10th Jan 2022 – Building a Community & Reading

Today was the first session, where I met the rest of my PGCert tutor group and I’m feeling really inspired. A great way to start the term!

Particularly useful was the break out room conversation I had with Suki and Anna. Here, I asked the question ‘how do we build trust online?’. For me building trust: student-student and student-teacher is so important as a groundwork to being able to learn from each other, give and receive feedback. Often the work we share is so personal. Suki and Anna pointed out that this is a question of community building, which could then lead to trust. This is something myself and some of my colleagues have all agreed we have found difficult since the pandemic began.

Anna gave a few different practical examples of how they built community on the MA course she runs, including: playful group activities, online group ‘missions’ and regular reading groups. From the presentation they gave to the group, these seem to have been really successful.

The reading groups particularly interested me – I guess as it seems like such a simple idea, but I worry would be difficult to get working in a useful way, especially for BA students. The last few weeks, I’ve been working on the scheme of work for a ‘Writing as Performance’ project I’ll be teaching for the first time with third years. Suki raised that many students don’t like to read as part of their practice, which I think is true, in my little experience of teaching Word and Image documents (P:DP’s dissertation-style task). Some also find it difficult for reasons of neurodivergence, or elitist barriers that make reading, particularly reading theory, seem inaccessible. Her presentation raised object-based learning, specifically an interesting lesson where students were encouraged to respond to an object in the Camberwell object archive. Though this example was inspiring, we both felt passionately from our own personal experience, that reading could also play an inspiring and important role in practical, creative development. Just as students could learn from listening to one another’s ideas and presentations, so reading is another oppourtunity to get into someone else’s head. How could we encourage students sceptical of reading to really give it a go?

Once again some practical examples were given by Anna here, from a session taught by a senior lecturer who they brought in to talk to their students about reading. In this session, Anna explained, the students were really given license to approach reading however they saw fit. Students were encouraged to ask the question ‘how do I read?’ and given permission to engage with texts on their own terms. Ways of reading that emerged included: highlighting, skimming or scanning, doodling and just reading part of the text. I found this very inspiring and will feed some of this in to my introductory session for Writing as Performance this Thursday. I just hope there’s enough time in the timetable to have these open and honest conversations, just as there were in the session Emily ran today!

Some final brief observations/ notes on the session in general:

• Really good to allow a full half hour for the break-out conversations, as Emily out tutor did. I hadn’t realised until just now how awkward they can be when you first join them. It was really good to know we had the time to ease into a good and useful conversation, though even that was a shame to end. It really was the part where I learned the most. Will definitely bare this in mind when planning my own student sessions.
• Also 20 mins break when online felt perfect. I think I’ve been giving 10 mins for my students – way too short! Though again… I do this because it feels like there’s so much to learn. The challenge will be getting the balance between thinking time/ information time and rest time…. as always!
• In first Writing as Performance session, get students to think about when they will write and read, outside the timetabled sessions. Perhaps do some scheduling with them.