PG Cert 2025

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.

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.