Planning and teaching for effective learning
CONTEXTUAL BACKGROUND
Both teaching on the BA Fine Art course at Chelsea and my role as a lecturer on the Foundation Photography and Time-Based Media Pathway involves crits. Although this practice also falls under the remit of formative assessment, I want to consider the ways that crits can function in relation to engagement. Often I feel as though I need to perform the ‘insightful teacher’ and as a result occupy the space in a way which I am aware might be limiting the student’s willingness to deliver their own contributions.
EVALUATION
Currently, I prefer to use the format of the silent crit in which for the first 5 minutes, the artist remains silent while their peers (and myself) offer observations and interpretations. While this works for some groups, it is often reliant on:
- The group dynamic. Even having one really engaged and vocal student often gives others the confidence to speak up.
- The quality of the work presented.
At times, when discussion either fails to unfold in a generative manner or when we reach a pause, I find myself confronted with ‘the look’. This ‘look’ feels like a request to perform and I am often uncomfortable to allow the silence to sit between us. I have noticed that while there is often a right time to enter into the dialogue, or if presented with a more difficult work, to start off the conversation, my interjection at times creates an imbalance in the dynamic.
MOVING FORWARDS
Since developing my micro-teaching workshop, I have started to think about how to incorporate strategies of close observation outlined in Dr Kirsten Hardie’s paper ‘Wow: The power of objects in object-based learning and teaching’. While the physical handling is not always possible, the attentiveness to what is visible is a valuable starting point for discussing work. This new format was trialled in a small group crit with my photography students. I asked everyone to bring a notebook to the crit and make the first few minutes silent for everyone, not just the maker, as they wrote down what they saw. I then started the crit by purely describing what is visible e.g. ‘I see a photograph, fixed to the wall with the kind of tacks you might find on a pinboard’ and invited the students to do the same.
This was partially successful in that it did give agency to some less confident voices in the group as I hoped (although some still a bit awkward) and built on the idea of ‘the invitation’ I was considering in my previous case study. In bell hooks’ chapter on ‘Engaged Pedagogy’ she remarks that Paulo Freire’s work “affirmed that education can only be liberatory when everyone claims knowledge as a field in which we all labour”. As the makers, students should feel like the expert on what they have produced. There is still, however, a sense of responsibility I have to help them to develop their skills – both in making and presentation of their work. Perhaps this is better achieved through a repurposing of the crit: this is not an ideal learning space for them to gather feedback unless it is driving the conversation. Feedback and feed forward is often more fruitful in one to one teaching which does not demand the same kind of public vulnerability from the student. Rather, a crit scenario can be utilised as an exercise in which we all build our language for speaking about art together, while students can form closer relationships with eachother, allowing for future conversation outside of formal teaching.
Bibliography:
‘Wow: The power of objects in object-based learning and teaching‘ by Kirsten Hardie
‘Teaching to Transgress’ by bell hooks