Tommy Ramsay's blog

As part of my research, I asked one of the tutors from the UAL drawing team for a chat and an opportunity to ask them some questions related to my ARP around methods teaching drawing

In your experience as a drawing tutor, how important do you think teaching technical skills (e.g. geometric and anatomical) are for students?

The question around technical skills, I’ve done a workshop when I did one with foundation students with like drawing with SketchUp and I use digital drawing a lot in my work. 
And I guess thinking about like the drawings that I make is kind of working drawings, and because they’re on computer aided design programmes, there’s that potential for like an output. So like in 3D print, I can laser cut the lines or that kind of thing.  The drawn lines become vectors, so it becomes a tool part to thinking about how you can translate that or make something from it. But I haven’t done any other like technical skills workshops. And that’s almost just like an intro. So it’s like this is a programme. If you want to like, yeah, learn this more, play around with it then. 
It’s kind of like really bare bones and I think that’s it’s always useful to kind of try different skills. 

How much of your teaching practice as a drawing tutor is dedicated to technical instruction?

The answer to this was not a lot, most of the tutoring work was one to one tutorials. A link was made to the splitting of roles with Technicians and Lecturers’Tutors. This is something which plays out less in roles within painting department or drawing even, but is something which is very much present in other courses such as textiles etc.

We also discussed the incentive being placed on students to pro-actively seek out workshops and there own resources and how this can be a barrier to learning:

“I think I don’t know if there’s like a lot of expectation on students to kind of see like almost learn things themselves or I guess that’s the framing of it’s like, it’s up to you to kind of seek these things out. 
And like go to workshops, but then even going, I don’t know. I feel like sometimes they find like going to the workshop quite intimidating. Definitely on my BA like I didn’t use any of. I barely use the workshops. And when I did start using it was like third year.”

This also made me reflect on my own experience as a student, on my MA at the RCA, trying to learn how to 3D print was challenging. Booking a slot was difficult and then travelling to another site in the hope of learning how to use Rhino. I then found myself speaking to a nice staff member who spoke fluently in Rhino but could not translate it in a way that made it accessible to me. This led my practice away from this line of working which is a shame.

Do you think observational or representational drawing can be taught by other, more holistic methods of teaching?

I think so. I mean again, like thinking back to my undergrads, someone brought in from Laban Dance School which is like in Deptford Creek and they did like a movement and choreography notation workshop which I thought was really interesting. And I guess it’s like thinking about mark making or I mean I guess also like notation probably spoke to me more because that’s yeah kind of like. 
I think I relate to drawing more in a kind of like, diagrams, notation type way? 
But yeah, I think thinking about like the role of the body and those kind of practises of drawing felt quite interesting. 

We discussed this at length and the different possibilities that experimental drawing can offer up to student intuitively and then cognitively. How not accessing the thinking or self aware part of your brain can allow you access other freer modes of working. The technique or method used can then in turn be understood at a later date and woven into ways of working.

Is an article that has been useful to think about my experimental drawing intervention. How do we access improvisation, and can such a thing as a truly free experience or drawing exist, or is every drawing and moment tied to other lines and other experiences? 

Taking a Lone For a Walk starts off with a defining the difference between “connecting” and “active” lines, this can also be interpreted as compositional lines and improvisatory lines. 

“… ‘connecting lines’ which look like broken segments, each one joining a point and the next one. Active lines are traced by wayfaring, which involves creating a path where there is none, along the travelling itself, as Machado has celebrated in his poetry: 

As you walk, you make your own road, 

and when you look back 

you see the path 

you will never travel again. 

Traveler, there is no road; 

only a ship’s wake on the sea. 

(Machado and Berg 2003: 55) 

By wayfaring, the traveller goes on in ways that are minutely responsive and attentive to the changing surroundings and to her life history.” 1  

This link between drawing and walking feels very apt and neatly links the often used ‘taking a line for a walk’ idea around exploratory drawing. It is also a nice ways of thinking about how the mind works when we are consciously or unconsciously choosing where we take the line in our drawing. Nemirovsky and Dibley set a key part of ideology out from the start: they see the moment of making not as separate but as intrinsically tethered to the life experiences of the maker. I can only agree with this, we are not goldfish, each lived experience we have informs who we are, just as each line that we make in a painting or a drawing is informed by, holds the possibilities of each and every line we have made before.  

It is interesting for me to think about how our own tacit knowledge and experiences of life and of making feeds into the act of drawing line, even if the aim is to let go and to let our mind and the line we make, wander. This also tickles the edges of one of my own concerns about this way of working: does improvisation or a lowering of control tap into a way of making that is more personal, more level or does it merely widen the gap between those who have had the time/learning/education/privilege to investigate their work and themselves. Is a student in a more comfortable life more able to easily access this way of making, given that is can be seen as having no end product or verifiable outcome?  

The following quote is an account of a street encounter between Ricardo Nemirovsky and the artist and teacher Steven Lacy: 

“I took out my pocket tape recorder and asked him to describe in fifteen seconds the difference between composition and improvisation. He answered: ‘In fifteen seconds the difference between composition and improvisation is that in composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in fifteen seconds, while in improvisation you have fifteen seconds.” 2  

Is a fun definition of the difference between composing and improvising. In this way, composition can be read as a play between performance and editing, a way of making that flows in two different types of time and two differing types of connectivity or movement. When composing an image, there are moments of ‘making’ or engagement purely between the maker and the material, though perhaps I would argue that even in this material connection, the maker is working with pre-conceived ideas. In improvisations there is only one time of time flow, and that is the present moment of making. 

“Like wayfaring, improvising is a temporal practice open to the unanticipated and to the ongoing engagement with others, materials and instruments.” 3  

I like this quote as well and the notion that improvised drawing. In my experience of making improvised drawings as a practitioner and listening to and watching students make these drawings, it is a way of making work that is of the present moment, of the now and is connected to the conditions around you. This feels like a way of working that keeps things open and allows for a more direct access to the play between maker and materials. 

“Improvisation is neither chance nor a product of intelligent design, but the pre-eminent mode of live performance across all forms of life. Improvising entails openness to a quasi-autonomous play of forces, desires, inhibitions, memories, as well as of affects traversing materials, instruments and places” 4  

I agree with this, that line drawing and improvisation are an expression of an individuals journey, a journey that is both inner and also informed by our experiences and out knowledge of the materials we are using. If we have spent a number of years making, drawing and learning about these things, the line we are making will be different to if we did not have these experiences. 

“A lot of improvisors find improvisation worthwhile because of the possibilities. Things that can happen but perhaps rarely do. One of those things is that you are ‘taken out of yourself’. You can do something you didn’t realise you were capable of. Or you don’t appear to be fully responsible for what you are doing.” 5 

The openness to improvise, to play is one of the key reasons I am want my students to learn how to look and think for themselves. We each have our own individual experiences, if these connections are allowed to come through, then they will be present in something even as simple as a line drawing. For me, this way of thinking lowering on the focus of our own technical control on what we make, opens up a space for a connection and play with the materials we are using which makes space for surprising things to emerge. Surely it is more invigorating to work with something that can bend, shift and move in ways that we have not pre-determined? After all, the journeys and connections we make in life is not formed in a straight line. 

References

1. Nemirovsky, Ricardo and Dibley, Tam (2021), ‘“Taking a line for a walk”: On improvisatory drawing’, Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice, 6:2, pp. 253–71, https://doi.org/10.1386/drtp_00064_1, page 254 

2. Nemirovsky, Ricardo and Dibley, Tam (2021), ‘“Taking a line for a walk”: On improvisatory drawing’, Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice, 6:2, pp. 253–71, https://doi.org/10.1386/drtp_00064_1, page 255 

3. Nemirovsky, Ricardo and Dibley, Tam (2021), ‘“Taking a line for a walk”: On improvisatory drawing’, Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice, 6:2, pp. 253–71, https://doi.org/10.1386/drtp_00064_1, page 255 

4. Nemirovsky, Ricardo and Dibley, Tam (2021), ‘“Taking a line for a walk”: On improvisatory drawing’, Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice, 6:2, pp. 253–71, https://doi.org/10.1386/drtp_00064_1, page 264 

5. Nemirovsky, Ricardo and Dibley, Tam (2021), ‘“Taking a line for a walk”: On improvisatory drawing’, Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice, 6:2, pp. 253–71, https://doi.org/10.1386/drtp_00064_1, page 268 

This text by Sara Ahmed feels like such an important and succinct text that uncovers the transparency of the hierarchical racism prevalent within our educational system through the lenses of academic writing:

“A citational chain is created around theory: you become a theorist by citing other theorists that cite other theorists. Some of this work did interest me; but I kept finding that I wanted to challenge the selection of materials as well as how they were read.”1 

This quote on citational justice really gets to the core of many of the issues around education and institutions and the hierarchies they adhere to. The institutional and academic need for writers to be accredited means that those who are part of these structures are the voices which we are far more likely to hear, thus making those who are already on the margins even more marginalised and invisible. How can we expect change to happen if we keep listening only to the same voices? 

Ahmed goes on to discuss how our citational choices are political: “I thought then: if theory is not politics, I am glad I am not doing theory! And it was a relief to leave that space in which theory and politics were organized as different trajectories.” 2

This is an important point and emphasis that each citation, and each decision or movement that a writer or researcher makes is political and should be aligned with our beliefs. Whatever forms our practice takes, for me, it as a writer and a teacher, for these practices to be true and performed to the best of our abilities, they must be aligned to our political and ideological beliefs. In order to keep true to these beliefs, we must act with awareness of how we move through our lives, how we connect with people and the resources we offer to our students. We must do this in order to break down the chains of repeated histories:

“But explaining phenomena like racism and sexism—how they are reproduced, how they keep being reproduced—is not something we can do simply by learning a new language. It is not a difficulty that can be resolved by familiarity or repetition; in fact, familiarity and repetition are the source of difficulty; they are what need to be explained.” 3

Here, Ahmed explains how the repetition of the status quo is constantly reinforcing the same problematics that we are trying to escape. The way around this is to stop using the same sources. This is easier said than done, we can be conscious of this and committed to this, but there are several obstacles that make this more difficult. 

One of the difficulties with this comes when trying to get academic written work published as it is often a requirement that your sources and citations are “reputable” e.g. institutionally recognised. In other words, those resources must have come through those who have previously held the power, and often still hold the power e.g. institutions and white men. 

Newer, more contemporary and more marginalised writers and voices are more likely to be less institutionally recognised, therefore less accessible and less likely to help you get your work published. These writers are also often in journals or behind paywalls making them harder to access. For me this is something that can feel like you need an education and training in how to access material and resources in order to find these resources. I find this frustrating as it can be an access barrier which perpetuates the issues. 

The voices that we need to hear in order to create changes are those that have empirical lived experiences outside of the institutional status quo. As Ahmed says: “those of us who arrive in an academy that was not shaped by or for us bring knowledges, as well as worlds, that otherwise would not be here.” 4

This is a key and succinctly made point that highlights the key of difference, and how imperative it is that this change is needed in all facets of our educational system. The problem is that this is in some ways like a wave slowly reverberating across an ocean. In order for new writers to come into these spaces, these writers will need to see other like them on the teaching staff, on the reading list, in exhibitions or on stage, and in order to get there, these individuals themselves will have had to go through an institutionally recognised program. Meaning that these changes will take time to come into effect.

Ahmed talks about her use of academic language and which is something that I find interesting on a personal level:

“When I first began working on this book, I thought I was writing a more mainstream feminist text, or even a trade book. I realized the book I was writing was not that kind of book… I have been an academic for over twenty years, and I am relatively at home in the academic language of feminist theory. I am aware that not all feminists are at home in the academy, and that the academic language of feminist theory can be alienating. In this book, I do use academic language. I am working at home, so academic language is one of my tools. But I also aim to keep my words as close to the world as I can…” 5

The desire to make work that is accessible for as many people as possible, means engaging with both ends of a spectrum – in order for work to be recognised within an academic field, it needs to address those in that field, but, in order for it to be available for those who are not in the field (or newly entering it), the work also needs to be accessible. I find this a tricky equilibrium, how we can access and use our learnings within our specialism and speak in our own languages whilst being connected to those who are not equipped with this specialist language? I find this problematic for my own painting practice which attempts to question hierarchies within painting and fine art, but to do so, uses the languages that are being questioned.

Ahmed goes on to discuss and show how citation is a microcosm of all of these issues and holds within it the transparent bias of our education systems and the bodies of institutions to be a white, male body. In order to navigate the racist and sexist hierarchies intwined with these systems, Ahmed adopts a blanket citation policy:

“In this book, I adopt a strict citation policy: I do not cite any white men. By white men I am referring to an institution … instead I cite those who have contributed to the intellectual genealogy of feminism and antiracism, including work that … lays out other paths, paths we can call desire lines, created by not following the official paths laid out by disciplines.” 6

Here Ahmed is showing us an example of how being conscious of and following her beliefs as a feminist writer and thinker gives her the awareness to create change and give light to marginalised voices.

“My citation policy has given me more room to attend to those feminists who came before me. Citation is feminist memory. Citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured because we deviated from the paths we were told to follow. In this book, I cite feminists of color who have contributed to the project of naming and dismantling the institutions of patriarchal whiteness.” 7

Ahmed shows how every tool or language that a writer or teacher or artists uses can be a vehicle or container in which to hold and express your political beliefs. How one’s beliefs are also a way of living and how each move and choice we make communicates something of our own ideas and beliefs.

Ahmed’s important text shows how the mainstream and institutional default is to cite recognised white, male writers and thinkers, which adds to and increases the lack of diversity in what we are exposed to which exacerbates the issues that we are faced with in de-colonising institutions and discourses. Ahmed’s text reinforces the need to be remain aware and attentive to whom we give our attention to.

References:

1. Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, Duke University press, 2017, page 8
2. Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, Duke University press, 2017, page 8
3. Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, Duke University press, 2017, page 8
4. Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, Duke University press, 2017, page 10
5. Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, Duke University press, 2017, page 11
6. Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, Duke University press, 2017, page 15
7. Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, Duke University press, 2017, page 16

Rationale for my ARP

As mentioned, at the start of this academic year, I unexpectedly lost my teaching hours on CCW Foundation due to the merging of CSM and CCW Foundation and the cutting of all staff outside of the “entitlement” time frames. ​I have been running short courses with UAL and at City Academy but mostly, I have been teaching drawing and painting at Sunny Art Centre in a one-to-one capacity, helping students to build portfolios for BA applications. ​

At Sunny Arts, the teaching model is a lot more traditional and instructive. The teaching model I prefer and have been part of at CCW is an active learning model. Encountering this more traditional teaching environment at Sunny Arts has been an interesting and challenging experience and has helped me to further define my teaching practice.​

For this project and for my current teaching, I am focusing on the genre of still life painting and drawing. The problem or issue that I am seeking to address is essentially a teaching methodology one. Working in a setting that teaches in a technical and didactic manner, I am trying to feed in my own pedagogic principles which focus on how we as teachers have a responsibility to help the person as well as the artist grow. As such I am focusing on helping students connect with their learning experience through their own connection with themselves and their work.

The questions for my ARP are:

• Can students gain technical accuracy effectively by experimenting and looking in place of technical instruction?
• Does applying NVC principles to pedagogy help students engage on a deeper level with their thinking and making?​

Intervention methods: experimental drawing

A methodology I have found useful in forming this connection, is experimental drawing to help students to loosen up and shift their ways of thinking about observational and representational drawing and painting. 

Students will make four warm up drawings, each five minutes long: 

• Drawing with eyes shut, holding the object (The aim of this is to draw how your object feels, allowing for senses other than your visual perception to take over. I feel this exercise is a useful tool for students (in particular on foundation) to help students to engage with their own making, to not compare their work with others and to hopefully relieve the pressures one’s critical self-places on making something look representationally accurate or “good” whatever that means) 

• Drawing whilst looking at and holding the object at eye level and not looking down at the page (this exercise is aimed at relinquishing control and self-criticism. I wanted this task to help students to experience the object through looking and recording the experience of looking through drawing again without having full control on the outcome) 

• Drawing the object in the traditional observational way (I ask students to look at their object as if they were a tiny insect moving across the surface) 

• Drawing the object without the object (I ask students to turn their back on the object and draw it from memory. I place this one last after students have tried out the previous tasks which have given access/opened other ways of thinking about drawing and making. It feels like it is a middle ground of control and journeying.) 

These exercises will be performed at the start of each session with different objects. I hope that students find a growing connection with the exercises and that the repetition of the exercises removes the novelty of them and they become an almost meditative task that breathes connection into their sessions.

These exercises have been successful for defining my teaching practice and for student engagement with experimental drawing and thinking about how we access different lines through different types of thinking and connection. Every student that has done these four warm up experimental drawings is always least interested in the traditional drawing that they produce. These experimental drawing exercises have helped to quickly break down and shift preconceived ideas around the need to control the work that is produced. 

We then move onto a still life which students work from with a selection of organic and non-organic objects. Asking students to think back to how they used line, touch and looking in their experimental drawings – to reconnect with sensation and mark making. I am encouraging students to incorporate some of these ways of working in their work. It is important to me that these ways of making are also ways of thinking, and I want these exercises to help open doors for students to think about their work in new ways and find new connections with themselves and the work they make. 

The importance of looking

When working on the still life set ups, I ask students to try to really look at what they are working with and to be conscious of not filling in their drawing or painting with what they think they know the object to look like. This is a key part of how I am trying to teach. As such, I am encouraging students to take regular breaks and I am also discussing ways of looking and how an object is not just a surface, it has a weight, a texture and is three dimensional. This links back to the exercises in the experimental drawing and again asks students to connect with line, with mark making and thinking about how they move. Looking is about connection and commitment to what you are engaging with. 

Intervention methods: NVC communication

The core fundamentals of teaching and learning through NVC are:​

Helping students connect with their intrinsic motivations for learning, rather than extrinsic motivators such as reward or punishment. ​I will apply NVC communication in my conversations with students. For example, an NVC conversation with a student could go as follows:​

Observation: I noticed that you stopped working on this section of your drawing ​

Feeling: are you feeling frustrated​

Need: because you would like to have figured out a solution by now?  ​

Request: would you like some help with that problem?  ​

This way of communicating shows empathy and asks the student if they would like help.​

Contextual resources in the sessions with students

I am also showing students a slideshow of different artists who make still life work and asking them to make work in these different styles if they are interested in them: 

Classic: Pieter Claesz 

Simple but classic: Giorgio Morandi 

Collage/deconstruction: Patrick Caulfield 

Looser/freer: Ghang Zhao 

Graphic style: Hilary Pecis 

Incorporating your own identity but borrowing from history: Chen Fei 

Research methods

I will use the format of a Likert Scale to record the responses from students in relation to the experimental drawings they undertake and the NVC style communication techniques that I will implement. In addition to this, I will also do an email interview in the format of a handful of questions to get more of an overall impression of how students are finding both forms of the intervention.

What method(s) are you using to explore the context/issue? 

I will be using 3 different research methods for 4 outcomes or results: 

1. An interview or conversation with a colleague 

2. An email questionnaire with one of my students on their overall experience of the experimental drawings and the NVC communication methods used

3. Photographs and tracking of the work made by students (this will form part of the presentation but is subjective so may not be considered data)
4. There will be 2 Likert Scale questionnaires to be completed by students, 1 will based on the experimental drawings and one will be based on the NVC communication methods.

Colleague interview and auto recorded responses

The interview will be with a former colleague teaching as a drawing tutor. This interview will be an informal one and will add research and information to help me to form my pedagogic principles for this project.

Likert scale responses on experimental drawings

Student will be asked the following questions:

I have found the experimental drawings to be a new way of working? 

I understand the thinking behind why we are doing the experimental drawings? 

I have found the experimental drawings to be generative in new ways of thinking about making my work? 

I have found the techniques used in the experimental drawings to be useful in making my work? 

This way of working has opened up new things for my work? 

Likert Scale responses to the following NVC communication questions

Did you feel empathetically supported in your studies?

Do you feel that I made observations rather than judgements when discussing your work?

Do you feel more connected to your work by being asked how you felt about your own work?

Did you feel more motivated by being asked what you felt about your work rather than being told by me?

Has this way of communicating opened new things for your work? 

Interview or questionnaire with my students 

There will be an interview questionnaire where I will ask the following questions:

1. How did you find the experimental drawing warm up sessions? How did they influence the observational drawing that you made afterwards? 

2. How do you feel being asked to learn by looking?  

3. How does it feel to be taught techniques such as underpainting? 

4. Which of these learning styles did you feel gave you the most impetus and confidence to make your work? Which did you enjoy learning the most? Did either style of learning empower your making? 

5. Looking at your drawings and your work, how do you feel your work has changed with this way of looking and making? 

What method(s) are you using to evaluate the change/intervention? 

Feedback from my students on their engagement with the work and how they are feeling about what they are making/producing. Are they enjoying this way of working, do they believe they are learning and stretching their working and thinking? 

The methodology behind using the Likert scale is that it offers me the readings in a numerical data form that show how students are finding the methodology in the sessions.

The email interview questionnaire will give the student more room to other up their own subjective viewpoints and should offer me a more fully rounded level of feedback. I can use this to evaluate my own teaching and shift or change anything that is not working in its current form.

In addition to this, I am also using my own subjectivity to track the work of students as they are applying for portfolio with this work, so the outcomes as well as the journeying is important. 

Here is the consent form template that I sent out and had signed by my 3 students. These are stored in a secure physical and digital location. are the consent form that were read and signed by each student

Information sheet sent out and read by all three student

The process of asking students to read and sign these consent and information sheets was probably one of the trickier aspects of this project. Students were all verbally very receptive to being part of the ARP project and were happy to help. However the introduction of the sheets and the consent forms may things feel more formal and also reintroduced the hierarchies of the teacher student relationship despite the flipping of the roles for me asking for something from them. I think in the future I will look to find different avenues to introduce these types of documents or to make them read in a less formal way.

The Auto- 

“The “auto-” of autoethnography relates to one-self, an author’s subjectivity, their lived experience. For manuscripts to do/use autoethnography, we expect the author to share and be self-reflexive about their decisions and experiences. We expect the author’s experience to be prioritized—used, reflected on, and theorized throughout a manuscript.” 1 

The “auto-” must show the writers self-awareness of their own position and this must be made a priority within the writing. Self-reflexivity is an important tool in distinguishing something as an autoethnographic text. This is something which I am really interested in within my teaching practice, as self-reflexivity, self-criticality and self-awareness are key things to try and cultivate in students as they are very important skills for an artist. I think they are also key for being a compassionate and connected person and teacher. 

“One aspect of the auto- that is missing from life chronology writing is the expression and the experience of emotion. As writers and researchers, we just don’t know things; we feel them. Good autoethnography does not downplay the fact that people are emotional beings.” 2

The key here is the writers focus on their experience of something specific, not a life chronology but a reflection from the author on an experience of an event or a research topic. This is something I always ask my students to do when writing about the work of another artist, please do not give me a biography or a Wikipedia entry but tell me your experience of what you are looking at. For me, accessing and showing this personal engagement with something sows much deeper learning for students. 

The writer’s reflection upon their own experiences being one not as a bystander, but as an activated, engaged, ‘real-life’, three-dimensional person. The inclusion of the writer’s emotional response speaks to me of engaging with the subject matter in what I have been/am currently describing as an embodied way (more on this later in another blog post). This aspect of the auto is what first attracted me to auto-ethnography as it offers me the potential to align my pedagogical ideology (working and looking in an activated, embodied way) with my research and writing. 

The Ethno- 

“The primary goal of ethnographic research is to identify, and sometimes challenge, cultural expectations, beliefs, and practices, and then, via “thick description,”⁹ facilitate a nuanced understanding of these cultural phenomena.”3 

The ethno- part is focused on an active engagement with the real world outside of the self. This can be an engagement with other people via interviews, it can be an engagement with other research texts or writing, film etc. Essentially an engagement with the field of research or topic of interest. Essentially it is what brings the inner back to the outer and is the connective tissues between our internal and external experiences. 

The Graphy 

“Auto-ethno-graphy is comprised of not one but two kinds of -graphy: the -graphy of autobio-graphy, the art of writing about one’s life; and the -graphy of ethno-graphy, the art and science of representing—producing a vivid and concrete, thick description—of cultural expectations, beliefs, and practices. Together, we have autoethnography, the art and science of representing one’s life in relation to cultural expectations, beliefs, and practices.” 4

The thick description is a term which interests me. I quite like it. It brings about my awareness of the weight of and layers of different experiences and information that we process in each engaged experience and action that we have with the world around us. For example, in teaching, in a tutorial, I would think of the thick description of that experience containing: 

My own self and all the multitudes which that contains. I will be wearing my teaching self, but within that, contained could be my own experiences of teaching, my childhood, my experiences that day, my previous or perceived levels of connection and engagement with and of the student that I am working with. Meeting that is the experience of the student, containing all their own multitudes and levels of engagement with the me, with the subject matter and the work that they are making that day. And, perhaps in between that, is the institution or place that the lesson is being held in, and each of our feelings about that place, the stresses or joys that it makes us each feel. These are just a few of the things I think go into the action of a tutorial and when held up and looked at in this way, it does thicken and fill out the layers that go into each action and experience that we take. 

“For this journal, an outlet that takes writing as a primary medium for representation, good ethnography requires good writing. Good autobiography requires good writing too. Autoethnography thus requires really good writing. Really good writing requires having a command of a specified language.” 5

This is probably a questionable point for me. The quote essentially argues that if you are careless or have a poor grasp of your medium then this makes for bad autoethnography. I find this difficult, as it feels elitist and limits those that can engage and participate with it. Perhaps this also chimes with one of the things I am concerned about when asking students to work in an embodied way – does this require or ask of them to have enough tacit knowledge and openness to work by looking rather than learning by reciting techniques. 

“Finally, although the introduction-literature review-methods-findings-discussion-conclusion formula may be expected of many research reports, this sterile formula for writing up research isn’t conducive for doing good autoethnography.” 6

This is also an interesting and challenging position for autoethnography to take up but is one that seems in keeping with its general disposition of challenging norms. I think that the potential for dropping the above formula is a positive and perhaps mirrors my experience of life more. I do not believe that every experience I have had held a conclusion or finding hidden within it, so why must the writing we do contain this too…? 

References

All quotes taken from and accessed on 15 October: Journal of Autoethnography, https://online.ucpress.edu/joae/article/4/1/1/195146/Good-Autoethnography

• Ethics form – DONE
• Discuss with Sunny Arts if they are willing to be be part of ARP
• Discuss with students if they are willing to be be part of ARP
• Draft activity plan/brief – DONE
• Arrange interview schedule with colleague– DONE
• Read back Teams auto recording of interview – DONE
• Refine activity– DONE
• Clarify research methods– DONE
• Implement NVC communication methods – DONE
• Undertake NVC teacher training course– DONE
• Listen to NVC podcast on the way to each teaching session – DONE
• Prepare for experimental drawings: gather objects– DONE
• Run activities– DONE
• Capture outputs– DONE
• Reflect on sessions– DONE
• Receive back Likert Scales and Interview Questionnaire– DONE
• Collate feedback from these– DONE
• Plan next steps– DONE
• Collate references– DONE
• Cross check posts– DONE
• Presentation slides– DONE

What is your project focus?   An enquiry into different methods of teaching drawing and painting, and the hierarchies associated with them. I want to find out if an embodied way of teaching and learning is a way to navigate certain hierarchical structures of teaching and learning or if it relies too much on tacit learning?  How does teaching technical skills or teaching to look play or not play not into pedagogical hierarchies?  I am interested in this for my own pedagogical identity and how I can help students find their voices and connect with their work.  Research methods will be to read around autoethnography, embodied making, interviews with students on how they find different tasks e.g. learning underpainting versus being asked to look and draw/paint what they see.

What are you going to read about?   Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks  Material Kinship   Autoethnography  Foundations of embodied learning: a paradigm for education / Mitchell J. Nathan.  Embodied performativity in Southeast Asia: multidisciplinary corporealities / edited by Stephanie Burridge.  Embodied: the psychology of physical sensation / Christopher Eccleston  Creative expression and wellbeing in higher education: making and movement as mindful moments of self-care / edited by Narelle Lemon  Embodied inquiry / Jennifer Leigh and Nicole Brown  Embodying identities: culture, differences and social theory / Victor Jeleniewski Seidler.

What action are you going to take in your teaching practice?   My teaching is limited to one-to-one sessions with students, I think I will either test out some of these teaching methods with these students or create some sort of provisional workshop based around embodied making.

Who will be involved and how?   Currently undecided if I am going to work with my students or write a provisional workshop and propose to some of my fellow teachers on the PGCERT…    N.B. If any of your participants/co-researchers will be under 18, please seek advice from your tutor.

What are the health & safety concerns, and how will you prepare for them?   I do not believe there to be any, though I think when testing students learning pre-conceptions, it is important to be aware of when they are feeling out of their comfort zones.  In the same way, I think asking students to try ways of learning that are new to them, for example, embodied learning by looking rather than relying on technical instruction, can be challenging, and I will make sure to check in with how students are finding this.

How will you protect the data of those involved?   I will collect only necessary and consented data; I will delete the data at the earliest opportunity. I will keep any physical data locked in a drawer with a key and will do the digital equivalent with data stored online by using folders that have a protected password.

How will you work with your participants in an ethical way?   If I choose to work with my students at Sunny Arts, I will inform them first and check if they are happy to be included and ask if there are any steps they would like to be taken to protect their identities.

Hindsight Analysis

I think the timing of the Ethics Plan came too soon for me and I received a pretty low grade for it. I think that slightly disengaged me from the ARP for a time but also made it clear to me that I needed to have something less philosophical and more research based.

The reading list which I submitted is very different to the reading list that I ended up with. In addition to this, the research methods got a lot clearer as the project went on and as my ideas and aims were clarified by the process of the two interventions I developed.

If I had more time to focus on it then it would have been clearer and also more useful to me.