Summary of Experience/Resource
“The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.” (Audre Lorde – New York — 1980s)
In this post I’m reflecting on a quote presented in workshop two which sparked me to reflect on my teaching philosophy, and how my “persona” as a lecturer could be enhanced to provoke reflection in my own students.
I especially thought back to my experience teaching a ‘crit’ style module in Human-Computer Interaction (1st Year BSc Computer Science students). Students had to present an interactive system to encourage people to think about decolonisation in their everyday life working at High Holborn. Emphasis here was on everyday use of technology, which is unobtrusive. I recall one group who wanted to use virtual reality, and my feedback consistently in crits was that this required people to use the headsets, creating a barrier for every day, unobtrusive use. Their final report submission on this project did incredibly well: the VR was important to them; they had crafted strong arguments for its use; and pushed back on my expert critiques.
Reflection on its Relevance and Application to Context
The notion of sparking learning like a riot reflects something important to my teaching – for students to think for themselves, identify their interests, and intelligently argue their point of view. A challenge of the crit method is that often my own expert design knowledge is given to students – power imbalances often lead to my own feedback being taken as always correct (McDonald and Michela, 2019). Furthermore, I felt as these crits were centred on considering decolonisation, that my own background as a White British male lacked insight from lived experience and more so my domain knowledge.
The quote made me consider a concept in the performing arts of Brechtian alienation – where audiences are exposed to the façade of on-stage action to spark their reflection. Considering lecturing as a type of performance (Street, 2006), I wondered whether there was opportunity to alienate myself, self-critique, and draw attention to the power imbalance. Would this encourage student’s critical thinking and provoke them to push back on my suggestions? Would this encourage student’s reflection on what they are being taught in the curriculum, and spark meta reflections on what they’re learning? To push back and create work they are truly interested in and proud of, instead of demonstrating performative learning without deeper insight (Draper and Waldman, 2013).
Next Steps
To explore the potential here, I will explore literature applying alienation techniques to education. For example, Demirdiş (2021) suggests that teachers could have students roleplay different perspectives to defamiliarize them and spark unique reflection, or to illuminate power imbalances by engaging students in discussion on this.
One simple first-step I will take in my next crits, discussed with colleges in the workshop, is to present my own background and biases before crit’s – to expose my own background, assumptions and influences. Students will then be more aware of my own positionality and might be able to consider and write about this more concretely when reading my feedback.
References
Demirdiş, M. (2021) ‘Bertolt Brecht’s Theatrical Techniques’ Connection with Critical Pedagogy and Their Usability in Learning Environments’, in. Available at: https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:252019494.
Draper, S. and Waldman, J. (2013) ‘Deep and Surface Learning: The Literature’. Available at: https://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/courses/archive/CERE12-13-safari-archive/topic9/webarchive-index.html.
McDonald, J.K. and Michela, E. (2019) ‘The design critique and the moral goods of studio pedagogy’, Design Studies, 62, pp. 1–35. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2019.02.001.
Street, P. (2006) What a performance! recognising performing arts skills in the delivery of lectures in higher education. PhD Thesis. University of Greenwich,.