PG Cert 2025

The UAL video introducing the social model of disability asks if people feel as if the world was not made for them. In the following series of interviews offered to us in this Unit focusing on inclusion, the participants reference how a lack of adaptation and an awareness of the impact of intersecting characteristics, in particular, creates disabilities.

Chay Brown refers to the non-verbal insider codes at play within certain male gay social spaces. He articulates the intersectional complexity of trying to decode these spaces as someone who is a) recently moving into this community as a transman and b) as someone with neuro divergent traits that may make intuitive grasp of social codes harder. Brown’s interview makes it clear how an emphasis on one protected characteristic within social justice models may end up excluding part of the community if it is not considered within a matrix of difference (Crenshaw, 1990). The word ‘community’ is transformed in Brown’s practice into something responsive and inclusive rather than something rigidly formed around one characteristic.

‘If you don’t see us we have no place to be’ (Christine Sun Kim, 2024)

Christine Sun Kim and Ade Adepitan draw attention to the intersection of visibility and ability. An absence of representation can signal a diminished value and reduced sense of belonging. UAL’s pedagogic podcast ‘Belonging’ describes this feeling as a key factor in marginalised student retention and achievement. It is noticeable that the 2023 exit stats for disabled students indicate higher overall achievement but lower retention rates: feeling as if you have a place is clearly key.

[It’s noticeable that I have just skipped from Ade Adepitan’s discussion of race to a point about disability. There are hierarchies of protected characteristics that pervade our thinking, which reflect systemic systems of oppression, and there are characteristics that are easier to talk about than others because they evoke feelings of shame and responsibility.]

‘and I think I’m just greedy too’ (Christine Sun Kim, 2024)

It is useful to think of the relationship between desire and disability. Can Christine Sun Kim take up all the space or take back all the effort and time she is owed?

Christine Sun Kim’s inclusion of her daughter in her work brings her role as a carer with her role as artist and deaf activist into the same spaces. Being a carer intersects with other challenges for many of my students, and it is positive that this is now acknowledged at UAL. However, every time an in-person meeting is called with a week’s notice, or scheduled after 5.00, then carers are discriminated against and practices like these remain common at UAL.

Over 50% of the students I teach on MA Performance: Society work with disabilities. For most, their ISA documented disabilities intersect with several other protected characteristics that are not documented. It is interesting that this intersectional approach is not formally explored within disability services. There may be issues connected to privacy that prevent this, but despite the emphasis on social models in the UAL video, practices still seem tied to a medical model of disability. I am interested in finding ways to address this.

‘What do I need to do?’ (Helen, Unit 6: 2025)

The Unit 6 assignment within MA Performance; Society includes a reflective journal, visual essay and presentation. These multiple parts are designed to offer inclusive and flexible modes of engagement. Whilst this design has been commented on positively by both the students and the external examiner, it is not as straight forward as a singular final exhibition or thesis, and students can be unclear about what is expected from them.

In their article examining good feedback practice, Macfarlane & Nicol (2006) argue that independent learning requires students to be able to identify the relationship between their present levels of achievement and what is required by the assignment. Without a clear understanding of what the assignment goals are it is impossible to learn, i.e. self-regulate and develop your own work towards this. They go on to point out that understanding assignment requirements (aligned with course learning outcomes) is not a simple process of ‘transmission’ (Macfarlane & Nicol 2006:200) and supporting this can be challenging.

Evaluation

With Macfarlane & Nicol’s work in mind, I have been reflecting on two key ways students understand the Unit 6 learning aims: reviewing past work and engaging in peer/tutor feedback.

At the start of the unit, students requested previous examples of work to help them understand the assessment requirements. Initially, I hesitated, as I have observed that while exemplars can be useful, they sometimes lead to emulation rather than deep understanding. Care was taken to advise us on the PG Cert, for example, to engage critically with the sample work shared with us. To support critical engagement in MAPS, I provided past examples of Unit 6 work alongside a series of workshops on critical reflection and postgraduate expectations of depth, which is central to the assignment.  So far, students have found this approach helpful.

Macfarlane & Nicol argue that if feedback is solely tutor-led, it does not promote self-regulation—the ability to refine work in response to external goals. I agree that pointing out that a student needs to go ‘deeper’, within formative or summative feedback, does not necessarily help them understand what ‘deeper’ means concerning their own work and how this might be achieved? Liz Bunting also points out that feedback needs to be developed relationally and that what she terms ‘compassionate feedback’ (Bunting, 2022) which honours students’ positionality and expertise, is key to fostering the sense of belonging explored in Case Study 2.

Currently, formative feedback is generated both within group sharing sessions, where students present early work for peer discussion, and individual tutorials with me as the unit leader. However, although peer and tutor contexts are employed, I am aware that there is a distinction between tutor-led feedback, where work is discussed in relation to the assignment criteria, and peer feedback sessions where the discussion is less anchored to the criteria.*

Going forward

I plan to align some of the peer feedback sessions more closely with the assessment criteria so that students can explore how each other’s work meets or engages with these benchmarks.

I will bring in a peer feedback exercise that directly employs the Unit 6 assessment feedback format.

I will consciously aim to co-produce feedback with students in tutorials rather than arriving with it fully formed.

References

Nicol, D. J. & Macfarlane-Dick, D. (2006) ‘Formative assessment and self-regulated learning: a model and seven principles of good feedback practice’. Studies in Higher Education, Vol 31: 2, pp 199-218.

Amina Akhmedova, A., Bunting, L. et al. (2022) Interrogating Spaces: Compassionate Feedback. UAL Teaching, Learning and Employability Exchange. [Podcast] October 11, 2022.

Keeping it together

‘they’re cutting the course before the first apples have fallen’ (Sarah, Unit 6: 2024)

In the UAL podcast ‘Belonging in Higher Education’ (2020) Neil Current argues that the key to achieving a sense of belonging – a state directly linked to student outcomes – is a feeling of connection. In January 2024, MA Performance: Society suspended recruitment, pending closure. This decision has negatively impacted both students’ and staff’s sense of belonging at UAL.  There are now only 6 students in the group, as some chose to transfer to other courses, and several have life factors which means their attendance is necessarily sporadic. The remaining students have voiced a need for greater connection with each other. The challenge is to find ways of maintaining a sense of connectivity and belonging within this small online group in Teach Out.

Current and future ways forwards

The following interventions are designed to signal to the student that their presence is important, and that they belong and have a place. The first involves setting up peer-to-peer interviews, where students meet outside of class to ask questions about each other’s work. This has worked well to create a connection with the students who regularly miss class and students said they found it useful to do. To encourage a sense of visibility and accountability, students are asked to document/share their discussions via their Unit 6 Padlet (see below), which I will respond to. We will repeat this as part of a peer-to-peer feedback process later in the year.

In the tutor review of my teaching practice, I was encouraged to give students more agency by inviting them to lead parts of the session. Drawing on this advice, I am planning a series of sessions after easter where students deliver mini workshops that supports the class in an aspect of the assignment. If they are unable to attend, they will be asked to send a workshop plan we can follow. This will a) offer students a useful opportunity to practice running workshops b) make them consider in depth what the assignment asks for and what they, and their peers, might need and c) promote a sense of agency and responsibility within the group.

In their article on teaching in online spaces, Lewis & Leigh (2022) promote the use of online virtual spaces to generate a sense of community. Platforms such as Padlet and Miro are used extensively in online teaching as modelled in the online PG course group. In Unit 1 of MAPS each student was given a Padlet to put their work in progress on. These Padlets were public enabling us to ‘drop in’ and see what each other were up to. Dulfer et al. (2024) argue that peer-to-peer learning is an essential part of community building and so it was great to hear the students suggest bringing this device back into Unit 6 to help maintain peer-to-peer connectivity on the course. Students have now been given Unit 6 Padlets and asked to populate them with their thinking so far by March 17^th.

Finally, I have sought funding to bring two alumni back in as GTAs within the class after easter. The hope is that this will act as a tangible reminder of the wider community of which these last students are a part.

References 

Currant, N., Jethnani, H. et al. (2020) Interrogating Spaces: Belonging in Higher Education. [Podcast] July 22, 2020.

Dulfer, N., Gowing, A., & Mitchell, J. (2024). Building belonging in online classrooms: relationships at the core. Teaching in Higher Education, pp 1–17.

Lewis, L. & Leigh Ross, S. (2022) Home sweet home: achieving belonging and engagement in online learning spaces. Spark: UAL Creative Teaching and Learning Journal. Vol 5:1, pp 71-81.

 ‘Thank you for navigating through the sometimes awkward moments of my silence.’ (Koichiro, Unit 6: 2024)

Context
Over 50% of MA Performance: Society students have specific learning differences, many of which involve challenges around information processing. Some students have said that responding to direct questions in online classes can be stressful because they need time to compose their responses. The capacity to respond to an immediate prompt is complicated by the fact that most MAPS students speak English as an additional language.

The assessment of student engagement is often predicated on their contribution to discussion. Being able to respond quickly and immediately to questions (putting your hand up first in primary school through to mastering a PhD Viva) is still regarded as an indicator of capacity. Over the last 3 years of teaching online, I have gotten better at giving people time to respond, or what Karen Harris refers to as ‘embracing the silence’ (Harris 2022:101). I am more aware of the role of my ego in my desire for immediate responses, and the challenge a faceless room makes to the notion of the tutor as ‘all-seeing and all-powerful’ (Harris 2022:101). Silence in online teaching, has a particular intensity but in no way means that students are not engaging. Some students, such as the one I quote from above, draw on the work of writers such as Ahsan (2022) and embrace silence as a form of activism. Silence no longer makes me anxious, but I am keen to keep finding ways of facilitating engagement that are not predicated on the immediate (debate style) response that still dominates HE.

Current and future ways forwards

I currently invite students to respond to a question by putting 3 words, or an image, in the chat. These individual words/visuals invite a more affective engagement with the question (what the question evokes rather than how you might answer it) and reduce the demand for immediate cognitive solutions. We then use the chat as prompts for further discussion –effectively using the words/images as a bridge between question and response. This technique successfully moves the initial emphasis away from language and demand for fully formed ideas but still asks for an immediate response.

I also employ tasks where students are invited to bring in a 5 minute visual or verbal response to a question, connected to the suggested reading/listening/watching materials, for the following week. This device gives people time to prepare and works well but can invite a summative style of response rather than a process of thinking together.

Moving forwards 
What I would like to try next are strategies that invite something in between immediate and asynchronous responses. Devices that, as Harris writes, invite students to listen until they feel they have ‘formulated something worth bringing to the conversation’ (Harris 2022:101). For example, asking a question to frame class thinking at the start of a session and inviting responses to it halfway through and then again at the end. Or creating a conscious gap between provocation and response by giving everyone ten minutes to read and reflect following a prompt.

I’m also going to try a technique I saw teacher Sophie Hope employ where she offered a selection of pre-prepared questions that students could choose from in a Q and A context. This device took the pressure off forming a ‘brilliant’ question whilst keeping student agency and interaction.

References

Ahsan, H. (2017) Shy Radicals: The Antisystemic Politics of the Militant Introvert. Book Works: London.

Harris, K. (2022) Embracing the silence: introverted learning and the online Classroom. Sparks, Vol 5:1, pp 101-104.

This workshop uses embodied research methods to introduce the idea of embodied knowledge. The aims of this session are to

• Introduce the idea of embodied knowledge
• Introduce embodied research methods drawn from somatic practice

Plan

Introduce myself/workshop aims. 2 mins

Movement Tasks – 10 mins

# 1 leaning forwards

Can we all move forward in our seats?

Introduce connections between movement and learning

# 2 – rest your head in your hands.

Use this position to introduce different ways of inhabiting and drawing on the body such as

• Formal externally measurable properties (what it looks like from a distance)
• Representational or positional qualities (gender, age, etc)
• Felt sense (emotional, affective sensations)
• Situated and temporal conditions (the temperature in the room etc)

Jot down notes about the experience  

Place 3 words that resonate for you from these notes into the chat

Introduction to conceptual frames (7 mins)

• Concept of the term Somatic and embodied knowledge and how these challenge traditional knowledge forms

• Western forms of analytic knowledge and Other (and othered) forms of knowledge

Show example of body story – Andrea Olson (2014) ( 1 min)

Question for discussion: How do you bring embodied experience into your practice/research/teaching?

key decisions

I indicated that I was not going to ask participants to share their reflective notes with the group. Instead, I invited them to share just 3 words from their notes. This is something I often do. If you know you have to share your thoughts – you write things that are shareable, potentially missing less formed, and more vulnerable insights. Selecting three words also prompts people to refine their initial thoughts, decontextualizing their findings and encouraging a shift from autobiographical insights to shareable findings.

Responses and reflection

mindfulness, awareness, relaxation 

relaxation, soothing

heartbeats, calm

[Key words offered by participants in the chat]

People fed back that the workshop made complex ideas understandable and could be applied to a variety of contexts. They noted the calm delivery and how the work brought them into focus.

Jumping into language

People were positive about the way the workshop led from embodied exploration into theoretical frameworks but noted the step between the different modalities (movement to words). I rushed this transition from sensing to conceptualising – potentially reinforcing the potential for embodied research to be positioned as relaxation/soft findings and the slides/text to be the real knowledge. Perhaps moving from sensation to private notes, to verbal articulation to written words in the future might act as a better bridge between knowledges.

Another factor was that although I followed the lesson plan quite closely, I  forgot to share slides pointing to key definitions and further references. This was important because people mentioned they wanted reassurance that we would return to the more theoretical concepts and these slides would have helped with this.

Another part of the feedback involved recognising how unnerving it can be to decenter what we know.  Going forward, it would be useful to situate my practice and acknowledge the place of privilege, and expertise from which I speak. The concepts introduced in the work are specialised. Take one step outside of this highly specialised area, and I know very little and it would be useful to acknowledge this.

The MA Performance: Society (MAPS) course is technically a low-residency program, but in practice, the majority of the course is delivered online. Students only meet in person once a year, and some never meet due to travel constraints. As a result, generating a sense of belonging has always felt important.

In the article titled Home Sweet Home: Achieving Belonging and Engagement in Online Learning Spaces, Lewis and Leigh Ross write that ‘successful virtual environments’ support experiences of ‘ownership, connection, and co-creation’ (Lewis & Leigh Ross, 2022:78). They go on to suggest that a creating a shared sense of space is key to nurturing and strengthening learning. Reading this article reminded me of how much emphasis the course places on locating devices such as arriving together as a group, arriving into a digital space, and arriving in our bodies as we begin each session. For example, at the start of the course we use an interactive map so we can see where we all are.

We spend time looking at how far apart or close we are. We then added to this map by uploading a guided tour called Where I am now, that students were invited to do during the summer. It is both a light-hearted task and a profound one, as students must begin to identify what is important to them about their sense of place. They are invited to revisit this assignment at the end of the course to see how their perspectives have changed.

Situated encounters

Lewis & Leigh Ross promote the use of dance as an icebreaker. I see now, that much of the work in MAPS concerns devices that bring awareness to the body and our immediate environments into our shared encounter within a digital space. One example includes the performance score called ‘The Body as Home’ by Andrea Olsen (2018), where students are invited to consider their embodied, rather than their artistic or academic, history.

Other strategies we use include:

• Looking out of the window and sharing what we see.
• Conducting a “temperature check” literally and metaphorically
• Adjusting their environment for comfort (e.g., using blankets or fans or tea).

Acknowledging whether we are hot, cold, confused, joyful or hungry invites openness and the possibility of change. I see that these methods invite a recognition of learning as something situated and relational within the course.

Belonging

Dulfer et al. argue that ‘[r]egularity of contact, its stability, as well as affective concern can promote a sense of belonging’ (Dulfer et al. 2024:2).  In my experience, reliability is pivotal in strengthening the potentially fragile connectivity of online work. A sense of home is generated through regular structures such as meeting at the same time every week and a weekly ‘Monday email’ detailing student successes, news, and weekly tasks. We also created maps of things we can lean on, identifying our local and global communities of support.

Moving forward

UAL has suspended this course and launched UAL Online, which is structured around asynchronous content. Whilst I am sad to lose the rich intensity of synchronous connection within digital spaces, I am interested in developing asynchronous tasks that generate community such as chain-mail devising processes, accumulative collaborations or online collaborative processes where students create work together by responding to material asynchronously in Miro or other online spaces.

References

Dulfer, N., Gowing, A., & Mitchell, J. (2024). Building belonging in online classrooms: relationships at the core. Teaching in Higher Education, pp 1–17.

Lewis, L. & Leigh Ross, S. (2022) Home sweet home: achieving belonging and engagement in online learning spaces. Spark: UAL Creative Teaching and Learning Journal. Vol 5: 1 (2022) pp 71–81.

Blog forms hold an auratic trace of journalling. They invite an externalising of an inner dialogue, which might normally remain a private part of long-form writing. Much of the writing around blogs (Jordan 2009, Hindley & Clughen 2019) aligns immediate feelings or responses with a quality of authenticity. So, in a blog, you can state your real thoughts as opposed to what are presumably less ‘real’ thoughts due to the processing required within long-form writing?

The learning premise around blogs centres on the way they allow us to bring our authentic selves, mainly positioned as vulnerable confusions and feelings about an issue, into a community of others. But blogs within HE operate within constructed rather than self-forming communities, which may also encourage a projection of self onto the page. I am aware of my performance of self in these words, for example, and the potential to be seen as resistant to blogs as an anti-elitist device.

Hindley & Clughen (2018) argue that bringing together private voices with critical discourse helps learners find their identity as researchers. MAPS students spoke positively about how the reflective blog/not blogs permitted them to bring something of themselves to the research, which is an important part of the shift from UG mapping to PG generation of knowledge. Garrison argues that a bringing of self, which he describes as a ‘social presence’ is crucial to the ‘facilitation of critical thinking’ (Garrison et al 1999 cited in Jordan 2009:4). So, despite my reservations Blogs did work as a starting place that helped develop the rigour and criticality required by these complex writing forms.

Going forward

Blogs could be used more consciously to introduce issues of positionality that run through the postfoundational perspective, MAPS encourages. In the final unit in year 2, students are invited to engage with creative/critical, ficto-critic, and autoethnographic methods, that celebrate the value of lived experience in dialogue with discourse. These approaches acknowledge feelings/vulnerability as an important way of knowing the world and blog forms could be a good starting point for thinking about where and how different types of knowledge are valued.

References

Hindley, D. and Clughen, L. (2018) ‘Yay! Not another academic essay!’ Blogging as an alternative academic genre. Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, Vol 11:1, pp 83-7.

Jordan, Lindsay (2009) Engaging students in the curriculum through the use of blogs; how and why? In: The Fourth International Blended Learning Conference, 17th – 18th June 2009, University of Hertfordshire.