The Public Disorientation Unit

GLADHE The Group of Learning in Art and Design Conference. April 2021

This article was orignally a paper and keynote presentation for The Group of Learning in Art and Design Conference. GLADHE. UK. Friday 23 April 2021.

For the event I presented new approaches to learning that my team developed in response to the crisis and the education sectors massive shift into online teaching. I also shared some of the opportunities that were realised by students and staff through engaging with this change.

These past 12 months it has been impossible not to see the political, social and economic issues that are affecting and shaping the way our students learn and forge their own visual identity, and whilst it has been particularly challenging here in Brazil, This is exactly when we need to be encouraging learners the most about the potential in the midst of disorientation, all of whom will be entering into a very uncertain future.

Historically crises within society have always been followed by the resilience of creative expression, and although these periods are terribly painful, they are at the same time fertile for art, creativity and education, as people look towards alternative ways to manifest, protest, and stand up against injustice. Social transformation is one of the positive consequences that can manifest out of these moments of public disorientation, as we learn to adjust to new dynamics and change. And it is through art and education that we are provided a chance at holding on to social transformation and bringing it more closely to our lives.

The central purpose of this discussion is to demonstrate that social transformation within our departments is achievable, and necessary, and that it can exist in different forms and within different contexts. And in order for it to do so, we must re-examine our understanding of value measurement. How it is acknowledged, individually within our departments, institutionally within our schools and globally within the sector.

I believe we are supporting the values of social transformation within our institutes. However, even though higher education has always been understood as a process that can help transform society, it has also been known to reflect and reproduce inequalities rather than transform them.

Within the creative sector there are many accounts of inspiring individuals that come from very little and that move on to gain international acceptance, equality and security within their lives and through the opportunities they receive they make their cases heard, decolonising the creative industries, addressing the lack of diversity within arts and culture, championing inclusivity. Many of their accounts demonstrate how tough it is to make it through adversity and how the fact remains, that most educational and employment outcomes continue to be strongly in favour of social privilege.

There is a danger to this single story. If social privilege is mistaken for academic ability, and institutional prestige is mistaken for educational quality it could create a situation in which nothing important actually happens at university.

There are of course many students who gain a great deal from their time at university and are transformed by their valuable learning experiences and we are doing a good job and not completely failing our students, however part of my argument is that our sector would benefit from a reexamination of the role of university education rather than becoming fixated by the economic value of a degree.

Due to the past 12 months many of our programs are now providing a very different learning experience and although design education traditionally supports practice that is physical and digital in format we have adapted surprisingly well. One of the exciting by-products of our sectors shift into online learning was the discussions and the subsequent development of new forms of cultural production that students generated as a direct result of the conditions within which they were living.

Home confinement forced my students and team to rethink the ways in which they shared practice, stimulated learning and promoted a studio culture, Lessons in the zoom room were not just about zooming as a digital outlet enabled by new media, but also about zooming inside and outside of ourselves and other-selves, zooming in and out of our physical coordinates, students were connecting in a way like never before, group sessions reduced division and without forcing it, we had been given the chance to become more adaptive with organisation.

My departments current teaching tools consist of using creative and educative websites, social media apps and the Institutions platform ‘canvas’, ‘canvas’ provides clear sign posting, guidance and sets the learning expectations. The hybrid approach to a use of multiple tools functions well and it runs alongside our institutes requests causing little friction. Revising the model this way through shared culture has provided our students with the freedom to make it their own, transform it into something they can relate to it and very easily apply to their existing knowledge.

One of the massive benefits of using accessible social media apps is the ease at which feedback can be received and reviewed. The teaching model adapts as our students actively engage with it, as we note their preferences to platforms, to accessibility, to comfort and as they study in this manner, our students relate their engagement with the new model to their previous experiences and understandings, this again helps to change knowledge.

I would like to share with you two very accessible examples of this in process, examples that help to demonstrate how we are making effective changes to the program delivery as a result of the closer relationships that has been forming between students and staff.

This first example is from our 2nd year illustration studio. Our students in this program have been participating with the illustrators network ‘Pictoplasma’ on a daily basis, using this as their learning space, uploading work for discussion, connecting to a network of global illustrators. Often student images get picked for the sites feature page and this kind of popularity becomes a great incentive as our students navigate their learning and locate their practice.

What is interesting about this image is that Daniel is the module leader and he has also contributing to the platform, doing what he is asking the students to do. This kind of staff engagement makes the project very successful, the students and teacher make the activity their own, the content is engaged with equally, the hierarchy dissolves, learning is quickly synthesised and this helps the group to very easily reinterpret the knowledge that is being shared into their own learning.

A key element of our level 05 graphic design program requires students to locate their practice and make it ‘live’ for public viewing. Using social media to disrupt narrative and expanding on the stories of brands online is second nature to this group, they are all very familiar with Youtube lives and instagram stories, so this group decided they wanted to do something different for their presentation. Having an awareness of the use of structure and format, and understanding how media can be mediated as much by the tools that we use as by what we wish to say, this group decided they would use WhatsApp to present their project. Here is a short section of what is quite possibly a world first in student crit presentations via WhatsApp. Please view this as a work in progress and a model in development. In Portuguese.

I would like for you to understand that adapting the curriculum in this way I have never perceived it as a distortion of a teaching model for the benefit of pleasing the students, but as an essential process by which we can help students make knowledge their own. And as a result gain a greater sense of ownership over their learning and a greater authorship over the manner in which they model personal risk and make knowledge.

We are all familiar with the length of time that it can take to have change accepted into any program curriculum, it is unnecessary and unhelpful and this does need to be addressed,

Not all of us have the opportunity to respond to student needs and modify the delivery of our programs when needed, however the pandemic has provided a short term opportunity to address this inflexibility, if not institutionally at least within our own departments. One of the benefits of my own institute is that it is small, this provides me with the chance to manage the fragility of teaching processes successfully, and although my department has to be extremely resourceful as all new programs do, we are also in a favourable position where we can offer a program that has change built into its model.

This past year the shift to providing programs that have a greater emphasis towards the vocational has been huge. Whether learners are connecting through educational networks, social initiatives or whether they are choosing to attend private training providers. Students are self educating. These new education models exist beyond the traditional structure of education and in some way counter the inaccessibility of higher education. They are all very possible alternatives for todays young learners and support a constant flow of talent into the creative industries. So if a three year BA degree is just one of many routes that young learners can choose from to get into the economy, what makes us different? The wide range of support that these new models provide for aspiring creative learners is clearly an incentive but can they really nurture the depth of talent that the industry requires, can they provide this better than our established Higher Education colleges and institutions?

With the current emphasis on the vocational and the creative economy resettling into its new form, the rebalance that is required for higher education is going to be within the socially transformative. To understand why, is to understand educations capability at balancing equality and inequality within cultural and economic society.

I am certain we all agree that a good university education is one that is socially transformative, one that provides us with an opportunity to develop a more productive mindset, one that will provide fulfilment beyond salaries and careers. The educational purpose of a university education is therefore not only to prepare someone for their role in the future work place, but also, to provide learners with access to knowledge that allows us to see themselves and the world differently, transforming our sense of who we are and what we can do in the world.

The next example that I would like to share with you demonstrates transformative value in practice and is a recent collaborative project entitled ‘Numero Zero’. It was conceived as an expanded publication, existing across multiple online formats, acknowledging our studios response to the new normal. It was produced through online teaching by an editorial team of students and staff from all three year groups across the two programs of Graphic Design and Illustration. It was embodied through non-linear online narrative and connected the department of critical and contextual studies with creative studio practice. Content was informed by the pandemic and our daily digital dependency. The students made use of the social networks to invite professional artists and writers to contribute. Our UK External Examiner Dr Simon Bell was also invited to contribute. The collection of subjects, whilst being used as tools for critical discussion also helped our students to overcome the sociological anxieties of isolation that we were all feeling.

To offer high quality education we need to be able to explain the reason for its design and we need to have the flexibility to rework that design based on the knowledge and experiences of our students when they engage with a curriculum. This project was a result of exactly that kind of process.

This second example involves an interesting flip with online teaching and involved a series of cross continental crits with partners in the UK. These crits were coordinated by two members of staff from each respective school, break out rooms were used to provide private spaces for student discussion, and for staff the day was all about coordinating the rotation of discussions, leaving the students to learn from one another, it’s a good example of students acquiring relevant knowledge by providing them with the right setting and connecting them with necessary means. The internationalisation of these crits added another dynamic to this activity, it felt special to everyone who participated and provided an insight into a different cultures that both groups had never experienced before. Both student groups left feeling more certain about their ideas and their position as international learners, they all felt like they had achieved something and were going somewhere. Equally empowered through sharing their own learned experiences, and also excited in understanding other students perspectives from different locations and different lives.

Although these two examples are contextually different, they both involve a high personal involvement from staff and students, they involve practice that is engaging and effective, they both prompt different ways of thinking that help our students to perceive transformative new perspectives through learning.

To have a clear sense of knowing who our students are and how the knowledge we are giving them is transforming their sense of who they are and what they can achieve in the world, Our roles as educators will need to become more demanding. We will need to continuously collect, analyse, and discuss department specific evidence that relates to value with our teams and students. If we do this we can gain control over the process of assessment and how it can be shaped by the way in which our programs are designed. The danger if we do not have control over how our students are assessed, is that we can become focused on the demands of achieving the external examination rather than designing an assessment that is focused on measuring our students’ actual level of understanding, or ‘teaching to the test’ as it is often called.

If we understand the educational role of undergraduate degrees in this way, then this will have an impact on how we can measure the quality of our degrees. Rather than focusing on the economic value of a degree our universities would be able to focus on how their programs are designed, how successful they are at providing access to knowledge, and what students gain from this.

There is a common distortion within higher education that quality is something based on the prestige of an institution rather than the actual quality of the degree programs. The Quality of Degree program as we all are familiar, can vary greatly within a single institution so any system for measuring in order to provide a fair comparison will need to provide information about how well each particular program is designed. This is particularly relevant in my case providing an accredited UK program overseas.

Sao Paulo vs the UK, our school vs the host partner school, our resources vs the host partner resources, our students vs their students. When tasked with the challenge to deliver a British Higher Education program overseas, I am fortunate that I have the flexibility to design a curriculum that is reflective of a Brazilian learning environment yet I continue to follow the given institutional assessment framework, and at times the link between the revised curriculum that provides students with the opportunity to access knowledge and the values that we use to evidence and look for their learning within assessment creates limitations.

If we are to reach a fairer sense of educational quality that can provide students with access to transformative value then we also need to consider how successful our academic frameworks interpret this value, internally across departments and externally with educational partners such as my own.

End points

Short term, I believe we need to consider how to make positive changes to our programs and how these changes relate to the views that our institutions hold, where there are differences we will need to discuss how these can be bridged or held in tension.

We can also consider how to re-word but not re-write our program curriculum, this is a talent of any committed program leader, It shouldn’t necessarily be this way but it does provide us with a solution.

I believe that if we are to look towards the transformation of university education, then our sector will need to accept change as a necessary tool of reinterpretation that can help future proof models of learning rather than as a form of distortion that needs to be controlled.

An institutional fix would be to provide teams with relative autonomy to be able to interpret their programs with supportive internal cooperation, the alternative would be for our institutions to provide a system wide design and implementation of change to measure teaching quality and that I believe would be very difficult.

Transformative value can be established within our Higer Education institutions and through a considered approach to online teaching, but only through collaboration and conversation. By recognising what kinds of knowledge are included within the curriculum, whose voices and experiences are recognised, acknowledging why certain experiences are excluded and other experiences are privileged will help us to ensure that institutional quality is defined not in terms of institutional prestige but rather by the quality of education that we provide.