REFLECTIONS 3: An ounce of action

“An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.” Friedrich Engels

 

Introduction

In retrospect, these three reflections ask:

  • What teaching would give me at a point when my theatre design practice was thriving?
  • What, therefore, might be missing from that practice?
  • How my design and teaching practice might overlap or even intertwine?
  • What are the benefits of connection or separation of these two strands?

…and subsequently,

  • What do I now know, think and feel about my holistic practice?

 

Of course, when these questions are linked, dichotomies and sometimes (interesting) conflicts emerge. For example, how can the act of collaboration between tutor and student be wholly collective, mirroring good theatre practice, when the education system and my role in it are implicitly and often explicitly hierarchical? How do I resolve the contradiction of ‘Leading’ a course that is intended to promote liberated, independent students and staff? Such questions are further explored here and contribute towards a personal appraisal of my position and, alongside the experience of the ARP, begin to foresee what may equip me for change.

Since writing Profile 2, my attitude to teaching has changed most significantly in relation to my approaches to student-centred strategies. In essence this is manifested in either suggesting learning and teaching options to students or establishing an environment in which I can be more receptive to student opinion. I have moved from a position of attempting to prove certain assumptions and personal (perhaps utopian) aspirations to that of realising that delivery can take many forms from didactic instruction to free-form improvisation and that awareness of ‘fitness for purpose’ must be the prime criterion for a good learning and teaching experience. The trick is to establish a flexible, responsive environment that promotes a dialogue through which appropriateness is revealed, planned and actioned.

 

Design and Planning of learning activities and programmes of study

The Action Research Project gave me the opportunity to create, with the students, a student-driven unit of study and experiment with alternative ways to write the unit descriptor.

To this point I had shared authorship of previous documents with colleagues and asked for student reaction. I used the ARP to engage students in pro-active authorship of a course document to give me future insights into what students are most likely to respond positively to when faced with making sense of their handbook.

The project’s process took me further however. I can foresee that collaborative authorship of a unit descriptor, having undergone a pilot version of practical study, can facilitate a number of future benefits. Such as;

  • greater student ownership
  • stronger bonds between students and staff
  • more accessible pedagogic language
  • contemporary review of the field

The results also revealed a trend of students concentrating on the specific learning activities rather than the generic learning outcomes. Learning cannot be implicit within a written course itself, but what’s important is whether students either react or respond to the course’s learning environment. Students who simply react to stimulus will most likely become reactive, or at best conservative, artists and designers.

The aim of a good pedagogic framework is to provide the context for responsive action and therefore positive creative people. My initial unit descriptor without student input however used language that provoked reaction:

 

“ This short course aims to give you experience of the various areas of drawing etc…”

 

…rather than the student’s collective descriptor that invited a response.:

 

“You should be prepared to be part of a dynamic and supportive effort that aims to give you the confidence to etc…”

 

It takes a group of interested students to make a good educational experience and sustaining that level of interest over an undergraduate programme requires mechanisms that provide for the probability of an interchange of ideas that stimulate engagement with the subject long after the tutor left the studio – ideally, years after.

The most effective course documents for creative opportunity are those that suggest rather than dogmatize and therefore equip students with the circumstances to teach themselves. The former plays into the hands of Biggs’  Roberts and frustrates the Susans, whereas the latter can challenge and sustain both. Teaching prescriptive methods of production are also short term and expensive, whereas time invested in the means by which methods can be collectively exchanged takes a long-term but ultimately more effective approach.

There is no doubt that ‘route one’ instruction can be both satisfying for the tutor-performer and student-audience. Established good technical practice, well hewn, can illuminate a subject through the act of making something with purpose and clarity; drafting technique for example. But ultimately, many skills can be delivered through the use of new and old media economically and flexibly. Peter Hillier’s session describing the use of pod casting has opened up exciting, accessible and pragmatic possibilities for demonstration of craft-based course elements.

The strength of a student group lies in their differences, not in similarities, and tutors can harness this diversity by facilitating dynamic language rather than homogenise it through, largely procedural, messages.

 

Teaching and supporting student learning

Lurking beneath my professional duties as a responsible practitioner is an ego. It surfaces when I least expect it. Sometimes it’s productive, sometimes protective (as opposed to defensive) and sometimes blindingly obstructive. If love is blind then love for a subject can cause similar disabilities – more so if the subject mutates into oneself.

The PG Cert in Learning and Teaching that I took five years ago gave me an opportunity to appreciate a wider perspective of what teaching means and what makes it satisfying for those that give and those that receive. On the very last session of the course, I came on a Friday as I was External Examining on my usual Wednesday, and overheard someone in a group talk extremely frankly about her fundamental reasons for teaching. What were mine… really… and are they the same now as when I started?

I began to unpick a tangle of motivations. Do I teach because:

  • I miss being a performer?
  • I need to talk about design with designers rather than directors?
  • I need a secure life in an uncertain freelance field?
  • Is it a glorified displacement activity (negative) or alternative outlet for       creativity (positive)?
  • I need a regular income?
  • I want to give back something to the college I owe a great deal to?
  • I want to leave a legacy (- a form of immortality)?
  • I want to be loved?!!!

… and on and on.

There is most definitely a struggle between wanting to be valued (the guru effect?) FIND REF? and a genuine ambition to help people ‘to launch’. I feel that both are valid and know the latter genuine as instances of my students’ failure to launch’ frustrates me and pricks my professional pride (probably that ego again).

The question is how to balance the two needs and harness them without either denying personal needs or emphasising a simply mechanistic role?

This states mirrors that of the student and how do we, as tutors, assess the complex values heart and soul expression with due process?

 

“I think I’d got to the point where I was getting terribly lonely as a designer, very frustrated that I couldn’t talk about design with anybody who understood the language and it seemed that going back to college was a good place to do that – to be in a design environment and talk to young people about what their ideas were for the future.”

 

How have I used my knowledge of how students learn to inform theoretical debate and approached to practice-based problems?

The logic of reversibility – do unto others as you would have them do unto you]

“I feel under-represented professionally and it’s about time that we had a voice as a profession and I suppose part of me is a frustrated architect in that I make worlds, I help to make worlds, physical worlds, spaces that are one moment in time, believably, substantially permanent – part of an experience, a real experience and then the next minute disappear and [it’s] completely ephemeral and that that’s part of its charm but at the end of the day a charm offensive can wear very thin and talking about the way it comes about is part of putting a root down and feeling that there’s some permanence.”

Student centredness and peer support provide a supplement or surrogate to collaborative practice in the light of diminishing resources to fund external practitioner tutors to collaborate with.

 

 

Assessment and giving feedback to learners

The area of my practice that begs a radical critical reappraisal is that of the assessment of students. It continues to be the least satisfying component of my role – this is no surprise as I’ve heard colleagues repeat their own dissatisfaction with the process, both the mechanics and ethics, on many occasions. My anxiety may be that it measures up to very few of the motivators in the section above. Although I have only rarely (two in twelve years) had to field appeals or complaints about how I’ve managed assessments or their outcomes, it remains a somewhat downbeat, ‘necessary evil’, rather than what could be a constructive affair or perhaps even a celebratory event.

The more student-centred my approach to curriculum design, the more inappropriate and outmoded my mostly inherited models of assessment appear to be, however accepted by students.

If students are required share the responsibilities of scholarship, such as negotiating a programme of study through learning agreements and setting their own learning objectives, then the process should be followed through to an inclusive and transparent conclusion. Anything less could be perceived as betrayal. My ARP’s experiment with peer assessment attempted to counter what Biggs (1999) defined as this ‘backwash’ of contradiction.

As a student on the PG Cert course I was genuinely shocked by my reaction to being graded and, despite rationalising the result as a true reflection of my relationship to the criteria, could not resist the animal impulse to gauge my learning in a ‘norm-referenced’, competitive fashion. Competition is a by-product of productive work, towards its goal. Most creative students are motivated by the desire to achieve, not by a desire to beat others, but the judgement of others and its relationship to self-worth cannot and, I believe, should not be denied. If the process of ranking is shared, the animal can be harnessed and put to good use.

A common understanding of outcomes and the level to which they are attained can be understood intellectually through clear explanation, but studying art and design practice is an experiential undertaking and students using a full range of cognitive skills to practice assessment are more likely to have a deep understanding of its usefulness.

Once a bond is formed in a student group and a common language of values emerges, external interpretations of assessment semantics (the set criteria) may be perceived by the student on the receiving end as not only external, but alien. One of my interviewees went further to suggest that external assessment was likely to misrepresent the student’s learning and certainly their highly valued progression;

 

I don’t think an outsider can do that [assessment] because drawing can be so personal, the way we did it we could actually see how someone had improved where if an outsider had come in they wouldn’t know how where person started, whereas we did.  “This person’s done this and they’ve got better and then we could mark them on that”, an outsider wouldn’t understand that really; how far someone’s come.

I mentioned earlier the benefit of the PG Cert course’s reversibility effect (MacFarlane 2004) in that becoming a student again helped me re-identify with how studentship feels. Students that took part in the ARP peer-assessment exercise re-evaluated the process of making value judgements and thus their relationship to this facet of teaching and tutors.

These are the very beginnings of what I hope will become a series of trials and adjustments to move the assessment experience from a hierarchical imposition founded on the status of the tutor, to a supportive and stretching engagement.

 

Developing effective environments and student support and guidance

Introducing the communal production table promotes:

  • Dialogue
  • Team construction
  • Group teaching
  • Social interactivity – identity

Universities are full of good teachers. What it takes to make a good educational experience is a group of interested students. Sustaining that level of interest over an undergraduate programme requires mechanisms that provide for the probability of an interchange of ideas that stimulate engagement with the subject long after the tutor left the studio – ideally, years after.

The most effective course documents for creative opportunity are those that suggest rather than dogmatize and therefore equip students with the circumstances to teach themselves. The former plays into the hands of Biggs’ Roberts and frustrates the Susans, whereas the latter can challenge and sustain both. Teaching prescriptive methods of production are also short term and expensive, whereas time invested in the means by which methods can be collectively exchanged takes a long-term but ultimately more effective approach.

There is no doubt that route one instruction can be both satisfying for the tutor-performer and student-audience. Established good technical practice, well hewn, can illuminate a subject through the act of making something with purpose and clarity. In my discipline, drafting is an example of this. But ultimately, many techniques or craft skills can be delivered through the use of new and old media economically and flexibly. The word ‘discipline’ can mean just that for some components of study.

The strength of a student group lies in their differences, not in similarities, and tutors can harness this diversity by facilitating dynamic language rather than homogenise it through, largely procedural, messages. Dynamic, synthesized discussion can only really take place in an atmosphere of mutual trust that has to be carefully nurtured from within the group rather than constructed from beyond. To be an active part of this process rather than just observer I found that two conditions have to be maintained:

  1. I had to be prepared to listen a great deal and reflect opinion rather than feel continually responsible for generating it.
  1. Field arguments and relate them to my own experience as a fellow practitioner (and now also student).

An example of this is that recently I was simply asked by a student “Who are the Theatre Designers I should know about?” Why shouldn’t I just tell them? I put together a presentation, about an hour long, of the work of 20 or so most influential Theatre Designers of the last century – something so blindingly obvious and important to their studies and I had never thought of doing it and in my defence, there are very few publications that deal with this straightforward need. The trick (to point 2) however was to impress on the students that they are very much attached, perhaps umbilically, to the timeline that reaches us today and that along the way I too was linked both to the field’s history and to them as my contemporaries.

The presentation transformed some of the student’s subsequent work – derivative maybe, but a level of sophistication rarely achieved in previous 1st Years

 

“[Those of use that teach would still…] “aspire to try and engage with designers at art school on a personal level – because ultimately it’s a profession that requires personal engagement and bonding of one sort or another. But it’s increasingly difficult given various factors. Firstly the sheer weight of numbers in relation to the teaching staff available and the requirements of a course to satisfy criteria which are generic and not appropriate very often to the specialism of theatre design or theatre”,

“[Nevertheless] what I think everybody tries to hold onto is the personality at the end of the system, to try and respect that that’s the future of the profession and not the exactitude of the project, or the packaging of the product.”

British Library Sound Archive, Wright, L: “Narratives of Continuity & Change: British Theatre Design 1945 – 2003, an Oral History”. Recorded 27 February 2007.

 

Conclusion

Despite the Profile 3 form appearing to only describe modest incremental improvement from that of Profile 2, I feel that this course has allowed me invaluable personal time and mental space to evaluate my various roles as an educator at a critical point of my life. With a dozen years under my belt and probably the same left, I have been able to draw on experience and still know the time and effort is an investment.

It’s only when feel I have something to value that know I have something to evaluate and I now feel far better equipped to further examine my practice and exchange new ideas with both students and colleagues.

The cautious entries on the form also reflect that, given that much learning is life-long, this single year has not been the conduit for lightening flashes of inspiration, nor could it be expected to be. But the integration of reflection, making informed change and counter-reflection has begun to weave a matrix of connections that will no doubt help sustain my future in teaching, both practically and intellectually. In that sense, I’m looking positively at room for improvement.

There is, for example, more work to be done in joining the processes of visual theatre making and good pedagogic practice. My position this year has swung from theoretical attempts to implement a utopian view of collective working to the more holistic, realistic and complex situation of responding to conditions. Teaching strategies founded upon ‘fitness for purpose’ have been fruitful. The ARP gave me (what is becoming increasingly) precious time for experiment and exchanges of views in the studio that helped me determine what ‘fitness’ might mean for students and tutors alike.

Designers in the entertainment industry tussle with a balance of satisfying individual need and collaborative responsibilities on a daily basis. Arming students in this field with the ammunition and confidence to make shrewd strategic judgements about their process is key to a purposeful education and successful professional life thereafter. I feel far better equipped to open up debate about how to go about achieving this but my development will hinge on implementing not only the frameworks of negotiation for critical change but following through to effect change itself.