My teaching context is that I predominantly teach at LCF across 22 BA+MA courses, and at LCC on specific BA+MA courses, all of which contain majority ‘international students’.
Thus, acknowledging my positionality as a white, cis male, British, first language English, MA RCA educated person who has not lived abroad from UK for a period of more than 6months, nor studied abroad in a non-first language English speaking institution — I wholly acknowledge that I have little knowledge and no experience on what its empirically like to live abroad in a country in which you are both trying to fully master the local language and study in a formal higher education setting.
This limitation to my lived educative experience means that my expectation of the amount of work produced or understanding which is grasped in certain lessons and evidenced in formative or summative assessments, is sometimes out of balance to what is actually possible for the students positional context. I cannot truly in any meaningful way understand what its like to be in a foreign country where I am expected to both listen, learn, understand, and then communicate my leaning all in another language. Nor can I begin to understand the nuanced social and cultural complexities and/or challenges which would present themselves when moving abroad to a different time zone and cultural sphere.
I propose an intervention of beginning to workshop ways of re-working and diversifying visual references within my teaching materials, broadening them from a Western and Euro-centric position using a loose co-design approach.
I teach a lot of graphic design, visual communication, and moving image foundations and my lessons contain mostly Western/Euro-centric references, in part due to my own ignorance, and in part its due to me being conscious of what the impact might be if I unknowingly select a reference for purely aesthetic reasons (without deep research) and what its cultural significance or legacy could be.
References
TED (2020) Climate justice can’t happen without racial justice | David Lammy. Youtube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkIpeO1r0NI (Accessed: May 27, 2024).
TED (2019) Tackling the “BPOC” attainment gap in UK universities | Shirley Anne Tate | TEDxRoyalCentralSchool. Youtube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPMuuJrfawQ (Accessed: May 27, 2024).
Sabri, D. (2017) Students’ Experience of Identity and Attainment at UAL, King’s College, London
Willcocks, J. (2024) Object-based Learning. Online, 24 January [Event programme].
Willcocks, J. and Mahon, K. (2023) “The potential of online object-based learning activities to support the teaching of intersectional environmentalism in art and design higher education,” Art Design & Communication in Higher Education, 22(2), pp. 187–207. doi: 10.1386/adch_00074_1.