You might remember me raving about the documentary drawing class I attended at the beginning of the year. Just to let you know that the lady who gave the workshop is having an open studio 25/26 May in Hartford, Cheshire. More info here
I came across this via Twitter and thought some of you might be interested…
Presenting the Onion: a tool for discussing academic writing
On 2nd July 2013, Staffordshire University will be hosting another one-day workshop in the Writing in Creative Practice series. Since starting this series, which developed out of the work of the Writing-PAD network and has been supported by the Higher Education Academy, we have mostly shared best practice and allowed some space for exploration to link to engaging our students in writing for Higher Education in the creative disciplines. To find out more about what we have been doing, explore this blog, particularly the ‘workshop’ category.
This up-coming workshop will focus not on students’ but on our writing, and how we can turn it into writing for academic publication. Therefore it is aimed at members of staff who want to publish in this very specific context for the first time (or just more); it would also be suitable for post-graduate students within art, media and design.
Nancy de Freitas, Associate Professor at AUT University, New Zealand and Editor-In-Chief of Studies in Material Thinking, will share her expertise of writing in the context of material thinking practices, introducing workshop participants to methods and insights on good structure, clear writing and elegant style when talking about research, processes, images, objects and spaces. There might also be the opportunity to discuss the genre of academic writing – and review this as currency within the creative, studio-based disciplines. This day is meant as a day of starting points, sharing tips to get (academic) writing projects on the go. It would be helpful if participants come with a particular writing project in mind.
The attendance of this workshop is free of charge to all those interested in the workshop topic, with preference being given to staff working in HE institutions and HE in FE colleges from across the UK. Places will be allocated on a first come, first served basis. Lunch and refreshments will be provided, but travel expenses will not be covered.
For more information or to book a place, please get in touch with Alke Groppel-Wegener (tactileacademia[at]gmail.com).
And, if you are interested in following this up with a more immersive experience where you can actually get some writing done, check out the related Pedare Weekend Writing Retreat at Falmouth University.
Another fortnight, another get-together to talk about our portfolios for the HEA fellowship accreditation. This time we talked about A4 – Develop effective learning environments and approaches to student support and guidance.
At Fellow level we need to give evidence of our debelopment of a learning environment, for example
At Senior Fellow level we need to give evidence of our managing the development of learning environments and support, for example
We talked about how we support, set up and manage both online environments for modules (and particularly the tools here that go beyond the mere information delivery of putting up lecture slides, for examples the use of discussion forums, blogs, wikis) and also resources (different ways of accessing our in-house research collection) as well as the ‘old-fashioned’ not quite as virtual environments we create – and why sometimes the one is more appropriate than the other. Actually we thought what would probably be an important factor in our annotation of our individual examples would be exactly this explanation – why did we choose to set it up this way, with reference to the content and skills we teach, and the type of students we interact with.
We ended by having a little chat about the references. Each of us needs to references, which should be provided by somebody who knows our teaching, so we thought about who we could ask.
Next time: A5 – Engaging in continuing professional development in subjects/disciplines and their pedagogy, incorporating research, scholarship and the evaluation of professional practices.
There are exciting developments with what I call the Fishscale of Academicness. You might have come across this before at one of my talks – or through my little booklet (which is described here).
There are two exciting new things happening – my colleague Geoff Walton and myself are working on a chapter on this for an open-access book on information discovery journeys. We have been having a number of meetings about this in the last few weeks, and I am happy to report that it is progressing nicely. We are trying to combine what I already have as written for the little booklet with a commentary on information literacy and information discernment, that locates this in an academic context. Most recently we have been working on ways of how to combine the different texts/images, here some of our working drawings:
We are hopeful that we have worked it out!
The other exciting thing is that we have been given some funding by the university to produce at least two different ways of delivering this – a hard-copy and a digital one, which we want to use to test this further with students in the coming academic year, hopefully in different departments and possibly at different universities.
Let me know if you are interested in taking part in this further research!
Through booking forthcoming events, I also get to catch up with people who came to previous workshops – and I of course always ask whether they were able to put anything into practice since then, or whether they went away inspired.
Well, today, Sara Eaglesfield got in touch. She was at the second workshop in Stoke last year, and says that
During the summer I created a series of workshops for our first year students which combined my multiple intelligences research with some collage-making-sticking ideas I’d picked up from our day in May (we have since got through incredible amounts of glitter).
And she also sent this Poster she made to disseminate her research, to share it with all you lovely blog readers. She is very interested in taking this research further, possibly in a collaboration, so if you think this looks interesting, please do get in touch with her at Sara.Eaglesfield[at]bucks.ac.uk
Thursday, 13th June: (free) workshop at Middlesex University
Within the art and design academy we witness few of the expanded possibilities that lie between writing practices and the object. This workshop will combine theoretical and practical approaches to consider different writing-object relationships, including: writing about objects, writing as an object, writing to generate objects, etc.
This day-workshop will examine different relationships between writing practices and the object in art and design.
We write about objects, we produce writing as objects, we write in order to generate objects and sometimes we write in spite of objects, yet within the academy we rarely witness many of the expanded possibilities that lie within the relationship.
Our workshop will take a theoretical and a practical approach to exploring these possiilities, so we will schedule sessions which theorise on these themes but also sessions which allow for practical, hands-on experience. We will also allow time for reflection on themes raised in the sessions and for discussion.
Papers will investigate topics such as the use of writing as a means of generating design; the role of intuition within object-focused writing practices, and its relationship to formalised writing norms; ways of drawing on art and design practices in writing, such as the use of making in writing instruction with art and design students.
Speakers at the workshop will be both external to Middlesex University and internal, and the day’s activities will involve the University’s Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture and its collection.
You can find abstracts for the various sessions here: Writing & the object – topics. For more information, please get in touch with Peter Thomas (p.thomas[at]mdx.ac.uk) and to book, please check the information on the HEA events page.
Kaye Towlson (of De Montfort University) sends the following report:
Report, feedback and future planning:
Kaye Towlson and Carol Keddie delivered a well received and inspirational workshop entitled : “New ways of seeing” to 10 students from a wide range of disciplines including Housing, Multimedia Design, Cardiology, Biomedicine, Youth and Community Development, Health Studies, Nursing, Human Resources and Fine Art. The group included Undergraduates, Postgraduates and a Phd Research student. All students participated fully in the activities and engaged with tasks from the word “Go”. There was also much peer to peer learning going on as students discussed the different visual learning techniques as they performed the given tasks.
Students enthusiastically embraced new visual planning and thinking techniques such as the image enriched mind map created using collage techniques, dressing up the “doll of formality” (Groppel-Wegener 2012)with selected keywords and images derived from their mind map.
jumble of plaits
They enjoyed forming a research plait by combining the assignment question, selected keywords and references of relevant journal and book resources identified through searching the library catalogue and relevant research databases. This information was recorded onto three separate strands of paper given at appropriate times in the workshop. The plaiting together of these three essential elements of the planning and research process simulates the knitting together of this information into an evidence supported argument in the form of a completed assignment. (Amended from Francis 2009)
Students were then introduced to the University of Creative Arts Creative Cycle which maps the route of the creative cycle from the initial interest through to submission and post submission reflection on all the learning inputs, tasks and skills acquired. Students were asked to create their own road map for the successful completion of their chosen assignment starting from the initial assignment allocation through the planning, inputs and activities culminating in the successful completion and handing in of the assignment. They were asked to illustrate the roads map with images (doodles/sketches or collage) to identifying tasks, to add emoticons to reveal how they would feel at that point of their journey and maybe chart the ups and downs, twists and turns experienced on the route.
doll with keywords
Feedback from the session was very positive; students commented particularly that they liked the mind map and the journey map, others particularly liked the doll (”especially cause I was relating keywords and assignment to a person”).
Many said they intended to use mind maps in future
Other comments:
“Thank you it was inspiring”
I liked: “the ways teached to divide an assignment into smaller pieces”.
“The creative aspects of the session absolutely BRILLIANT!”
I liked…. “The atmosphere and the context”
I am going to …..”Continue to mind map my work this way before I begin an assignment”.
“Fantastic!”
I would like to see….”more like this please! New tips on ways to work effectively”.
“Please do more courses such as these as a Phd student I have found it really useful and will be attending many more”.
Future development:
The intention is to offer this workshop again and to utilise some of the techniques within curriculum based teaching. IT is also intended to offer this workshop to LRS Librarians and CLaSS and to ask them to bring a selected assignment question with them from one of their areas of responsibility.
To expand visual learning, thinking and planning techniques applicable to information/digital literacy and offer other workshops.
To feed experience and feedback from today into ongoing Teacher fellow project.
Reflection…….. To investigate scope for utilising similar visual techniques to encourage reflection in student learning, both during the assignment path and also after. To reflect on tasks and skills completed, their effectiveness, areas for amendment and improvement, areas of transfer.
The workshop intended to stimulate creative thinking and planning and to introduce students to non-traditional visual techniques that they can utilise through their course. It is safe to say that these learning outcomes were met.
Kaye Towlson 12/2/13
If you liked the idea of the reflective walk, and the drawing, you might be interested in the Festival of Dangerous Ideas: Thinking Dangerously in Teacher Education? Walking, Drawing and Extending Sites for Learning at the Ayr campus of the University of the West of Scotland that is happening on June 18th.
One of the things I particularly wanted to explore at the second workshop in Stoke-on-Trent last year was genre, and why academic writing specifically seems to be such a problem for students. Yes, there are the students who ‘don’t like to write’, but in my experience a lot of students also come to university safe in the knowledge that they KNOW how to write, because they learned it at school. And it is difficult for them to understand that they now need to write at a different level – and for a different purpose.
I was talking about this with my colleague Jane Ball, who works at our study skills centre and was scheduled to do one of the presentations at the workshop, and she mentioned the Concscious Competence Model/Ladder/Matrix. In brief, if you are learning skills you go through four main stages:
(Some people argue that there is a fifth stage which is akin to either mastery or coaching, but I don’t want to make this more complicated here.)
Now I think that this is a really good model, but one of the problems with it, is that there are some tongue twisters in there and it becomes really complicated to try to talk about the difference of concious incompetence (which is the stage I would like my students to be at) and unconscious competence (which is the stage most of them seem to think they are at, due to them not paying attention to what I am trying to teach them when it comes to essay writing), because frankly the terms all sound so much alike. So we needed some better terms, and possibly a little visual to tie this together. And we came up with the lifecycle of a butterfly – and that is what The Butterfly Challenge became about.
So the trick is to be aware of what stage you are in for each skill you encounter. Are you at the egg stage (blissfully unaware of anything going on around you – and not really caring)? Are you a caterpillar (hungry for knowledge you realise you don’t yet have)? Are you at the crysalis stage (knowing all the rules and quietly practicing applying them all)? Or are you indeed already a butterfly (having internalised all the rules to the point where they are second nature to you)?
different types of butterfly representing different genre
This becomes particularly tricky if a transferable skill is concerned, because you might not be aware that the rules have changed. (And I think this can often be the problem with my students.) Surely once you know how to write, that is it? Well, here it becomes important to understand the concept of genre – not all written pieces are the same. There isn’t just one type of butterfly, there is one for writing text messages and one for writing academic essays, and they are not necessarily exchangable. But because some students are not aware of that, they think that they are a butterfly (or in the crysalis) as far as writing is concerned, when really they are only at the egg stage for the writing they have to do.
When I presented this idea as part of the talk I did for the Staffordshire University School of Education conference, this seemed to particularly strike a chord… at a different level. Not of undergraduates coming into Higher Education, but rather of graduates continuing on at Masters and PhD level. There also, academic writing (and other research skills) takes a ‘step up’ (in the case of PhD work quite dramatically), and students are sometimes not aware of this. Indeed, somebody in the audience said that when she was working on her PhD it felt like she was a butterfly who got slowly torn apart… In order to avoid this sort of student experience, it might be well worth to introducing the students to this model at the beginning of their courses.
A possible activity to go with this would be to get the students to make butterflies out of copies of different types of texts, and then put them together on a museum type tray complete with labels that identify the specific rules the different texts have to adhere to. (I developed this as an activity a bit, I thought washing pegs might be good for the body of the butterflies, but then never actually used it as the idea of using a paper doll came along and seemed to make more sense – see The Dress-Up Doll of Formality, to be blogged about soon.)
(This booklet was made in a preview edition of 31 handed out to delegates at the Writing in Creative Practice: Integrating Writing into a Studio-based Curriculum workshop, each with a pop-up butterfly in the middle.)
Tactile Academia 