In the on-site session on the 24th February, we thought about the knowledge and values that underpin our approaches to learning. My group mind-mapped these out to:
- Our underlying (subject) knowledge: how much to share it and when.
- Ourselves: our biases, backgrounds, strengths, insecurities, etc.
- The students’ contexts: their course/year, hopes & dreams, expectations, lived experiences.
- Course aims and objectives our expectations of our students.
We then judged our responses against the V1-4 and K1-6 of the UKPSF. Curiously, as a learning technologist I hadn’t even considered K4: The use and value of appropriate learning technologies. On reflection, this is perhaps because I do not have a core subject knowledge, but I use my core knowledge of learning technology and design to supporting technicians to deliver their core knowledges effectively online. I also think that in the context of the PgCert I am thinking about what teaching is for my peers who I assume to be “traditional teaching practitioners” (which I acknowledge is just an unchallenged assumption in my head!) versus me thinking about these questions individually.
UAL Principles of Climate, Racial and Social Justice
In the pre reading for the session, I looked at UAL’s core social purpose principles. Staff and students have developed the following set of principles of climate, racial and social justice:
- Move with urgency
- Cultivate systems thinking of practice
- Foster futures thinking
- Design for human equity, social and racial justice
- Accelerate activism and advocacy
The co-design of these principles encourages inclusiveness and chimes Paulo Freire’s dialogic pedagogy and the belief that classrooms (or in our case workshops, labs, studios?) can be sites of social change.
It is encouraging to see that there is a clear action plan for embedding the principles within the curriculum. The action plan seems achievable, in terms of achieving a baseline that can be practically built upon to develop awareness, ideation and creating a total shift in the curriculum.
In the session we talked about frameworks and policies and who gets to decide them. It seems that UAL’s principles were developed by a working group that did not include technical representation (as the accompanying picture shows). The framework also focuses on how to embed the principles within academic programmes. I wonder how this could be embedded within technical teaching and learning, or in online learning practice. PgCert peers related that the principles also aren’t being embedded coherently in other parts of the university, ie IT (sustainable supply chains, electronic waste).
From my role as a learning technologist for the CSM technical team, I know that the climate crisis is a big concern and we think critically about the materials we use, acquiring LEAF status, etc. The development of CSM’s swap shop is an example of where students and technicians have collaborated to deliver on these principles. The dye garden on CSM’s roof terrace is another example, with Print & Dye technicians and students are applying these principles to creating sustainable environmentally friendly dyes.
I also don’t need to wait for explicit guidance from the university to think about and apply the principles to my practice. I have been working to redesign our CSM Technical Moodle site, so that each section has the same structure with common categories for content. I have included sustainability as a core category to clearly signpost this information. Another effect all technical workshops are now be encouraged to think about sustainability in their context and to include content as this one of the core categories. Additionally, something I need to educate myself more in is sustainable website design. Websites, particularly the more complex and highly designed, generate C02 and accumulatively across the whole of the internet this is a large-scale issue. I’m hoping to enrol in a course like Product for Net Zero, so that I can robustly apply sustainable practices to my work.
In one of my other blog posts I considered how the practice of learning technology itself could be decolonised by being critical of and rejecting the humanist pedagogies that so often pervade our practice. Co-design, between staff and students, is a tangible way I feel I can work towards enacting this. Similarly, adopting a universal design for learning approach – where learners are engaged, represented, and can act and express themselves – gives me the tools to work on this. I am committed to continually engaging with this and being awake to new methods, approaches, and perspectives.