‘Community cannot take root in a divided life. Long before community assumes external shape and form, it must be present as a seed in the undivided self: only as we are in communion with ourselves can we find community with others. (Palmer 2012, p.92)
I am writing this reflective essay from my positionality as a British born, white, non-binary, disabled, Pre-Degree Student Experience Officer who has studied and worked at UAL for 8 years. I teach as a visiting Practitioner at LCC and Camberwell on Level 3&4 courses. Neither of my parents went to university and are from a working class background. I consider myself lower middle class due to my work and study opportunities.
The set up of the artefact is covered in a visual appendix, so that personal reflection of my experience studying this unit can be explored here. Some reflections have grown out of several traumatic life experiences which coincided during my study, which whilst difficult, have truly enlightened my empathetic perspective.
My artefact is a designed social and caring space that first requires an introduction from a facilitator. It requests students ‘make space’ in their thinking practice before entering, this could be to think about privileges or biases they carry. From this starting point, they then manage the revisioning and transgression of whatever they have taken away, before nourishing it with fresh insight; an insight of love. As they place theirselves and practice into this online social space, it will become a social space for resource and honest experience sharing.
The space aims to help students not just ‘graduate with confidence’ but with a hopefulness that they can take the dialogic caring skills they will utilise, to transform the degree courses and future industries they inhabit. The space will encourage learners not to prescribe and fit in to what already exists, but is inspired by bell hooks’ modal definition to be ‘queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and it has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live’ (2014). My years of experience reading of the Further Education Student Survey comments have taught me that as a forum, the FESS is too little and too late as far as its capacity to listen to honest student voices.
Universities and industries have colonial and patriarchal histories. This should be at the forefront of both student and staff consciousness so that there is no room or excuse for any ‘unconscious bias’. The space will encourage students to never disregard their experience, but embrace the diverse range of voices, to hear everyone else’s thoughts and feelings. This is fundamental Paulo Friere’s dialogical collaborative group emancipatory theory.
It’s pertinent to share frequently and openly in a supported space. I will work to gain this unconditionally from learners and colleagues. Too often, students are simply directed to support and are funnelled off, this grows marginalisation and discrimination. It fails to address the environment which allowed issues to foster, unchecked.
I have come full circle through a myriad of experiences recently which (I believe for better) have intersected explosively with the reading and topics contained in the Inclusive Practices unit. This includes invisible pain, disabilities, mental health, trauma, relationships ending, discrimination, transphobia— I have realised that the thick skin that UAL has taught me to develop over the 8 years I have been studying and working here, is purely for the protection of the status quo of the power of the institution. It is truly time for that end. What the Inclusive Practices unit has started, is revolutionary. I have never learnt in an environment like it before. I want my artefact creation to follow this inspiration.
I have simultaneously put everything into this unit whilst having a lot taken out of me. That sounds negative, but I believe a lot of what has been taken has only resulted in a positive change. It has inspired the artefact space I have designed but also given me confidence to request the involved students engage in a manner at odds with the norm of UAL’s systemic inequitable norms. I have unlearned and changed my perspective on UAL’s education, particularly the wider student experiences, especially those which weren’t my own. During my BA and MA I believe I propagated and pedalled a dangerous, harmful and excluding ideology which simply is not about talent and attainment, but instead: race, class and sex discrimination.
Unlearning my previous education and social prejudice is key to making progress in the design and deliver of group sessions. My artefact and reflections are a step towards challenging an inherently powerful institution.
Paul De Bruyne in Teaching in the Neoliberal Realm Realism versus Cynicism frames a deeply damaging ivory tower & predatory, discriminatory pedagogic practice. It describes how drama education is fundamentally different to art education, the interviewee promotes Sigiswald Kuyken’s notion that ‘One cannot overestimate the positive power of a bad school’(2013 p.63). The guiltless interview for me only instills pain and describes much of what is wrong with the banking model of education. UAL is has thankfully made some progress; Shades of Noir highlights though where it is mostly optic. This drive for accountability is what motivates me in creating my artefact space.
Reading bell hooks’ all about love: new visions (2001) expanded my understanding of how love can guide dialogue, society and student groups to question the status quo to channel cooperative teaching and learning. hooks highlights how higher education environments nurture an ‘unconscious bias’, or teach dissimulation, where concealing the truthful existence of marginalisation, racism and discrimination is common practice.
hooks emphasises how the ‘teachings about love offered by Fromm, King and Merton differ from much of today’s writing’ of which, consist of a ‘dangerous narcissism’ that pays so much attention to individual self improvement and so little to the practice of love within the context of community’ (p.76, hooks 2001). I can see how UAL as an institutions embodies this exact same narcism; teaching it to students, utilising it as a numbing void in which to hide itself from prioritising progressive and inclusive practices.
This sense of denial leads to a pedagogical model in which we teach our students to lie to us and to themselves on a daily basis (hooks, p35, 2001). As hooks experienced, it is arguably ‘still necessary for students to assimilate bourgeois values in order to be deemed acceptable’ (hooks, 1994, p.178).
It’s important we work with strength, encouraging students and colleagues to ‘take responsibility in all areas of our lives’ whilst never discounting their positionality, experience and heritage. This includes areas where we’re acutely aware we’re falling far short of attaining equality and not recognising privileges. Where naysayers may protest this and my artefact space as utopian thinking, they are mistaken, as in this concept, idealism is not concerned. hooks asserts that ‘taking responsibility does not mean that we can prevent discriminatory acts from happening. But we can choose how we respond to acts of injustice’. hooks contends that we already practice ‘shape shifting to cope with realities we cannot easily change’, instead we must encourage students and ourselves to shape shift their learnt, taught and inherent biases to better the group community as a whole, to enact change and betterment as a whole. (p.57, 2001, hooks).
Creating such a loving and dialogic environment must be in tandem with encouraging students to ‘let anyone know who they really are’ lest they ‘choose isolation and aloneness for fear of being unmasked’ (p.60 2001, hooks). An environment where learners are unable to do this is due to an ongoing censoring process [which] is only one way bourgeois values overdetermine social behaviour in the classroom and undermine the democratic exchange of ideas’ (hooks, 1994, p.179).
We can aim to all attain a ‘high point of meaning’ by employing the key elements of pedagogic reform (of which my artefact space will be built around) to transcend ourselves in ‘encounter, response and communion with another’. (p.76, 2001, hooks). I believe as hooks does, that ‘we do not become fully human until we give ourselves to each other in love’. A key word here is ‘other’ which could make up a silent majority in many classrooms pervaded by marginalising teaching and institutional discrimination, where students are constituently othered by their peers and teaching staff.
Where once othered, I hope that through the actualisation of my artefact (beginning in microcosm) through shaping the world, ‘we receive what is outside of us, and reshape our inner selves’. (p.77, 2001, hooks). I hope that as a collective body, a culture where the transformative power of love, formulated by Friere and hooks engenders a level of strength where we all feel committed to ‘stand up for what we believe in, to be accountable both in word and deed’ (p.92, hooks, 2001). I have learnt that many white staff and students teach and learn in a state of fear; a fear of our continuous malignant damage we inflict as we pedal and preach a cycle of discrimination and victimisation. If we learnt to ‘love, fear necessarily leaves’ (p.93, 2001, 2001).
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