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Writing in Creative Practice: Writing and the Object

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May 1, 2013
Beyond the Display, Workshops
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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.

New ways of seeing: Assignment planning, research and discovery with a visual twist

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April 22, 2013
Workshops
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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

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

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

The Butterfly Challenge

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April 21, 2013
Alternative Presentations, Workshops
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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:

  • Unconscious Incompetence (You don’t know that you don’t know)
  • Conscious Incompetence (You know that you don’t know)
  • Conscious Competence (You know that you know)
  • Unconscious Competence (You don’t know that you know, because you have internalised the skill)

(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.

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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

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.)

Writing in Creative Practice: Collage, Reflection and Writing

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April 16, 2013
Workshops
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So last week, Sarah and myself made our way to the first Writing in Creative Practice workshop to be held in Scotland. We had been invited to come to the Ayr campus of The University of the West of Scotland by Alison Bell, who had been at the very first of these workshops in Stoke-on-Trent, and we had been talking ever since to make this happen.

bags waiting for participants to arrive

bags waiting for participants to arrive

The idea behind the programming of the day was to particularly look at collage, but more in the direction of reflection than the recent Chester workshop had been, which was very much about interpretation of text I felt. And of course we had set it up so that participants could have a go themselves. Intitially (after making our own name tags), Sarah introduced reflective notetaking in book form, with a particular look at poetic inquiry and its roots in Dada (as well as referencing the songwriting of David Bowie).

After lunch, Alison shared her experiences of working with collage as a methods of enquiry as part of her PhD. This was a very thought- and personal reflection on her work, which (for me) particularly made the point that it is not only the collages that can be interpreted, but that taking photographs of them then allow their interpretations from mutliple perspectives, again changing what one is able to see in them (and in extension in the work).

The next part of the day was given over to just that exploration of words in not just two but three dimensions. Brigid Collins introduced us to her work on poem houses, and with the help of some handy template boxes, participants were encouraged to take their two dimensional collage into the third dimension. Brigid had also given everybody a haiku as a possible starting point. A really intensive working period followed, where people were working on both two and three dimensional visual reflection.

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To bring everybody back to the university context, I then introduced a way of using collage as a way of thinking about collating a literature review, and particularly for explaining to students the difference between a literature review and an annotated bibliography (something I seem to have trouble at in my teaching). I will blog about this in more detail soon.

In order to collect feedback, we used an activity that Sarah had recently tried with her students: we gave everybody a page of notes from the back of a found book of a greek play (I think), asking them to pick out three words and expain how these three words reflected their experience of the workshop. Because the notes were quite academic and sometimes included translations of greek and latin terms, the found words were really interesting and the feedback in places was almost lyrical.

Overall it was a great day – on our way back we were already making plans on a future event, so keep your eyes peeled for that (though of course it might take another year for that to actually happen…).

Igniting Anything - my poem house

Igniting Anything – my poem house

Here is a picture of my ‘poem house’ (slightly unfinished as yet). It was inspired by a David Bowie quote in a video clip Sarah showed: “igniting anything that might be in my imagination” and a Conquergood quote that popped up in Alison’s presentation “braiding together of disparate and stratified ways of knowing” (2003). I liked the idea of igniting and found a map of islands at least some of which I thought might well be volcanic, and liking the idea of braiding things together, I cut them into strips according to the longtitude. So far I didn’t do any braiding, but that might still come!

The Chester workshop – Sue’s reflections

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April 2, 2013
Workshops
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A message from Sue

Dear Alke and all,

Another stimulating, inspirational and useful seminar day in Chester last week ! I was particularly intrigued by the ideas about literally ’working into’ academic text, creating new understandings and breaking the shiny, polished and finished sense of the ideas. Attached are some images for the blog, of the tunnel bag I made from ‘found’ collage materials supplied at the seminar. I first found words in a Joseph Conrad story which expressed the panic which surrounds the current process of writing my PhD, and, in the second layer, words which made some of that clear to me: it’s partly my reluctance to let go of the ‘vague’ and complex, “that idea kept back” (as Conrad says), and commit to claiming my representation of the world is ‘the truth’ !

Finally, in the last layer, by spooky serendipity, a map supplied showed the house I was born in … it made me think hard that I must start from ‘myself’, keep myself in the writing somehow… A helpful way in to thinking a little bit about the barriers I face when trying to write up complex ideas in an academic way and to remind me not to lose myself in it.

Thanks! Sue

Creating Layers of Meaning

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March 27, 2013
Workshops
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Just a short post to let all of you who couldn’t make it to yesterday’s workshop (and the weather was probably an important factor, although some people made it up from the south coast) know how it went. I didn’t take any photographs myself, but Michael Walls, a student, joined us to take some (when we could get him away from the craft materials – and thanks Mike, for doing such a fabulous job!).

Elizabeth getting us startedAfter the by now traditional welcome of making our own name tags and having a look at lovely materials and books brought in for inspiration, Elizabeth Kealy-Morris, our host, gave a presentation on taking collage seriously, making some reference to how she gets her students to engage with text in a humument fashion – and allowing the table groups to start some discussions on the set text (a chapter by Stuart Hall).

Different groups were approaching different quotes from the text, discussing aspects they found particularly interesting and important – and finding ways to illustrate what the text was saying through changing the format from 2d to 3d (and flexible in some cases).

Sarah talking about collageThen Sarah Williamson talked about different types of Angela speakingknowledge and how that can be teased out and developed through using collage and layering as a tool. To finish off the morning session, book artist Angela Davies talked about her practice and work that inspires her – not only showing beautiful slides, but also bringing in some of her books so we could take a closer look. She also showed a work in progress, which was inspired by the reading for the workshop (and she has promised to let me have some photographs of how this work developed for this blog once she is done!).

During these three sessions there were already very lively discussions developing, which we at least partly were able to continue over lunch.

In the afternoon we had set an hour and a half aside just for making, and there was some very interesting explorations of layers going on.

By the end of this, we re-entered our discussion, but some of the energy was lost – or maybe people just wanted to continue making? At the end of the day there were some fascinating explorations of layers of meaning going on – some of which to be continued at home.

 

Jane's Tunnel Book

Jane’s Tunnel Book

I have already been sent the image of one of the books made -exploring the taxonomy of presentational knowledge introduced in Sarah’s talk – and it also uses the structure of the tunnel book I was proposing as a simple way of exploring layers (If you want to make your own, download make your own tunnel book instructions here).

The official HEA post (including handouts and presentations) about this workshop can be found here.

planning some layering

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March 18, 2013
Workshops
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Yesterday Elizabeth, Sarah, Angela and myself had a little meeting to sort out final details of the Chester workshop next week (and yes, there still seem to be places available, if you are interested). It was a really good meeting, and there will be some interesting stuff going on!

Inspired by getting together and talking about different ways of layering, I went home to protoype a ‘tunnel book in a bag’. I had been thinking of ways to easily facilitate a layered approach in book making and was thinking that it could be fairly straight forward to use a paper bag as a ‘container’ with little concertinas at the sides so that content could be ‘slotted’ in. I had had the idea some time ago, but hadn’t done anything about it (like so many ideas…), so it was really good that the meeting made me actually try to put this into practice. I aim to make a little how-to handout for the workshop!

Called The Underwater Iceberg, this particular book looks not at layers of meaning, but the different layers that should go into researching an academic essay. Hopefully I will be able to finish this soon, and then I will post about it some more.

Writing in Creative Practice: Collage, Reflection and Writing

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March 4, 2013
Workshops
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On 12th April the University of the West of Scotland (Ayr Campus) will host the first Scotland-based workshop in the Writing in Creative Practice series, which is run in conjunction with Writing PAD and partly funded by the Higher Education Academy.

Titled Collage, Reflection and Writing, this workshop looks at collage’s potential as a method of inquiry through creative practice which seamlessly merges the making and the textual. We will explore the versatility collage offers as it allows one to find the words to express subjective experience through reflexivity and its (collage’s) intrinsic multiple interpretations of the ‘image’. We will take a look (and possibly have a go) at collage as a method of inquiry, reflective bookmaking, poetic inquiry and poem houses, as well as discussing ways of introducing students to structuring academic texts through collage.

Conceived as a hands-on day with lots of activities and discussion, this workshop will give participants the opportunity to explore collage in both a theoretical and practical way, but particularly as a way of engaging students in a reflective and analytical process that can prepare and support their writing tasks.

For more information on previous workshops in the Writing in Creative Practice series, please check the HEA events archive or https://tactileacademia.wordpress.com/?s=writing+in+creative+practice.

 

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. However, the HEA is currently running a funding scheme to support travel crossing national borders to attend events, which could be applied for independently.

For more information or to book a place, please get in touch with Dr Alke Gröppel-Wegener (tactileacademia@gmail.com) with ‘WiCP Ayr’ in the subject line.

 

Our current draft programme (subject to change)

11:00 registration and refreshments

11.30 welcome

11.45 Thinking through Collaging: Reflective bookmaking and poetic inquiry (Sarah Williamson)

13.00: Lunch

13.45: Collage as subjective experience: Transitioning, Relinquishing, Becoming (Alison Bell)

14.45: Collaging in three dimensions: the Poem House (Brigid Collins)

15.45: refreshments

16.00: Collaging the Context: Visual Ways of Collating a Literature Review (Alke Gröppel-Wegener)

16.30: Discussion

17.00: end