians don’t make art. Peruvians don’t make theory.” For about a year and a half, my Latin American Studies PhD supervisor would find a way to convey this to me, the Peruvian PhD student.[4] As I mentioned in my blog post on race, having been a racialised English-language learner international student, I have a profound sense of political solidarity with the barriers and prejudices those students face. (Francke, 2025) There is a profound sense of dehumanisation in ignoring the language barriers that UAL itself has produced.[5] The lack of concern for the barriers those students face relates to how the college perceives them as consumers “buying” a degree, rather than active participants in a pedagogical environment. Low expectations are set up institutionally and repeated in larger political and social discourses that are being amplified in the media and becoming pillars of current fascist government trends, such as vilifying international student visas in the UK and the US.(Bradbury, 2020; Kiely, 2025; Moynihan, 2025) It is fundamental to me that, as an art course, we nurture an environment of epistemic abundance and create the conditions to learn together from everything that all of us bring to the course. It is by modelling treating every student as a full human that we can help our students develop as people and as artists.  

Bibliography

Bradbury, A. (2020) ‘A critical race theory framework for education policy analysis: the case of bilingual learners and assessment policy in England’, Race Ethnicity and Education, 23(2), pp. 241–260. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2019.1599338.

Brixton Black Women’S Group (2023) Speak Out!: The Brixton Black Women’s Group. Verso Books.

Bryan, B., Dadzie, S. and Scafe, S. (2018) The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain. Verso Books.

Chicano! History of the Mexican-American Civil Rights Movement (1996). NLCC Educational Media.

Cussiánovich Villarán, A. and Schmalenbach, C. (2015) ‘La Pedagogía de la Ternura -Una lucha por la dignidad y la vida desde la acción educativa | The Pedagogy of Tenderness –A struggle for dignity and life from the educational action’, Diá-logos, 16, pp. 63–76.

Francke, A. (2025) ‘Unit 2 – Blog Task 3: Race’, 22 June. Available at: https://andreafranckepgcert.myblog.arts.ac.uk/2025/06/22/unit-2-blog-task-3-race/ (Accessed: 1 July 2025).

“Friends & Strangers” (2023). (Art21). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NpRaEDlLsI (Accessed: 5 May 2025).

Garrett, R. (2025) ‘Racism shapes careers: career trajectories and imagined futures of racialised minority PhDs in UK higher education’, Globalisation, Societies and Education, 23(3), pp. 683–697. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2024.2307886.

Gibson, J. (2025) ‘English Language Levels Survey – follow up’.

Internal Access Monitoring (no date). Available at: https://dashboards.arts.ac.uk/dashboard/ActiveDashboards/DashboardPage.aspx?dashboardid=c977e2c6-878b-48df-b8e7-aa2c5fe6a3fe&dashcontextid=637396550877188156&resetFilt=true (Accessed: 1 July 2025).

Jack, A.A. (2019) The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students. Harvard University Press.

Kiely, E. (2025) ‘Ed Kiely · Short Cuts: University Finances’, London Review of Books, 23 May. Available at: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n10/ed-kiely/short-cuts (Accessed: 25 June 2025).

Mingus, M. (2011) ‘Access Intimacy: The Missing Link’, Leaving Evidence, 5 May. Available at: https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/access-intimacy-the-missing-link/ (Accessed: 19 February 2024).

Moynihan, D. (2025) ‘The Attack on International Students’, Can We Still Govern?, 13 April. Available at: https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-attack-on-international-students (Accessed: 25 June 2025).

Neill, A.S. (1990) Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child-rearing. Penguin.

Steinberg, T. (2025) ‘Unearthing history at the Blackwell School’, e-flux Education [Preprint]. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/education/features/638581/unearthing-history-at-the-blackwell-school (Accessed: 2 July 2025).

Tough, P. (2019) The Years that Matter Most: How College Makes Or Breaks Us. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

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[1] Grammarly was used to revise this document.

[2] “I notice from your survey responses that you have students on your course(s) who you would describe as having very low levels of English. I’m keen to investigate which language tests were used by such students in order to satisfy their English language entry requirement. The tests that we accept at UAL are under constant review and it’s important to note any possible relationship between a given test and low student proficiency as seen on their course. Any English language test which does not appear to accurately assess the proficiency of students can be reviewed and removed from the UAL list of accepted tests as necessary. This process of constant review helps to ensure that all students who enrol have the language skills required to be able to cope with the demands of their course.”(Gibson, 2025)

[3] I’m a firm believer than inclusion and access interventions that are enacted at a local level by members of academic staff tend to be much more effective that general measures imposed through administrative bodies. For example, Paul Tough chapter on the impact individual teachers have on Calculus grades in US Universities (Tough, 2019)

[4] The issues faced by racialised non-native English speakers academic staff are very similar to those of students. (Garrett, 2025)

[5] There is a variety of texts overing how pedagogy and language skills have been used historically in process of racialisation In the UK, examples are exemplified in Black Feminist struggles on schooling in the late 60s and 70s (Bryan, Dadzie and Scafe, 2018; Brixton Black Women’S Group, 2023) , Summerhill School’s attempts to introduce languages of their migrants communities in their optional curriculum(Neill, 1990), as well as the pressure against Welsh and Irish language in schools until recent years. In the US, a well know example is how Spanish was used as a tool racialise students who were pressured to abandon it and were forced to repeat school years as a given.(Chicano! History of the Mexican-American Civil Rights Movement, 1996; Steinberg, 2025).

I’ve always been interested in how the construction of the international student category at college connects language and racialisation processes. For example, it’s very common for US or students from Western Europe who are fluent in English are seen as outside that category. The university frames “international students” as a racialised term through their dehumanisation as a source of cash and funding for courses, or to be blunter, our dehumanisation. This characterization seems completely unmoved by generations of incredibly successful art careers led by international students at college. Students describe how they feel that they succeeded against the expectations and dismissiveness of some of their tutors.  It’s common to hear academic and administrative staff refer to those students in a generalised pejorative way. For example, I’ve been to a training about name pronunciations that began with a 5 min Zoom open mic chat between the facilitator and a staff member in attendance discussing how international students bring the standards down and how the only reason we have them in our classes is because the university wants their money. This is also an example of how the dehumanization of racialised students is echoed in the dehumanization of racialised international staff in general, which were present in the call.(Garrett, 2025) The session then went on to explain to us how name pronunciation was essential because of the university’s decolonisation aims…On an anti-racist mandatory training, a member of staff raised the issue of how uncomfortable he felt about the way some of his team members spoke and treated Chinese students, only to be told that this was not a race issue that could be discussed in the session.

“The low expectations of the English-language learners are established right at the very start of their school careers, and stay with them through their seven years in primary school, solidified in the data which tracks them as they progress.” (Bradbury, 2020)

Low expectations are the key words here. The testing of EAL (English as Additional Language) learners English learners has parallels with the patronising expectations against international students at UAL, more specifically but not restricted to Chinese and brown students, who are evaluated in relation to British art education paradigms. Those paradigms are established through the foundations courses and are thus expanded to working-class black and brown students who come straight from 6^th form. Expectations of ‘experimentalism’ (which is usually a gimmick and has a specific aesthetic and methodological form), the valuing of conceptual uses of mediums over commitment and development of the skill specificities of the medium, the overvaluation of discursive justification and contextualisation of the work through crits, the extreme work the term ‘criticality’ is expected to do, etc. These paradigms ignore the different art pedagogies that exist not just all over the world, but also in the different art worlds that exist in different communities in the UK, and the multiplicity of ways to make and think about art in the contemporary art world. Instead of treating diversity and abundance as a wealth of intellectual and aesthetic opportunities, the art school becomes a place of kinship making over pedagogy. (O’Brien, 28 June 2023) A place where to reify the ‘supremacy’ of an implied racialised British art school tradition.

Bibliography

Bradbury, A. (2020) ‘A critical race theory framework for education policy analysis: the case of bilingual learners and assessment policy in England’, Race Ethnicity and Education, 23(2), pp. 241–260. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2019.1599338.

Garrett, R. (2025) ‘Racism shapes careers: career trajectories and imagined futures of racialised minority PhDs in UK higher education’, Globalisation, Societies and Education, 23(3), pp. 683–697. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2024.2307886.

O’Brien, D. (no date) ‘The Fall and Rise of the English Upper Class – Houses, Kinship and Capital Since 1945’. (New Books in Critical Theory). Available at: https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-fall-and-rise-of-the-english-upper-class (Accessed: 22 June 2025).

I agree with the references’ articulations of how the way religion impacts the perceived (de-) humanisation of a subject always already intersects with their other identity categories (either imposed or self-ascribed). (Kwame Anthony Appiah: Is religion good or bad? (This is a trick question), 2014; Challenging Race, Religion, and Stereotypes in Classroom, 2016; Rustamova, 2022; Rekis, 2023) I would be more invested than some of them, though, in how, more often than not, it is read as a proxy for race and class.

It made me sad that Simran Jeet Singh felt that he needed to follow a respectability politics strategy and that it was on him and his actions to prove certain stereotypes wrong.(Challenging Race, Religion, and Stereotypes in Classroom, 2016) It makes me concerned about the classroom pedagogy he practices and how it might push students to think that this is the only way to react to their dehumanisation. I hope my students don’t feel it is ever on them to disprove the prejudices we might hold as a community. That’s collective work that should be done as a group in a space held by the tutors.

Having grown up in Peru and Brazil, it has always surprised me how rarely religion appears in teaching here and how much students think it is something you must leave out the door before becoming an artist or an intellectual. During my education in Brazil, religion was always present. Liberation pedagogy was very present, and its relation to Liberation Theology was openly discussed. My primary and secondary school was run by liberation theology nuns who were fierce Marxists and feminists and openly talked about how my middle-class private school existed mainly to provide money for the school they were really invested in. A free school for d/Deaf children, which they ran. This meant we usually had d/Deaf students, and everything was organised so seamlessly that even in a country with massive prejudice against disabled people, none of the access infrastructure felt like a favour. It feels very different to have grown with a clear association that certain forms of radical and sophisticated political thought can’t be or have chosen not to be separated from religion. That religion is not an epistemic void.(Rekis, 2023)

In the UK, it’s weird to me how Paulo Freire is discussed with no mention of his Christianity. In art history in Brazil, we read biblical passages in order to understand medieval painting. We explored the fusion of Judaism and Hellenism, which became Christianity and then Neo-Platonism, to understand ideas of light in constructing gothic churches and aesthetics. Islam restrictions on representation and the symbolism of the cave in order to look at calligraphy, abstraction and the Moorish churches of Spain. How can you understand Brazilian music, performance and theatre traditions without studying Candomblé and Umbanda? How can we read philosophy and use Kant’s aesthetics (not that I’m a fan of his), ignoring his Lutheranism? I’ve become more aware of not unconsciously erasing the religious context for intellectual and art practices when I bring them to my students. Why would you read Judith Butler without considering her Judaism? Sara Ahmed and Rehana Zaman’s writings on their practices and thinking in relation to Islam? Evan Ifekoya’s work as a spiritual practitioner and her relation to Yoruba religion? Paul Thek and Peter Hujar’s Catholicism?

Bibliography

Challenging Race, Religion, and Stereotypes in Classroom (2016). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CAOKTo_DOk (Accessed: 23 May 2025).

Kwame Anthony Appiah: Is religion good or bad? (This is a trick question) (2014). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2et2KO8gcY (Accessed: 23 May 2025).

Rekis, J. (2023)’‘Religious Identity and Epistemic Injustice: An Intersectional Account’’, Hypatia, 38(4), pp. 779–800. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/hyp.2023.86.

Rustamova, F. (2022)’‘Islam, Women and Sport: The Case of Visible Muslim Women – Religion and Global Societ’’, Religion and Global Society – Understanding religion and its relevance in world affairs, 22 September. Available at: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/religionglobalsociety/2022/09/islam-women-and-sport-the-case-of-visible-muslim-women/ (Accessed: 23 May 2025).

My proposal addresses a specific language barrier affecting some of our Y3 Chinese students.

This cohort of Chinese students has been flagged as having been accepted with a lower IELTS requirement because UAL was concerned about their international students’ numbers. This has been mapped across courses and is currently being addressed by Language Support, to make a case for not lowering IELTS requirements again. IELTS requirement should be pedagogically determined, not according to how much money UAL needs from international students, a dehumanizing rational in par with the institutional discrimination Chinese students face on campus.

 The result is a handful of highly isolated Chinese students because their language skills don’t allow them to take part in the group situations, lectures, workshops and crits our course pedagogy is constructed around. They also find 1:1 tutorials difficult. Most of them had retreated from the course, their mental health attainment was heavily affected. One of my students this year fits that profile and it has been a long process to get him to trust me and engage, first with me and lately with group activities.

My current solution is using my iPhone Google Translate app.  Students speak into it, pass it to him to read, then he responds into it, and I read it out load. It has taken us a while to get to this solution and for the group to adapt and get used to the slower speed, the errors in the translation app, for him to feel that is ok to that extra space, etc.

I want to develop a better protocol in which we could use two laptops running Teams. It could capture the sound of the group discussion (potentially with a better mic) and he could access instantly translated subtitles and vice-versa). It could be expanded for lectures, external guest crits, and workshops as well. I’ve done some training on Teams and accessibility with UAL’s Digital Team and I’m confident that it is possible. This year is ending but I would like to be prepared and potentially set out a protocol that might be useful in the future for other tutors as well.

There are two levels at work in these videos and in any discussion of accessibility and intersectionality. At one level there are structural and institutional considerations. UAL proclaims their use of the social model of disability – a pretty low bar.(University of the Arts London 2020) Ade Adeptian talks about transport and employment issues.(ParalympicsGB 2020) Christine Sun Kim talks about all the “no”s she heard while studying because the resources weren’t made available.(Art21 2023) Chay Brown talks about trade unions organising conferences and accessibility budgets.(ParaPride 2023) All of those points refer to how the conditions to create accessibility require policy, budgets and labour which need to be valued.

On the other hand, there is a engagement with accessibility that needs to occur at a personal level. Adeptian hints towards the person who decides not to employ someone because of access issues or racism, or both. Sun Kim talks about members of her family not learning sign language. Brown talks about the Trade Union using a person-centred approach, which requires a logic of intimacy and care.

Most of the intersectional issues, how the disability of the speakers intersects with their other identities, are hinted towards but not addressed directly. How does Sun Kim’s deafness intersect with her identity as an Asian American, women, or mother? Did not having to think about the costs of childcare and public healthcare impacted her experience of deaf motherhood? Did Adeptian’s blackness impacted his access to disabled spaces or opportunities? Brown is more open about specific barriers to LGBTQ spaces that can trigger extreme anxiety.

I think that an intersectional approach to disability require both levels to work in parallel because it is in large policy gestures like the proclamation of generalities as if they were actions, that large groups of people can be made invisible. Mia Mingus, who self-defines as a queer physically disabled woman of colour adoptee, outlined Access Intimacy as a core principle of disability justice, a suggestion on how to reframe the tension between those two levels.  

“The power of access intimacy is that it reorients our approach from one where disabled people are expected to squeeze into able bodied people’s world, and instead calls upon able bodied people to inhabit our world.It challenges able bodied supremacy by valuing disability—not running from disability—but moving towards it. It asserts that there is value in disabled people’s lived experiences. In this way, it reframes both how and where solidarity can be practiced. Access intimacy is shared work by all people involved, it is no longer the familiar story of disabled people having to do all the work to build the conversations and piece together the relationship and trust that we know we need for access—that we know we need in order to survive. I know this has been the story of my life, especially with able bodied people of color and able bodied queer people of color.“

(Mingus 2017)

But as Mingus says, someone has to do that work. As  Brown mentions, there has to be an accessibility budget. As Sun Kim mentions, you need the budget to pay for the Sign Language Interpreter to join the night class session. As a course we aim to make the course as accessible as possible which has meant that we have a high number of disabled students accepting our offers. But every access issue that we embrace, requires an increase amount of staff time that is not recognised or budgeted by UAL. Each access choice is more and more dependent on staff volunteering time. Each tutor group leader has at least 25% students with ISAs and different requirements, and that proportion increases every year, while the number of extra hours that are not specifically assigned to curriculum delivery has been reduced to almost zero. Not to mention that we all have a number of black, brown, Asian and working-class students who should have an ISA but don’t feel entitled or have the time or emotional energy to engage with disability services.

Who is affected by those reductions? Who volunteers that time? Mainly disable staff themselves, who practice access intimacy even if it isn’t named but as an everyday practice of political solidarity. UAL proudly proclaims to embrace a social model of disability while squeezing resources and support in order to increase profits[i].

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[i] See UAL’s Size and Shape policy for more details in the plans to keep increasing number of students and reducing staff in the next five years, without increasing spatial or support infrastructure.

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Bibliography

Art21, dir. 2023. Christine Sun Kim in “Friends & Strangers” – Season 11 | Art21. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NpRaEDlLsI.

Mingus, Mia. 2017. ‘Access Intimacy, Interdependence and Disability Justice’. Leaving Evidence (blog). 12 April 2017. https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2017/04/12/access-intimacy-interdependence-and-disability-justice/.

ParalympicsGB, dir. 2020. Ade Adepitan Gives Amazing Explanation of Systemic Racism. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAsxndpgagU.

ParaPride, dir. 2023. Intersectionality in Focus: Empowering Voices during UK Disability History Month 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yID8_s5tjc.

University of the Arts London, dir. 2020. The Social Model of Disability at UAL. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNdnjmcrzgw.

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Session/artefact to be observed/reviewed: Interim Review – Afternoon session

Size of student group: 8

Observer: Tim Stephens

Observee: Andrea Francke

 

Note: This record is solely for exchanging developmental feedback between colleagues. Its reflective aspect informs PgCert and Fellowship assessment, but it is not an official evaluation of teaching and is not intended for other internal or legal applications such as probation or disciplinary action.

Part One
Observee to complete in brief and send to observer prior to the observation or review:

The Situations interim reviews are a specific type of crit that function as a formalized formative assessment preparing the students to Degree Show, the first and only time in which students work is directly assessed.

Interim review sessions are scheduled for all students and happen in the context of Situations, a series of exhibitions focused on developing their installation and realization skills. Situations used to be a quite straight forward in-college show for them to start prepping for the degree show but students’ feedback asked for more directed training and preparation. We have prepared these weeks in collaboration with the build and tech teams.

Situations happens just after the submission of their Unit 9 (dissertations) so many of them haven’t had time to make new work. They are allowed to install old work or work that wasn’t made by them because we focus on the skills and decisions involved in making a work public. After a week of skill sessions, install, crits with external guests, among other events we use the interim review crits as peer-group assessment to explore how we as a group would assess the work they’ve done for Situations. We will focus on the decisions involved in making work public, since this is at the center of all the learning outcomes in this unit and closely relatedly to install decisions.

Because the weeks are organized according to different mediums, the students are randomly allocated to tutors that are not their Tutor Group Leader. I co-run year meetings, the lecture programme and many across year sessions so most students will know me even if I don’t know them. These are very difficult sessions to run and only my second time running them. I know from last year that most tutors find them almost impossible to run because students tend to quickly move towards giving As to everyone. Most tutors last year gave up and run them as regular crits. I’ve planned a different strategy this year to help me stay in track. Although I’ll still focus on decision, intention and what the work is actually doing; I’m going to start the discussion of every work by proposing it is ‘satisfactory’, ‘D’, and then ask the students to point out what evidence we could find that would move upwards or how can we as a group think about different strategies that would develop those learning outcomes.

You will join in the second half of the session, after lunch so I hope we will have developed a productive group dynamic by then. The main issues I would like to get feedback on are:

1. How do the students engage with the idea of group-assessment in relation to the learning outcomes. Do they engage with the opportunity or would other form of crit be more useful.
2. Group dynamics management. I still find it quite hard to hold space for quieter students that might have serious anxiety issues.

I’ll let the students know about the observation at the beginning of the session in the morning and just before we restart after lunch. I’m hoping that since they are not my students, it will not be too disruptive.

Note:

Learning Outcomes:

Realization: You will apply considered practical and conceptual working methods in the production of a consolidated body of work.

Knowledge: You will evidence an understanding and awareness of the work’s relationship to its public and to a diversity of discourses.

Experimentation: You will understand your practice as the dynamic relationship between artists and audience demonstrating your awareness of the ethical and inclusive considerations of your practice and its actual outward-facing significance, deploying safe methods in the way you make and exhibit.

Communication: You will articulate your practice effectively towards given cultural contexts.

Enquire: You will identify, select and discuss information and evaluate modes of presentation that are productive for the making public of your work.

Part Two

Observer to note down observations, suggestions and questions:

The method I use for everyone’s teaching observations is to try and note the progress of the session – this is really to remind you of the session so you can recall it. I will not cover everything you said in such complex tutorials as these. Then, I comment on any issues arising. I use “ “ to indicate actual speech and [ ] to make comments or describe. T2 is second tutor.

1^st Student in the Gallery

[First piece, the monitor low down, in front of bench with fake grass painted white, person with scratches on back, and scrawled statement indecipherable.

[The students are confident and know immediately how to talk about each other’s work. One, with short brown hair, is being very articulate about the scene depicted.

[The low perspective, the subject, what the words sys…’handlebars’

AF: Is it important to you that we know..? [Great question that sets up more possibilities

[Sts talks about this…explains illegibility, happy with the ambiguity

[More vocal student discusses more…no sense of threat to the person depicted…sense of relationship between model and photographer/videographer..is it voyeuristic…sense of protection…’are you comfortable talking about the process’ [This was a very respectful almost model of good practice peer review sensitivity, so however you got to this point, something is working well in the culture of the Crit in this context…

[Artist explains, about actual scratches…using make up…and the illusion…but the process of exploring the painful…

AF: What do you think about this space [you draw attention to the installation

Different relationship with the image, right?

[Another student (sitting on floor) speaks about it as a sculptural piece and being close to the screen…’made me question if I was invited into the space or not’ [Again another wonderful peer intervention, sensitive, conscious of context of presentation and engagement…

AF: Haven’t seen people sitting, it’s really interesting..because the wires, a really weird relationship to this as an object [You have a very friendly and natural style, relaxed with students, not ‘superior’ but on their level using accessible language focussed on the experience

[The group discusses the space and position of the screen, wires and what affect it creates

AF: …lots of people…came close [You invite the other tutor to come in..[Great team working

T2: Asking about the experience and whether it is congruent with students expectations ..

[Artist discusses branding…changes, of mind an plan..

T2 people come with their own…explains more

[Vocal student. definite ambiguity to it, knowing your work in the past…there is possibility of kink or BDSM cultures..sexual violence, ambiguity and sexuality is present…have you explored other relationships to pain and mark making on skin..? [A sophisticated question and questioning…

Discussion between students…[interesting when this happens; the crit is ‘activated’ in the group, which is a ‘success’ of the format in your hands, well done

[Artist has not, but finds it interesting as connotations and reading [she is now relaxed and being very vocal and communicative in return

T2, explains the artist’s agency and aim…[ goes on to cite a book on Catherine Opie..perhaps as a teaching team you are very much on the same page here

AF: yeah that’s what I was going to say, because to me this is a such as, and knowing your work, and history, there’s a tradition in feminist art

T2 yeah, yep

AF to do similar work, and there’s something really interesting about this repetition over time and what you were saying..but joining those artists and all of those problems are still the same problem…is that something…did you know that work..?

T2…I did read about Opie’s approach…the enquiry…the method…[talks about the rigour in her work

[Artist talks about her intentions, approach and practices…goes back to the installation theme and context

St voice…

[The white cube space and the pillar, other spaces…

T2 joins in this space discussion…about the ‘domestic’ in the installation..

AF: it does depend on the construction of what is the domestic, it could be intimacy and closeness…[you move over to the work…talk about touch, and proximity; this is a wonderful theoretical intervention where you re-translate what the domestic might be…

“The domestic could be other codes…preparing..,but it’s so violent but doesn’t feel violent it feels caring…

St. relationship of care with model and mark making, set up…

T2 Politics of uncertainty, ambiguity…explains more about discomfort on the bench set up…advises owning the discomfort in the installation…

AF even that they are on the bench…closer…specific relationship…interesting [about the specificities of installation [You are bringing the group’s attention to the mateirlaity of the work, fundamental aspect of the Crit

St..join in…

Artist; also..

Goes back to discussion of the scratched words…

St. What is the position of the viewer… are they witnessing…[great question too

Artist explains and discussion about the vulnerability of the model…

AF: [you bring in another student] Any thoughts…? [you bring in the quiet student to speak…Neatly done, without fuss and direct…

Crit continues.

AF The grading, we are starting with satisfactory…now what evidence is there…[You introduce the strategy, and I see that it does really work as a scaffolded discussion

[Students join in the discussion. This is a great intervention and again activates the Crit as an assessment scenario, it’s a shift in gear, in energy…

[Crit continues -with additional depth  – now with the contexts of value/judgement. [However, they are still engaged, moreso

AF: 100% agree with you…[laughter, you managing the discussion of grades with a level of care and consideration

T2 …Las Vagas or South End [talking about ‘realisation’

AF: Do you think we should move it up…[Grade…

What do you feel…other decisions made…would this be something you are happy with… [you (both tutors) dialogue with the artist directly which is good in this context

St discussion on professional gallery contexts

AF [discussion on the work’s relation to sculpture

T2 give yourself time…overt critical attention…be prepared to justify…things you will learn…

St. Did you have to have a conversation about trigger warnings about this..? [Good and direct question back in crit mode, so fairly seamless…after grade discussion which is v. positive outcome in terms of your question as to how this works…i.e. leads to further engagement

Discussion on this as a group, around T2 ‘safe’ …longer discussion at another level, evaluative…

St. very vocal…

AF Interesting what you’re saying, the work holds itself…[Or the model, the way she has a hand on her own shoulder

T2 …

AF …how much you can get from the person filming…

[The discussion naturally concludes and you bring it to an end with time and schedule comments, this is good tutor management, as we move to the new space

2^nd Student in new block

AF Shall we have a look first….

AF You initiate the questions and engagement…

T2 [signals an interest in one of the four works [Personally, I feel this is a “mistake”, when. A tutor expresses a strong personal preference early on in a Crit, it derails the process of the open criticality and questioning, mainly because the person has more power than others i.e. their opinion “matters”

AF Why this one and not this one…[You tackle this as best you can

T2 Actions and the body…

[At this point the crit continues in the same or similar manner in terms of process but I’m afraid the Crit process feels now, as to have an unworkable bias, or object, in the way of an open and exploratory discussion.

[Artist talks more about her process [quietly

AF you explore the making…[you also seem to me to try and retrieve a few themes

T2 printing press?

Artist…charcoal

AF you press…drawing, [trying to work out the method and its uniqueness

AF It feels like its quite important…this is so much about the body as well…[you bringing in the materiality of the process as also embodied, wonderful interventions in very difficult circumstances showing your great skill and commitment to equality in the process and treating students with equity

[My judgement here is perhaps swayed by my feelings about T2’s approach]

[Discussion continues…about the installation of additional information…

T2…on process, etching, etc.direction..

AF There’s something quite amazing about looking at an object and you have no idea…this is not a drawing…not an etching….not water based.…its very rare…I don’t know how this is made…[This is a very positive and affirmative approach, that works very well, and is also ‘true’ to the work in my opinion

T2 you’ve got a chance to figure it out..

AF Something that is not legible….

T2 sometimes…sometimes…as artists we can lack confidence…”need to step out, good and bold” [misreading body language and NVC, I’m not sure T2’s comments are not a little biased – is there another message her to the student, a type of frustration that she wants her to be more confident in terms of her speaking (in normative judgement)

[My sense is that this work is pushing T2’s boundaries…

T2 [Says a lot of things, quite complex vocabulary]. “can you tolerate my swell of narrative”…”My question comes back to you” .”What was your intention…” [problem inherent in western modalitiy of tutor-student relationship, I am not happy with how this is going!

Artist : silence [long

AF…You started to tell us at the beginning about your intention…about books…[Encouraging and scaffolding, brilliant work I must say, you try and rescue the situation and something of the student’s ‘face’, which is an important concept in East Asian culture.

Artist starts talking about her ideas…[You also get a very positive response which is articulate and shows that your ‘respect’ has worked…

T2…[adds in more “you have this platform” [I might say good cop/bad cop also sometimes happens in 2 tutor crits…

AF: when I make work…people know this…are you comfortable…for people that know this technique…[You try and structure a relational discussion

AF:…this is amazing…black artists create work…and this create transparency….lots of people look through…and they make that choice…[You structure a brilliant intervention around what is perceivable given cultural difference…* I’d like to ask you for this reference! *

“maybe that’s just something for you to think about…” [talking directly to artist

It’s about choice…

Artist: she responds to you and elaborates….

AF: clues…subjectivity…ambiguity…is that more of the direction you…[You are working well, and working quite hard to build communication bridges…

T2…what did you want [problem here is underlined by cultural differences between the ‘you’ ‘I’ and the ‘work’ there is a westernisation in the discourse of T2, i.e. it is very individualistic in its language/assumptions: “does it do what you wanted it to do…” “What do I understand…” “ This isn’t critical just inquiry, I want to understand more…” [My sense is she is really struggling with the work herself…evidenced in the air time not being fully distributed amongst the group of students in the Crit, not student centred…and now having to justify her own position of preference for one particular of the four objects…”not about liking the work…”[!] Having to backtack.

Artist cannot respond to her.

Discussion continues…

AF…interesting…about the……there is. Technique, a choice…its not an accident…[You talk positively about the work’s evident qualities in manufacture

Artist speaks a bit more…

T2 Thank you, that is really…[Appreciative…a kind of resolution occurs between T2 and the Artist, a huge relief, and wekll rescued by T2

T2 Layers, process meaning…[She may well have had some very valid points, but perhaps ‘jumped the gun’, in stating them so soon in the Crit

AF Sometimes things …so interesting…perspective here…not just flat…you go to the work to explore in more detail and speak it out loud…[Great Crit technique of non judgemental description – brilliantly done

… AF…you want to do this…? The grading…[You address this directly to the Artist first, which is a very ethical decision in the circumstances, given her social standing and risk of losing face again

“So, we start with a D satisfactory…….a …strong decision… so go to a C

“The richness of the concepts behind it

[Students…now start to really articulate some valuable qualities of the work] [This again to me, equivalent to a moment in the first tutorial, where the Crit is ‘activated’ by the students. I feel quite emotional. They suddenly now, on your intervention to address the Grade start to vocalise more nuanced thoughts and feelings about the work, your strategy unlocks the creative thinking of the group. And perhaps their sense of equality.

“I feel there are other thing that need to be considered….[A Student starts with this amazing line…

AF …you clarify

“I do think that there is something…[and this one

“Not being afraid…existing in the lightness of the space

“Feel its very fragile…the wall is empty at the same time…printed on paper obviously…

“Weight and weightlessness

…[referring back to the mounting and install discussion earlier…

“I’m curious that….feel very [etc. excellently done by the Students!

AF So, it’s a B?

Few more comments…

AF you agree…? [with the artist, wonderfully sensitive…and excellent conclusion to the drama of the Crit. This was a tremendous recouperation of educational value. Excellently done.

Summary and Key Points

That was quite an emotional experience for me to observe how you implemented the Crit and its culture, as well as its values, so beautifully and brilliantly. I am very impressed. There were some tricky moments in the second half that you steered around, and navigated with great skill. I was holding my breath!

Values, keeping student esteem and the Artist’s well being in mind. This was accomplished in both cases, very differently.

Attention to the materiality of the work, attended to throughout.

Try looking at the Crit literature, Orr and Shreeve on Art School Evaluation and their bibliography for starters to articulate your efforts in shared terms, which you may know already.

I have commented on issues throughout in square brackets, are there any issues you see arising from these comments.

You might want to address concepts/practices such as groupwork and group dynamics, the notion of ‘face’ and types of shame/esteem in E. Asian culture, centring the “work” not the “individual”; the role of ambiguity, the way we can speak about violence in a neutral way (which again you managed to do), the positive use of self and peer evaluation (I will share an article for reference, and its bibliography).

Your role – great facilitation skills. The use of positivity and positive affirming words and tones (you signal enthusiasm very clearly).

Tips for development; not sure I have any immediate suggestions apart from the ones on Crit and authentic assessment.

If you wanted to review tutor relations, and discuss the Crit format with T2, it may or may not be appropriate, nor easy, that might be something… Opening a discussion on E Asian student crit participation…who knows, may lead to an interesting discussion.

For dramatic value, this was a wonderful experience to witness! and I’m deeply grateful and appreciative for the support, encouragement and insights you give to your students – thank you and very well done.

Part Three

Observee to reflect on the observer’s comments and describe how they will act on the feedback exchanged:

Tim’s feedback was such an emotional and rewarding experience to read. I didn’t realize how stressful it would feel to have someone observing me in a crit. Having a much more senior member of staff joining the crit at the last minute was quite a challenge in that sense because it’s different to try to be purposefully as much invisible as possible as a learning infrastructure when someone next to you is invested in performing authority.  

As I think I’ve mentioned before, I have a lot of issues with art-school crits and it’s not something I feel very confident about. I’ve had horrible experiences in crits during my own education and I know many artists who had the same experiences. When I did my PGDip and BA at Chelsea there was a clear distinction between a certain type of British white male middle class student that was rewarded for “generously solving” other student’s work by pointing out of their failures, and all the other students who inhabited minoritized intersectional identities. Now that I’m older, I’ve realized how unhelpful that dynamic was to everyone in the room and I really try to create a different type of learning environment while also being aware that it might not look like I’m performing knowledge or authority in a way that reassure students and other members of staff that learning is happening.

I’ll look at all the references and try to use this experience as a push to become more confident in my take on the crit and maybe I’ll find a way to start looking forward to them.

My reference about invisibility and transparency is from the third chapter of Tina Post’s Deadpan Aesthetics, The Opacity Gradient. It’s an incredible book on Black Art aesthetics.

https://libsearch.arts.ac.uk/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?biblionumber=1541837&query_desc=kw%2Cwrdl%3A%20tina%20post

I also just found an amazing book on the role of tactility and reproduction methods in Chinese art that I think will help that student articulate and contextualize their work: Networks of Touch: A tactile history of Chinese Art, 1790-1840 by Michael J. Hatch. https://newbooksnetwork.com/networks-of-touch To me, this is one of the most enjoyable aspects of these crits, I get to work with students I don’t know and that means we can push each other outside of the comfortable boundaries of our knowledge. There is something incredibly enjoyable about encountering work that is beyond the current limits of your capacity to think and understand work. I hope the students experience these crits as a nurturing of that enjoyment. That they don’t need to “solve” things or make them into art that they can understand and then judge, but that together was get used to the discomfort, pleasure and potentials of not-knowing.

Record of Observation or Review of Teaching Practice  

 

Session/artefact to be observed/reviewed: group crit with MAIVM students – 12^th March

Size of student group: 8

Observer:  Andrea Machicao Francke

Observee: Emily Woolley

 

Note: This record is solely for exchanging developmental feedback between colleagues. Its reflective aspect informs PgCert and Fellowship assessment, but it is not an official evaluation of teaching and is not intended for other internal or legal applications such as probation or disciplinary action.

Part One
Observee to complete in brief and send to observer prior to the observation or review:

What is the context of this session/artefact within the curriculum?

A crit with 8 MA Illustration and Visual Media (IVM) students and one member of staff (me).

This crit will focus on work they have done for their Collaborative Unit (see appendix for unit info). The unit asks them to work collaboratively in groups in response to one of three set themes. Last week (w/c 3^rd March) they had a pop-up show where they exhibited their outcomes for the unit.

How long have you been working with this group and in what capacity?

I am an HPL responsible for delivering workshops, tutorials and group crits. I have been working with this cohort since they joined the course in September 2024. Some of the students in this crit group are also in my tutee group meaning that I know them well, others I have had less contact with.

What are the intended or expected learning outcomes?

My line manager hasn’t given me firm guidelines for this crit; therefore, I can choose the intention.

As all the feedback sessions for this unit have been done in groups, I am hoping to use this crit to give students a chance to reflect on (through the process of sharing work) their individual experience of the unit and working collaboratively, specifically whether it has felt useful (or not!) and how they might take learning from it forwards through their personal practice (or not!).

What are the anticipated outputs (anything students will make/do)?

Students are expected to show current work (including but not limited to research, experiments or tests, material samples, maquettes, storyboards, sketchbooks etc., as well as more resolved outputs). As they have recently had a pop-up show it is likely that most will show final works or documentation from the exhibition.

If they are working physically/three-dimensionally they should present the material work. If they are showing research or digital work/moving image, then this can be presented digitally. They can also share documentation from the exhibition that they did as part of the unit.

Are there potential difficulties or specific areas of concern?

I find crits difficult for many reasons (I won’t rant here) and this one particularly so because it is the first time in the unit that students are being asked to centre their individual experience of the collaboration. I imagine that asking them to shift their perspective in this way will bring challenges.

Additionally, students are often quick to make judgments in crits about others’ work based on their interpretation of it. To help them move beyond this and sharpen their visual analysis skills, I encourage them to focus on what they can see (or if they insist on interpretation then to root it in the work in some way). The success of this approach depends on the willingness and maturity of the group. As this is my first crit with this cohort it is difficult to predict. 

How will students be informed of the observation/review?

I have emailed the students to let them know about the observation and given them the option of opting out if they feel uncomfortable about being part of the review. I will also check in with them verbally on the day.

What would you particularly like feedback on?

For this crit I will trial a new approach and use Rosenberg’s practice of ‘observation without evaluating’ (text linked in appendix) as my framework. This intention is also outlined in my Case Study 1 (blog link in appendix).

My hope is that, within an art and design crit, promoting observing without evaluating could help students to give feedback about what they can see, rather than their interpretation of a work. Instead of relating through the dichotomy of understanding or not understanding, they would instead focus on what is visible; in other words, the formal elements of a work. This would go some way to mitigating the second challenge outlined above.

If you’re able to give feedback on this approach and its strengths/areas to improve I would be very grateful!

How will feedback be exchanged?

I am available in person and via email to discuss and exchange feedback.

Part Two

Observer to note down observations, suggestions and questions:

Points to pay attention:

Use of non-violent communication framework of observing, not evaluating.

First time presenting these works that were produced as a group individually.

Set-up

Before the session Emily sent out emails with the details of the session, an introduction of the crit as a pedagogical format,  as well as suggestions on how students could use it. This was cohesive with a transparent pedagogical approach that permeated the whole session.

Emily arrived early and was very welcoming and warm to students as they came in. She also talked a bit informally about the studio and how to set it up to best accommodating the group opening windows and helping organise collectively cleaning the space together a bit, for example. She set up a neutral and welcoming space for everyone to gather and talk together before going to the spaces the individual students had set-up. There was a mix of students presenting, students just joining the crits as guests, and students using the studio. Emily was very welcoming to all of them. She started the session by inviting students to join her at the main table when they felt ready. The students were very warm towards her and vocalised that they had missed her in some of their last sessions. I’m assuming those were the sessions she missed because of her sick leave. The main example was a conversation about missing her because the work related to gendered or feminist perspectives, but Emily highlighted how this was maybe useful because it forced them to engage with the discomfort and potential confrontation with audiences that come from a different perspective. The maybe there was reflective of a pattern to how Emily was always very careful in avoiding an authoritative position and constantly articulate herself through doubt and uncertainty, opening up discussion instead of modelling judgment.

During the session.

Emily started on time but made it clear that late students would be welcomed in the group.

She asked everyone to disconnect from their screen unless using translation software or taking notes. It was clear that access issues are at the centre of her pedagogical practice, and she puts a lot of care in holding that space.

She introduced how the crit would function and was very transparent about the tension of the crit in relation to their recent group/individual experience. She framed the crit as an opportunity to talk not about the collaboration, which had been exhaustively reflected on, but how it supported them in their individual practices. She suggested a focus on one of their outputs because the collaborations were quite expansive and she wanted the conversations to have a grounding. She also made it clear that all of these were suggestions, and each student could define their own framework. She had asked students in the email to prepare a question for the group beforehand.

There was a 10min break for the students to reflect on their focus, framework, question and spend time with the outputs to prepare. Students took this time as an opportunity to set out their work and made some notes.

Emily used that time to also help clarify questions and support a student that arrived a bit late. This was a very gentle and discreet way to support students without calling attention to it.

Student 1

Emily guided the students in moving to the table with the work from the first student presenting.  She set the framework to the crit, checking with the student, explained what observing without evaluating or interpreting would look like and suggested students to look at the selected object for a couple minutes.

Another student arrived during observation time. Emily softly by firmly highlighted the importance for being on time for group crits.

She encouraged students to move and use their bodies as part of the observing experience in relation an art object which was taken on and students moved around the table. It was clear that she made them aware of their bodies and their point of view in space.

Student 1 started by giving a bit of context to the work in relation to their group project on nostalgia and objects that have lost their functions in contemporary India in relation to her childhood. The student framed their crit question about how the materials and textures communicate nostalgia or failed to.

Emily was very attentive to students’ comments and gently pushed them to reflect on their choices of words and interpretations. She was very gentle and always phrased her questions and comments as point of curiosity for her, not a judgement on the word choices. She asked students to also bring in their knowledge from seeing the works in the exhibition space, before the student’s contextualisation.

Emily made sure the conversations were collective and repeatedly invited people to join the discussion whenever students’ attention showed signed of dispersing into individual conversations. There was some building work that was quite loud and again, Emily was quite effective in quickly addressing it and bringing  the energy of the group back to the crit.

Emily used active listening and mirrored students’ articulations back to them, constantly checking if her rearticulation was precise and used it to enable a more in-depth reflection. She also was very transparent about what the crit was doing in pedagogical terms at different times, highlighting the group learnings as they were developing. She made sure to always referred back to the objects/images in the table and highlighted how what “what was visible” changed as the conversation proceeded.

The student was very joyful about some of the things they themselves “discovered “through the session. They also took opportunity to articulate how they worked as part of the group and what they understood about their individual practices as a result. Other students joined in to articulate how they addressed cohesion or difference in their groups. They mentioned the impact of working together in the same studio and Emily helped them articulate it in terms of understanding studio practice as a form of learning and working. They highlighted how it helped collaborations work in a more immediate, nurturing and process-based form. Emily focused on helping the student articulate how they would use the experience to move their work forward.

Student 2

As the group moved to the different setting, Emily reminded the students to take a few minutes to look and, in this case, hold and touch the objects, after asking the student if it was ok. The student started by flagging how all the pieces were collaborative in this case. She also highlighted different reactions to the works in the exhibition and how they were processing them. Emily was very attentive to student reactions and individual comments and used them to gently calling them into the discussion. Again, Emily repeated the active listening tactic of rearticulating and checking in, while at the same time highlighting points that could be interesting to explore forward.

 A lot of the students seemed quite shy and hadn’t really participated in the discussions by this point, so Emily came out with some very direct descriptive questions that would require short answers which lowered the barriers to warm into joining the discussions. There were a few quite quiet students that seem to find it hard to participate in the discussion, probably an issue amplified by language barriers. Emily used her previous knowledge of the students to suggest to quieter students how their experience would help them to contribute to the discussion.  She also kept connecting the current student with questions raised in the student 1discussion.

Emily was quite interested in getting students to articulate how different moments in their practice affected their work and always brought their attention to the materiality, the material choices, and the methodologies used in the work.

Student 2 had a very clear question: they enjoyed working with materials but it challenged her previous experience of focusing on storytelling as a comic artist, they wanted advice to how to move forward.

From the discussion it emerged how students felt they had been pressured in their previous educational experiences to have a concept and then develop it, while process-led research felt a more productive, natural and joyful way to lead their practices. Emily brought in her own experience at Goldsmiths of a concept-led education colling with her process-based practice and used that to exemplify how there are many different ways to structure one’s practice.

After:

The active listening / mirroring technique functioned quite effectively in helping the students to articulate themselves in a more sophisticated manner as well as to developing their attention and visual/material reading skills. Emily was very careful about modelling uncertainty and framing her questions or readings as tentative to be disagreed on, critique or built upon by the students. She used the active listening  to gently challenge the assumptions under which certain positions that students might have been just repeating. There was an interesting circular/spiral structure to each of the discussions that never assumed something was solved or fully understood but took every new development as a chance to reassess something that has already been discussed. It reminded me of Lisa Baraitser’s work on Enduring or Unbecoming time, as an alternative to developmental time. I had never thought about it in relation to pedagogical time but it reinforce the idea of teaching as a nurturing and caring space, instead of an individualising and predetermined space.

Emliy was also very attentive to opening possibilities instead of closing down on judgments, that’s why the spiral as a structure for the crits came to mind. The group seemed quite wary of conceptualising or theorising the work or their decision-making processes, but the spiral form made those emerged naturally from the objects grounding the crits.  

Emily was very attentive to the affects in the room and made sure that both sessions ended up in a high, with students feeling confident and invested in what was coming next. She was also very attentive to the embodied experience, suggesting moving and touching. She kept checking for energy levels and if students needed to sit down.

It’s hard for me to know how the observing vs. evaluating worked without having seen how this group has engaged with previous crits. I thought there was a lot of grounded evolution going on so my suspicion is that maybe what that method enabled was the spiral form and the collective holding of uncertainty.

Part Three

Andrea’s feedback is very helpful. Her framing of the “spiral model” and its relationship to “modelling doubt” (Mattern, 2024) is particularly generative. Key points for reflection are:

Using observing without evaluating and OBL (highlighted in yellow): The “observation without evaluating” (Rosenberg, 2005, pp. 25-35) approach enabled students to strengthen their visual analysis and locate evaluations in the work. Starting by explaining the approach helped, as did encouraging tactile engagement. For example, recommending students “move and use their bodies” and that they “hold and touch the objects”. This aligns with OBL, which promotes multi-sensorial learning. Andrea’s comment that students were “very joyful about some of the things they themselves “discovered” through the session” affirms they took agency over their learning. Joy and discovery are key facets of OBL, as Hardie (2015, p. 4) remarks “the ‘wow’ of an item can create rich, important and fun learning”.

It’s important to note that this approach did have to be continuously reinforced by referring  “back to the objects/images” to highlight “how “what was visible” changed as the conversation proceeded”. Using this crit model consistently will help students learn to do this without prompting.

Navigating diverse student needs (highlighted in green): Andrea’s feedback has highlighted ways that I do this. I will continue to use these methods.

Supporting students to contribute verbally:

• “Emily came out with some very direct descriptive questions that would require short answers which lowered the barriers to warm into joining the discussions.”
• “Emily used her previous knowledge of the students to suggest to quieter students how their experience would help them to contribute to the discussion.”

Accommodating diverse physical needs:

• “She kept checking for energy levels and if students needed to sit down.”

Holding space for individual needs within the group dynamic:

• “There was a 10min break for the students to reflect . . Emily used that time to also help clarify questions and support a student that arrived a bit late. This was a very gentle and discreet way to support students without calling attention to it.”

Facilitating joy:

• “Emily was very attentive to the affects in the room and made sure that both sessions ended up in a high, with students feeling confident and invested”

The spiral crit and modelling uncertainty (highlighted in purple): Andrea has dubbed this crit model a “spiral” because there was a “circular/spiral structure to each of the discussions that never assumed something was solved or fully understood but took every new development as a chance to reassess something that has already been discussed”. This approach is informed by my Socratic teaching method (discussed in my microteaching review) and Rosenberg’s “observation without evaluating” (Rosenburg, 2005, pp. 25-35) (discussed in Case Study 1). As Andrea notes, what the latter has enabled is a “spiral form and the collective holding of uncertainty”. Benefits include “opening possibilities instead of closing down on judgments’ and helping students ‘conceptualising or theorising the work or their decision-making processes”.

To unpick this further and explore possible applications Andrea and I are talking via WhatsApp (screen shots attached with permission) and plan to meet soon. She has also kindly shared literature (linked in her feedback) with me.

I want to highlight the cumulative learning this evaluation has enabled by embedding and extending ideas from my microteaching and case studies (1 & 2), as well as course texts.

References:

Hardie, K. (2015) Innovative pedagogies series: Wow: The power of objects in object-based learning and teaching, Higher Education Academy. Available at: https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets.creode.advancehe-document-manager/documents/hea/private/kirsten_hardie_final_1568037367.pdf (Accessed: 10^th March 2025)

Mattern, S. (2024) ‘Modeling doubt: a speculative syllabus’ in Journal of Visual Culture, Vol 22/Issue 2 (2024), Available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14704129231184553 (Accessed 13^th March 2025).

Rosenberg, M.B. (2005) ‘Observing without evaluating’, in Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. 2nd ed. Encinitas, CA: PuddleDancer Press, pp. 25-35

Appendix:

Information about the Collaborative Unit:

Collaborative Unit assignment brief

Collaborative Unit briefing slides

Observation without Evaluating:

Rosenberg’s text can be found here

My Base Study 1 blog post is here

Students have been sent this email ahead of time:

Hi everyone,

I hope you’re well.

First of all – congratulations on the pop-up show! It was a really dynamic exhibition that showcased your hard work and innovative approach to collaborative practice. Well done!

I’m emailing with some information ahead of this week’s crit.

The crit will take place in T1001 from 2 – 5 pm on Wednesday 12^th March.

What is a crit?

A crit is a session where you share work (which could include research, experiments or tests, material samples, maquettes, storyboards, sketchbooks etc., as well as more resolved outputs) with a group of peers and staff. The group then offers you conversation, feedback and insights.

The word ‘crit’ is short for ‘critique’ which means to evaluate something in a detailed and analytical way. During a crit the aim is not to be unduly critical but to reflect on and discuss how and why someone is doing/exploring/making something and what this means. To critique is to be compassionate, interrogative and empathetic and to both actively listen and contribute to the group dynamic.

What will we do in our crit on Wednesday 12^th March?

On Wednesday you will be asked to present something from your collaborative project. During the Collaborative Unit most feedback sessions were done in groups, this is an opportunity for you to share and reflect on your role within and experience of the collaboration and how it feeds into and informs your personal practice – or how it doesn’t!

If you are working materially, try and bring the physical thing. You could also consider sharing documentation of your work installed in the recent pop-up show.

You will each have around 20 minutes to show your work and participate in a discussion about it. To guide this discussion please prepare two questions for the group. This will help ensure that the conversation is useful to you.

Also! I am currently doing a teaching qualification called a PgCert. As part of this qualification another teacher has to observe me working so that they can offer me feedback on my teaching style and methods. On Wednesday, a teacher called Andrea will observe me facilitating the crit. She will not participate in the discussion, she will only observe. Please note that she is not observing you, she is only observing me.

If you are comfortable with her being there it will be very helpful for me. If you are not comfortable with this please let me know by emailing me directly.

Let me know if you have any questions and I look forward to seeing you all this Wednesday!

Emily 

Record of Observation or Review of Teaching Practice      

 

Session/artefact to be observed/reviewed: AV Cultures Session – 20^th of Feb

Size of student group: it varies around 15 to 4

Observer:  Emily Woolley

Observee: Andrea Francke

 

Note: This record is solely for exchanging developmental feedback between colleagues. Its reflective aspect informs PgCert and Fellowship assessment, but it is not an official evaluation of teaching and is not intended for other internal or legal applications such as probation or disciplinary action.

Part One
Observee to complete in brief and send to observer prior to the observation or review:

What is the context of this session/artefact within the curriculum?

This is an optional drop-in session open to all students from BAFA, PGDep and MAFA at Chelsea. It is mainly attended by Year 1 and Year 3 students. I work on Year 3 so I know most of the Year 3 students that come.

How long have you been working with this group and in what capacity?

I’ve only started running AV Cultures since October 2024. I’ve only run the sessions in alternate weeks. I coordinate the sessions together with Elizabeth Peebles, Y3 leader.

What are the intended or expected learning outcomes?

There are two main forms of engagements. For the students watching the films, the aim is to expand their knowledge of historical and contemporary art and film, engage critical with the content, feel more comfortable in discussions with other students, develop strategies to analyze from their practice and learn about film and video techniques and language.

Ideally this builds their confidence and all of them program at least one session over their time at Chelsea. Students that present learn to develop curatorial frameworks and public programme planning, start to develop their own facilitation techniques, practice public speaking, engage with self-led research around a subject of their chosen, connect with peers over similar interests, practice their own film skills (some students prepare edits and super cuts for their sessions, for example).

What are the anticipated outputs (anything students will make/do)?

Students can be involved in programming and running a session, in which case I would support them in developing it and facilitate it as needed. Other times. Depending on their schedule, no one volunteers, and I program and run the session myself. I only know that a few days before the session.

Students are expected to come and watch the films and then we have an open discussion. We also use this as an opportunity to help support students who might want to host a session as a response.

Are there potential difficulties or specific areas of concern?

Running it as a team means there are moments of disconnection between sessions, and we have to treat them as isolated events. I’m not sure if we miss students through that process. It can also be hard to cross the gap between a lot of the film knowledge students bring with them (most of them mention Hollywood films when we ask what they would like to programme) and the ambition of AV Cultures which is to introduce them to more challenging and expansive forms of filmmaking. It can be quite hard to get them to publicly and critically engage with the content, especially since they rarely know everyone in the room.

How will students be informed of the observation/review?

We occasionally have guests joining for screenings, either alumni or invited artists. Because the course is so large (over 600 students could come to the session) they are used to there always being new people. I will introduce Emily at the start of the session as I do other guests.

What would you particularly like feedback on?

I worry between how much information I give the students as I facilitate it so that it is not a lecture on that film or artist, but at the same time is enough to give them context and keep the discussion going. I also always question how much to control or share my own interpretations and how much it helps make visible the potential variety of readings from different perspectives or it imposes my own reading. I would like to ensure there is disagreement in the room.

How will feedback be exchanged?

I have to leave soon after the session because I’ll be running assessment sessions very early next morning so maybe Emily and I could meet for a coffee afterwards and discuss both our observations at once?

Part Two

Observer to note down observations, suggestions and questions:

Set up:

• Active and empathetic facilitation. Supporting Jake by asking how he wants/needs the room and tech set up. Makes helpful suggestions, moves chairs and tables. Careful to maintain Jake’s agency and decision-making at all times.
• When other students entered the room, Andrea ensures they feel welcome. Eye contact/warm body language, making introductions as needed and asking thoughtful questions about their learning experiences that day.

During:

• Sits close to front (supportive not domineering) and actively engages/listens throughout. An excellent benchmark/guide for students.
• Jake (student presenting) invites audience to reflect on moshing – is it charming? Is it stupid? – when students are responding, Andrea turns to face them. Body language indicates and reinforces her interest and support. Nods in agreement/encouragement in places.
• Students are keen to respond to the prompt/question. Several make thoughtful contributions. Andrea does not respond herself and allows student to lead discussion. Flagging this because of question outlined above about implications of controlling and sharing interpretations as a teacher.
• Reciprocal learning dynamic securely established.
• During his presentation Jake mentions a discussion with Andrea where she helped guide him through his ‘angst’ about being a hardcore punk fan in 2025 feeling as though he has missed out on pivotal gigs from the 80s and 90s. Indicative of sustained and meaningful teaching.

After:

• Andrea encourages Jake to share his references on the Padlet (Moodle?) to support long-term student learning
• Adjusts lighting post-presentation and makes students aware that the environment is changing.
• Some students chose to leave after the talk had concluded and before the follow up discussion. Andrea rearticulates invitation to stay but did not enforce attendance.
• Invites everyone to sit around a single table to enable a more intimate follow-up conversation. Expresses interest and excitement in what Jake has shared and states she has many questions.
• Andrea initiates follow-up discussion with a point about gatekeeping. She knows the interests of the students in the room and refers to them if/when she thinks they may want to contribute/contend a point.
• Having kickstarted the conversation she slips back into active listening. Sustained eye contact and smiles and nods regularly – helps to establish mutuality and commonality amongst participants and ensures that different perspectives/readings are heard.
• When responding to student observations, Andrea affirms their contribution before sharing her own with phrases like ‘I was thinking about that as well . . .’
• Andrea’s contributions are rooted in her personal experiences, this helps to level her input and establishes her as one of the voices in the room.
• Concludes by making students aware of upcoming professional futures talk and tutorials – links it to Jake’s talk. Establishes continuity and opportunity for cumulative learning.
• Stays afterwards to talk with students and answer questions.

Note: as an external observer I couldn’t distinguish between the Y1, Y3 and MA students. The group gelled well, and diverse voices/contributions were encouraged. AV cultures is a great example of student-less cross-cohort learning. Big fan!

Part Three

Observee to reflect on the observer’s comments and describe how they will act on the feedback exchanged:

Emily was incredibly generous with her attention.

I was concerned about how central it was for me to take a background role and how invisible it would potentially make me. These sessions are about teaching as infrastructure. My role is just to enable things to happen and hold the room for students to become the teachers themselves.

This was an especially successful session. It is not representative of the whole series. Jake is an excellent student, and he put an incredible amount of work (and joy) in preparing. Most AV culture sessions have a lot less structure, a student shows just one or two clips, and I have to prepare a lot more research to hold the discussions. Some weeks we don’t have any volunteers, so I prepare a presentation myself.

I think the main way to take this forward feedback is for me to put more work now in developing strategies to get more students to host sessions.

Unstable Concepts – A Cross-Year Lecture Strand Experiment

Teaching Context

I’m a 0.8 Senior Lecturer on Y3 of the BAFA course at Chelsea College of Arts. I’m a Tutor Group Leader to around 30 students and offer general support to our Y3 160+ students. I co-run Year Meetings, deliver lectures, AV cultures, Studio Support, and co-lead our units. This case study focuses on one strand of the cross-year lectures, an optional series of four strands for all students (Y1, Y2, Y3).

Evaluation of the Issues

Every year, we run four cross-year lecture strands over four weeks. It is a rare opportunity to program teaching across the cohorts. They attempt to hold and develop students’ interests more in-depth by allowing them to choose a strand and encouraging them to foster a sustained engagement with the theme/method/question throughout the sessions. (Hughes, 2014)

Attendance issues in our lecture programmes have accelerated since Covid-19. Numbers tend to plunge after the February Activities Week break. Over 500 students in the course could choose among the lecture strands, but in the previous year, for example, the strand run by Year 3 started with around 40 students and finished with 4. We’ve decided to use this series to take pedagogical risks and test new models for our usual lectures.

Implications and Specific Actions

Unstable Concepts is a response to the lack of interest and resistance students seem to have towards theory. (Johnston, 2025) Most students seem to think that theory is not for them or can’t see its “usefulness”.(Tompkins, 2016) Our current students resist any idea of preparing by reading/watching/listening materials, so I’m testing a format that combines the preparation with the discussion. The guest speakers introduce theories/concepts they have been developing for about 20 minutes. Afterwards, I’ll lead a conversational/open discussion with students and the guest. The whole session lasts an hour and a half.

The guest speakers were theorists and BA lecturers. They engaged closely with lived experience and ethnography to allow students’ afraid’ of theory to realise they could speak from where they are. Since students’ levels vary across years and cohorts, the more advanced students could help model a more active and engaged relation to theory. I meant to create an environment where we learn to take intellectual risks and model productive and unproductive misunderstandings.

Next Steps

The students were very engaged in the discussions across cohorts, and although some tensions appeared, we managed to disentangle them as a group during the different sessions. We just finished the third session and retained a cohort of roughly 40 students per session across years, above the 32 initially signed up. Some of the learnings we aim to take forward for the next academic year  are:

The short introduction followed by a discussion model: Students feedbacked that they prefer to follow up with the texts after the sessions have piqued their interest and given them an entry point.

A generational shift on mediated experiences: Our first session was in the lecture theatre, but the speaker joined online. I had a microphone to give students for questions. This was an incredibly active discussion.

A discussion disguised as a lecture: Joining the discussion with the speaker has meant that we sometimes disagree, or I can be called in from a misunderstanding. Modelling disagreement and misunderstandings as productive and enjoyable seems to have helped the engagement. (Mattern, 2023) No session ended before students ran out of questions.

Bibliography

Hughes, D. (2014) ‘Dwelling as an approach to creative pedagogy’, Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education, 13(1), pp. 73–85. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1386/adch.13.1.73_1.

Johnston, M. (no date) ‘Wilton S. Wright, “Rewriting Resistance to Social Justice Pedagogies” (Lexington Books, 2024)’. Available at: https://newbooksnetwork.com/rewriting-resistance-to-social-justice-pedagogies (Accessed: 10 February 2025).

Mattern, S. (2023) ‘Modeling doubt: a speculative syllabus’, Journal of Visual Culture, 22(2), pp. 125–145. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/14704129231184553.

Tompkins, K.W. (2016) ‘We Aren’t Here to Learn What We Already Know’, Avidly, 13 September. Available at: https://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/2016/09/13/we-arent-here-to-learn-what-we-know-we-already-know/ (Accessed: 3 February 2020).

On Pedagogia de La Ternura

(roughly translated as Pedagogy of Tenderness/Care/Affection)

This week, I was talking with one of my PG Cert colleagues about how the British teaching system seems to be focused on teachers’ boundaries, on not getting too invested, on signposting and not getting involved. Some teachers can go home and turn their teaching off; I envy them. I used to see my hyper-investment as a failure, probably a gendered and racialised one that can be read as integral to the exploitative structures of the neoliberal university. (Järvinen and Mik-Meyer, 2024; Purdy, 2024; Mattern, n.d.) But the thing is, I love my students. I know love can be a scary and intense word in English; as if it’s a finite resource or a feeling that carries demands or expectations. But look at radical Peruvian pedagogy (as well as other Latin American and African pedagogies, or even black, brown and queer pedagogies in the Global North). You’ll find that love is central to forms of teaching that take into consideration the lived experiences of violence, oppression and trauma that are part of the everyday of many of our students and of many of us. Love, in this context, is an act of political solidarity.

I grew up in Peru during the Internal War years and then moved to Brazil when I was ten years old in 1989, just before the first democratic elections after the dictatorship ended. The radical liberation pedagogies I experienced growing up emerged in those countries as part of a realisation that to teach amid so much violence and trauma required a different type of student/teacher dynamics. In opposition to the current British obsession with the production of affects in service-based exchanges, including teaching, these pedagogies clearly distinguish between students’ needs to feel loved versus being loved.

“Yo resumiría esto quizás de esta forma. La Pedagogía de la Ternura quiere recuperar y contribuir a hacer de la relación interpersonal una relación social y una relación que tiene que ver fundamentalmente con el sentido social y político en el cual los seres humanos estamos inscritos, ¿no?

(Cussiánovich Villarán and Schmalenbach, 2015, p. 61)

I would maybe summarise it like this: Pedagogia de la Ternura wants to recover and contribute to making the interpersonal relation a social relation and a relation that is fundamentally concerned with the social and political contexts in which we are inscribed as humans. Does that make sense? [my translation]

Pedagogia de la Ternura was developed by a group of teachers between 1975 and 1990 in Peru and continues to be in use and in discussion. As Freire’s Liberation Pedagogy, it emerged from the Liberation Theology movement. It is shared and historised through praxis; oral histories, interviews with one of their main theorisers, Alejandro Cussiánovich, and the teacher’s groups that meet to talk about their practice. It is purposefully almost inaccessible in English. I asked a  Peruvian sociologist of education about it years ago, because I wanted references for books and papers to read. “You’ve become such a gringa,” she said. Pedagogy is about practice and discussions; you develop it by doing it and thinking about it collectively. It’s not something you can put on a book, sell, buy, consume and go around citing and using as branding so people in the Global North can build their academic careers. I guess we all learned from decolonisation… Pedagogia de la Ternura is focused on the human scale, on intimacy, and on the decisions you make in the specific situations in which you and your students encounter yourselves while always already being actively aware of and engaged with the social and political conditions in which we all live together.(Cussiánovich Villarán, 2020)

Bibliography

Cussiánovich Villarán, A. (2020) ‘In class, I do not face the students’. Available at: https://kulczykfoundation.org.pl/en/tenderness-and-freedom/tenderness-and-freedom/In_Class_I_Do_Not_Face_The_Students (Accessed: 13 February 2025).

Cussiánovich Villarán, A. and Schmalenbach, C. (2015) ‘La Pedagogía de la Ternura -Una lucha por la dignidad y la vida desde la acción educativa | The Pedagogy of Tenderness –A struggle for dignity and life from the educational action’, Diá-logos, 16, pp. 63–76.

Järvinen, M. and Mik-Meyer, N. (2024) ‘Giving and receiving: Gendered service work in academia’, Current Sociology, p. 00113921231224754. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/00113921231224754.

Mattern, S. (n.d.) The Limits of Refusal, Words in Space. Available at: https://wordsinspace.net/ (Accessed: 5 March 2025).

Purdy, M. (2024) ‘Closing the Gap: A Literature Review of Gender Disparities in Higher Education’, Pepperdine Journal of Communication Research, 12(1). Available at: https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/pjcr/vol12/iss1/5.