In their article ‘Key aspects of teaching and learning in the visual arts,’ Alison Shreeve, Shân Wareing and Linda Drew outline the benefits for students of working with external partners:
Students can put their knowledge into practice through collaborative work with partners. These can be business, community or schools links, but the student takes on the role of practitioner with a client from the world beyond the university. These kinds of interactions enable students to feel that they are capable and are learning the additional social interaction skills that will be needed on graduation. (Shreeve, Wareing & Drew, 2008)
These points apply equally to journalism students and while I agree with all of them in principle, in practice I have worked on a dozen client projects with journalism and publishing students at LCC with varying degrees of success. I am going to describe briefly one successful and one less successful ones
Collaborative project with MeeToo
The unit was “Professional Practice”, intended to prepare BA Journalism 2nd years for their future careers. It involves an element of work experience, and in this case students who had been unable to secure placements produced content for MeeToo, an award-winning safe social media app that allows young people to talk anonymously about difficult things with other people of a similar age or experience. This was pre-covid, and the co-founder, Suzi Godson, a former graphic design student at St Martins, briefed the students to write 500 pieces about their own experience of mental health issues, gave them feedback half-way through the 10-week unit and again at the end, all in person at LCC.
Suzi Godson as a St Martins student
Support from me as their tutor in honing ideas, interpreting and realising them appropriately for the client was part of a three way collaboration between me, the client and the students.
Setting up such opportunities requires support from the tutor who can maximise the learning opportunities through preparing students with ideas about what to expect … and through constructing more permanent learning resources to explain processes, give examples and hear from employers, clients and the students themselves. (Shreeve et al. 2008)
Another collaborative aspect was the involvement of the course leader, who brought her own perspective and was very supportive in explaining how to access facilities such as printing facilities, recording and photography studios, and as she said “how to ace the assessment”.
The outcome was that the majority of students had their work published in a handbook produced in 2019 by MeeToo, which went on to win a prodigious award as the Health and Social Care Book of the Year from the British Medical Association – a win for the client as well as the students and me. I didn’t mark the reflective reports for this unit so I can’t measure the success based on grades, but if having this to include on a CV is a measure of success, this was an A+.
The award-winning MeeToo handbook
Magazines for Moshi Moshi and Campus Society
Third year students on the same degree have to produce content for a client, a project that contributes to half the marks in their final degree. Examples I was involved in include an A5 magazine for an independent record label, Moshi Moshi and in another year, for Campus Society, a social network for students. The difficulty here was that the cohort – c. 30 – is very big to be working as a team on small format magazines of less than 50 pages, and totally unrepresentative of the size of magazine teams in the real world.
The students found it hard to agree on the design of the magazines, which made them visually incoherent and inconsistent, and in the end was imposed on them by design staff, causing resentment. Working in sub-teams to produce content was challenging if some students failed to turn up to editorial meetings or deliver the content they had agreed to create. This was despite sessions on how to work successfully as a team – vital in the magazine industry – during which we discussed in class what they did and didn’t like group projects, and agreed to a code of conduct, as well as teaching on theories of collaboration.
Students shared on yellow stickies what they don’t enjoy about collaboration in preparatory sessions
In both cases the clients did not seem to be very engaged with the projects. The staff at Moshi Moshi were hard to get hold of, and didn’t cooperate very hopefully with eg, providing images of bands. While Campus Society kindly invited us to have several of the unit sessions at their building in Soho, our contacts on their staff were often absent and unavailable for feedback.
As the client project contributes to half the marks in their final year, this lack of enthusiasm and engagement is worrying and may contribute to poor NSS results for the course. Course tutors are left picking up the pieces and doing a lot of the final production work themselves. As a preparation for the real world of magazine journalism, which is all about teamwork, this leaves a lot to be desired.
Possible solutions:
- Offer the students a choice of clients to work with so they feel they have more agency – but this is a) time consuming and b) can make final assessment problematic if they are working on different projects. Other degree courses at UAL must encounter this, it would be interesting to know how they respond.
- A design staff member could create a flexible design template that allows the students a certain amount of creativity and leeway – this would mimic how art directors work in the real world, creating templates that allow flexibility but create a clear visual identity for the product.
- This project is always taught by a team of three tutors. Build in time for tutors to reach out to students who are not attending sub-team meetings to understand why and see what could be done to encourage them to take part.
References
Shreeve A, Wareing S, Drew L. 2008. A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education – Enhancing Academic Practice, third edition, Routledge.