PG Cert 2025

Another reason for the blog reluctance outlined in Blog 1, was that students said they wanted to be able to process their ideas privately before sharing them with others. The students’ position countered two key requirements for blogs, the first is that ongoing thinking is shared as it emerges (i.e. an early stage in the learning), which I explore here and secondly that this thinking is shared with others (See Blog 3).

In part, immediate sharing within blogs provides a way of tracking and therefore encouraging activity. I must do something to show I am doing something. However, blogs are designed to provoke a particular mode of activity described as engagement. Engagement in this blog, and in MA Performance: Society, is positioned as dialogue with the specific materials/activities (articles, discussions workshops) identified by the course. I notice my joy when a student name checks an activity or reading from class in their submission. Perhaps blogs are popular in HE because in part they act as a form of reassurance for tutors that they are heard – but does this make them genuine tools for higher level learning?

Engagement with course materials could easily be evidenced within a long form essay but blogs invite students to demonstrate their ongoing engagement: their week-by-week encounters with new ideas. Unlike essays, which require time for processing and deeper thought, blogs invite students to reveal early, fresh responses and feelings around the work. Potentially, at its best, the form encourages an articulation of the situated generation of new knowledge: I encountered this at this point and now I think this. This processual activity has the potential to encourage a positional awareness in students, as Morris argues, regarding the way they ‘make meaning of the information they acquire in the context of their own prior beliefs and experiences.’ (Morris 2018:68).

In phenomenological terms, all knowledge is generated in the encounter of that which is long known and immediately experienced (Fraleigh 2009). But the way I am writing here – has a summative tone. This might be because as a dance researcher, like my students, I generate knowledge through practice– that is my process, my immediate response. Sense making does not always take place through words, which I use more often as a summative tool to share findings. This connects to another complexity of blogs, although facilitating images and film, is that they are predicated on words, which makes a staying with the processual quite hard.

Sharing anything early on can feel vulnerable, as findings may be partial, superficial or just not very interesting. This writing is not as good as writing I would do at the end of a year of study. An assessment predicated on revealing process, however, makes sense for an arts course where refining process is assumed to refine the resulting artworks. If a student doesn’t already work like this, then blog forms would encourage them do so.  For students already engaged in reflective cycles, as the MAPS students were, blogs may feel like interruptions, demanding pre-emptive conclusions.  

Next steps

So, whilst this blog has made me think about blogging as a way of evidencing reflective activity, blogs still feel like a medium where early insights can be ‘sentenced to meaning’ (Phelan 1997:17). Going forward, I would be interested in designing assessments for MAPS with a greater distinction between methods and outcomes. Perhaps the blog could still be used to generate/make processes visible but students are not required to make sense of it until much later?

References

Fraleigh, S. (2018) Back to the Dance Itself: Phenomenologies of the Body in Performance. University of Illinois Press: Chicago.

Morris, M. A. (2018) Somewhere in between: Blogging as an intermediate and accessible space. Journal of Writing in Creative Practice. Vol 11:1, pp 67-81.

Phelan, P. (1997) Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories. London: Routledge.

Hernández-Ramos, P. (2004). Web logs and online discussions as tools to promote reflective practice. Journal of Interactive Online Learning, Vol 3:1, Summer.

In the introduction to the UAL PG Cert programme, someone asked how much writing would be needed? The reply was, not to worry (equating writing with anxiety?) as smaller written tasks were used to align with the reflective unit aims. So why might a reflective blog align more directly with the reflective learning aims of a PG cert than a longer form essay/paper?

I am course leader for MA Performance: Society, which uses reflective blogs as forms of assessment in several units to encourage and evidence critically reflective practice. Built into its assessment model is an invite to demonstrate reflective processual engagement – careful thought about what you are doing and how – that leads to learning – here seen as evidence that something changes either in your understanding of your practice or in the practice itself.

The students on MAPS are mature, over 50% have specific learning differences and they are all experienced socially engaged artists. In Unit 1, they responded to the invite to blog by offering work in any other format such as google doc, websites, word docs and paper. Online educational specialist Lindsay Jordan argues that blogs provide ‘a route to learning that is active and interactive, independent and collaborative [and] can be conducive to reflection on situations and experiences’ (Jordan 2009:6). In blogs 1, 2 and 3, I touch on some of the complexities of these claims both through my experience of writing this blog and the polite refusal of my students to write theirs.

Learning new platforms

One of the reasons students gave for not using blog forms was that, as experienced practitioners with established ways of documenting/analysing process, they found the demand to learn a new platform to demonstrate process irritating.  Hindley and Clughen (2018) note that despite digital familiarity, most students do not use blog software. They advise spending time ‘scaffolding’ the form and we are offered blogging video guides in the PG Cert. Personalising a UAL myblog to reflect an individual reflective style (media, format etc) is possible but requires investing time in the software. It’s worth noting that this was written in Word and transferred to the blog form.

Although there is a dominant narrative ‘that blogging offers a more inclusive genre of writing than traditional forms of academic scholarship’ (Hindley and Clughen 2018:84), it also brings additional technical and time demands, that can act as barriers for PG and mature students. As the course encourages responsive and individual modes of engagement, we allowed these different forms of submissions: their reflective blogs were still reflective, but not blogs.  What I missed, and would change next time, is using their resistance as an opportunity to look at the relationship between assessment form and learning outcomes. This would be an interesting way to explore parallel drives for inclusive practices within HE and social practice contexts (See Education Act of 1993, Tomlinson report 1996).

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, L. (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.