As a BAFA Y3 0.8 I co-lead AV Film Forum, a series of open discussions around film and sound screenings on Thursdays after teaching hours – 5 to 7pm – open to all Chelsea Fine Art students (BAFA/MAFA/GDFA/MACC) and guests. We have always gently pushed Y3 students to programme sessions. Still, in the last couple of years, especially after COVID, it has become rarer for students to volunteer to lead a session. When they do, most of them find it hard to plan anything beyond showing a film they like. After I joined as co-lead last year, I began helping students to find and access films to screen, but this year, a new system seems to be developing organically. Students volunteered to help me organise sessions rather than lead a session on their own. Looking at recent pedagogical research that focuses on co-programming as a form to reengage students post-covid, I’ve now offered to do one or two 1:1 sessions to help student develop their programme (find and select films/how to present clips/different ways to present/different ways to mediate discussions/etc) and offered to co-programme with them in any way they need it.(Neary et al., 2014; ‘How Do We Teach Literature When Students Won’t Read What We Assign?’, 2025)
When I started the ARP, I wanted to explore how co-programming could expand what students gain from these sessions. I was interested in co-articulating with students what skills they develop through this different mode of delivery. Potential skills mapped with the Year 3 leader were:
- public speaking skills
- research and critical skills
- ownership of their research interest, practice and critical standpoint
- mediation skills (introduction to pedagogical methods)
- confidence to lead programming (our Y3 lectures on the 3rd term are potentially all programmed by students but in the last couple of years, we only had one or two students offering to programme them)
- professional development
- collaborative working skills
Instead, through the ARP, I found was that although students found the co-programming sessions useful, what stops them from engaging in programming extracurricular sessions is their excessive workload – our number of assessments keeps increasing and will increase more next year when we start our revalidated curriculum with an extra unit imposed by UAL, along with their increased part-time work and caring obligations. This disproportionally impacts students from working-class backgrounds and should be taken in consideration in terms of equity of access to the course resources.