Workshop 1 – Reflection
An a/r/tographic métissage: Storying the self as pedagogic practice
It’s not the most encouraging start when you read the title of an article and you only understand half of it. Remembering the advice given on Moodle, however, I launched ChatGPT and prompted it to explain the title to me like I was a second-year undergraduate fine art student at UAL.
The article
The article is a celebration of voices, a narrative blend of auto-ethnographic accounts and diverse stories from four female artists that weave together to create a ‘threadscape’ (Flood 2014) that goes beyond one individual narrative. The article highlights the significance of integrating personal narratives into arts education. It advocates for a pedagogic approach that values diversity in storytelling and identity exploration through various means such as reflection, storytelling, and community building.
Creating in isolation
There were parallels drawn between the historical isolation of women in their creative spaces and the contemporary challenge of creating in isolation and learning not to ‘succumb to isolation’ (Grumet, 1988).
The visibility of creating and documenting creative work is highlighted as essential, drawing attention to the interconnectedness of personal narratives and the need to share these stories to break the chains of isolation. Isolation, in the context of online learning, provokes reflection as it is more nuanced than the simple exchange of ‘expressing our thoughts and feelings to someone else.’ Being seen is also a key part of creating this ‘métissage’ yet we know that in an online learning environment, ‘the facilitator may never actually “see” any of the students’ (Gillet-Swan, 2017).
The challenge in online spaces is twofold: ensuring students feel and are seen. Strategies to overcome this could include ‘echolocating the self’ in a digital environment, aiming to establish presence and community despite physical absence. Sometimes it can feel as though there isn’t anyone else out there, at least in the liminal space of an online course.
Becoming through entanglement
The concept of becoming through entanglement resonated deeply in the context of the first TPP workshop. We were all strangers, but at the end it felt that we had come together to create new collective understandings, for instance on what social justice meant to us.
The postcard activity allowed us to share stories about ourselves, demonstrating the collaborative intertwining of stories. We celebrated the particularity of individuals while weaving a ‘threadscape’ of shared experiences as UAL staff.
Sharing lived experiences, memories, and conflicts of practice, can help to deepen our understanding, learn more about ourselves and open new spaces for teaching and learning. How we might share and ‘entangle’ these experiences remains an area to explore, particularly in the online space where sharing work is not always as straightforward as it might be in-person.
Conclusion
Making work visible is crucial, especially online. Strategies for enhancing visibility include creating informal interaction opportunities, fostering ‘safe spaces,’ and emphasising personalisation. These efforts aim to reduce isolation and enrich the educational experience by building a supportive and engaging online community.
By sharing stories and making work visible, individuals contribute to a ‘threadscape’ enriching pedagogic practices and reducing the inherent isolation that is can be of the creative process.
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References
Flood, A. (2014) Common threads: a discursive text narrating ideas of memory and artistic identity. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Gillett-Swan, J. (2017) ‘The Challenges of Online Learning: Supporting and Engaging the Isolated Learner’, Journal of Learning Design, 10(1), p. 20. Available at: https://doi.org/10.5204/jld.v9i3.293.
Grumet, M. ( 1988), Bitter Milk: Women and Teaching, Amherst, MA:: University of Massachusetts Press;, http://dx.doi.org/10.5860/choice.27-0431.
Osler, T. et al. (2019) ‘An a/r/tographic métissage: Storying the self as pedagogic practice’, Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 12(1-2), pp. 109–129. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1386/jwcp.12.1-2.109_1.
Photo by Clément Falize on Unsplash