First session with my tutorial group on 20/01/2020

Today we had the first session in our tutorial group, lead by our tutor Emily Salines. We each introduced ourselves with a five minute presentation about our teaching practice as well as mentioning our other professional and creative identities. It was very interesting to hear about the work and experiences of the various colleagues who had very diverse careers and current practices. Each of us was also introducing an item or article we had chosen for this session to share with the others. I will show my presentation below. But first of all I wanted to talk about some teaching methods that Emily employed in the session that were really useful. There was at the very beginning an icebreaker activity, which helped to get us all relaxed and engage with each other in a fun way. It also helped to bridge the time until the arrival of two latecomers. Emily chose an exercise whereby we drew our desk-neighbour without looking at the paper. Here my picture of Dr Ulrike Oberlack 🙂

I realised that I never use icebreaker activities with students – what an eyeopener and previous oversight on my part!
I have now started looking into various other icebreaker methods and am determined to include this in my teaching practice going forward.
Another teaching tool I was not familiar with is menti.com, which is really useful to share group work with the whole cohort and can also be used for multiple other purposes. I will also add this to my tool box.

Here my presentation and chosen research paper


Most of what I covered in my presentation I have already described in the earlier blog post, where I introduce myself, therefore I will not duplicate that here.

First lecture of the Teaching and Learning Unit

There were two texts given to read prior to the first lecture of the Teaching and Learning Unit. One was a paper by Gloria Dall’Alba, titled “Improving teaching: Enhancing ways of being university teachers”.

In the paper she discusses achieving this aim “through integrating knowing, acting and being”, whereby epistemology is serving ontology and is not been seen as an end in itself.

I found this paper particularly interesting as in many ways it resonates with what we do on the CSM MA Applied Imagination in the Creative Industries (AICI) and curiously as well partly with my practice as a therapist – I will go into that in a bit. Dall’Alba describes how the participants in this course are doing pedagogic research, analysing their own practice critically, but also design interventions “in the form of an action learning project.“ Our whole MA AICI is based on action research as a process. The aspects of iteration and collaboration with stakeholders and experts is also an important part. This MA is therefore process driven – and with the students coming from various different creative disciplines the focus is not on epistemology as an end in itself, but serving ontology: the students are first losing then finding themselves and defining their core interest and research question before tackling it. Also by its whole nature our MA AICI is not following any old-fashioned “teacher as authority” model. Interestingly quite a few students, often from particular backgrounds, are quite confused by this and sometimes even unsettled. They sometimes directly ask as that they would like to be “told what to do” and at first find it difficult that, as Dall’Alba describes it, “knowledge or, more accurately, knowing is not exclusively cognitive, but is created, enacted and embodied ”

When students come round to it and experience it, it really is as well a transformation of self.

Even though not directly linked to the PgCert I also found it interesting how I saw my work as a therapist reflected in the Dall’Alba’s paper as well. Working with embodied feelings and past experiences, hypnosis, imagination as well as Acceptance and Commitment therapy (ACT) clients are often surprised what they find out about themselves – things they couldn’t get to grips with through cognitive analysis. It is such a parallel to Dall’Alba’s statement of knowing not being exclusively cognitive, but being created, enacted and embodied.

Today in the Teaching and Learning lecture, me and a group of other PgCert students had been given the following statement to discuss: “The student is infinitely more important than the subject matter.” This statement was very fruitful to discuss and we had various answers depending on what context it would stand in. To me this statement also seemed to link directly to the above Dall’Alba paper and it’s core statement of epistemology not being an end in itself but serving ontology. Interesting!

Anyways, the lecture and session today contained a broad variety of educational techniques and methods, and we heard about and discussed many other important events and aspects of education. I thought I just focus for this blogpost on the Dall’Alba paper though which to me and my experiences provides such a plethora of connections.

Introduction

I have been working as an Associate Lecturer on the MA Applied Imagination in the Creative Industries at Central Saint Martins, UAL, since 2007. Until 2016 I solely worked on the part-time mode of the programme, as I also held a full-time role as Head of Design in a private company, heading a large team of interactive digital designers. My background is in digital design and video production and I had a career in that field for more than 15 years.
When I envisaged a career change I realised that what I most enjoyed in both roles was the mentoring, “coaching” and supporting of team members / students. I therefore decided to train as a therapist and since 2015 I am working as a fully certified hypnotherapist in private practice – whilst also continuing my work at CSM, on both the full-time and the part-time mode of the MA.
MA Applied Imagination in the Creative Industries is a multidisciplinary programme based on action research approaches. Me and the other Associate Lecturers on the course work each with a group of usually five to eight students on various briefs as well as on the students’ individually chosen main research project.
I hope to get inspiration and new ideas from the PGCERT and to enhance my teaching practice through exposure to relevant educational research literature, through critical analysis of my work and through collaboration with my peers.