This online session was led by Judy Willocks, head of the museum and study collection at CSM. She described her own experience of engaging students with this wonderful collection, much of it consisting of the work of former students.
One type of workshop she does with students is based on ‘object based learning’: bringing an object from the collections to a workshop group of students and observing how they respond to it: what kind of assumptions do they make? Are they interested in the material it’s made of, how it feels and looks? This type of tactile, sensory approach is called haptic, a new word for me. Do they want to know what it’s used for, or the “story” behind it – where did it come from, who made it, why? This helps students understand their own approach to learning, and their teachers in turn.
It emphasised for me how, as learners, we all bring different approaches and attitudes to the classroom and as teachers it’s important that we are aware of this – it can help us understand why some students may not seem to be engaging with the way we teach. I found this article on the UAL website about the Creative Mindsets project helped to put this into a more academic context, with useful suggestions such as
“Be careful not to compare your experiences
with another person’s. This often invalidates
or minimizes a person’s experiences (…).
If someone is pointing out how what you
said left them feeling, try not to explain or
rationalize what you said or why you said it.
Sometimes it’s necessary to just say, ‘I didn’t
realize what I said was inappropriate…or hurt
you in that way, I’m sorry.’” (D’Aunno and Heinz. 2017)
Journalism students will mostly be curious about storytelling – who, what when, when why how etc – and perhaps visual aspects if they are interested in graphic design. How their articles/zines/blogs etc look maybe as important or more important to them than the actual written content. My response as a a journalist is always about the story.
Judy also talked about the challenge of having to run these workshops online when the students are unable to handle the objects. We then had a chance to see how this had been overcome in a practical session with Georgina Orgill and Jaqueline Winston Silk from the archive collections at LCC. We had to think of an object and describe it, describe an object that we were show an image of, and describe an object from the digital collection, then reflect on how we had reacted to each one differently, and the ease/challenges of describing it. My notes are below.
It was very interesting to hear how fellow students had reacted to the objects in different ways, and upheld my observation that I will look for clues that answer who? what? etc, while others might be much more interested in how something looks.
References
https://www.arts.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0023/203288/Creative-Mindsets-Handbook-PDF-3.2MB.pdf