I was tempted to hunker down in the quiet of my studio to analyse my data thoroughly. But instead, with renewed confidence in the benefits of the ‘critical friend’ as an analytical asset (Costa and Kallick, 1993), and a hankering for avocado, I instead I went to brunch with my friend Dr Thandi Loewenson. Thandi is an academic in the architecture department of the Royal College of Art , and has been teaching for the same amount of time as me (about 4 years). Over this time we have frequently swapped experiences of teaching, and pedagogical strategies. In consulting Thandi about my ARP, telling her how the process had been and giving her a summary of the data so far, and my intentions with it: I hoped she would be able to be ‘an advocate for the success of that work’ (Costa and Kallick, 1993).
I shared my concern that, despite me taking the students on 3 research trips outside the university, and making the work sheet, the data I collected pre and post intervention appeared to be quite similar. Nowhere was the worksheet or any of the trips I took them on specifically mentioned. When in the group discussion I asked them to write down how research took place in their practice, no one mentioned visiting a nature reserve, or a particular archive, though there were some mentions of an art gallery.
Thandi pointed out that in her experience of teaching first year students, they often don’t give you the answer they think you want – instead they’ll try to grab for an answer that you don’t expect, in a bid to show their independent learning. Perhaps it wasn’t that the students were still not thinking of a ‘nature reserve’ as a valid site for research, but that they thought it was the ‘easy’ answer, since I had been the one to take them on a research trip there.
We also discussed that perhaps I needed more data to find out exactly what was going on. I am now considering sending out an online survey to the students to get more detailed responses.
Reflecting with Thandi, I told her that I had found that students informally mentioned research trips they’d been on, during/ in between tutorials. For instance one group told me a trip to the Wellcome Collection’s Cult of Beauty exhibition was foundational to their coming up with a performance that critiques contemporary beauty standards. This was one of the research trips on the worksheet I sent out. I wonder if they didn’t mention this when I asked them the question ‘How does research take place in your practice?’ in the more formal data collection setting, because they still didn’t really think of it as formal research? To understand this I would need to ask more questions.
Thandi also pointed out to me that my interventions don’t take place in a vacuum – that there are other things going on. This reminded me of the idea we discussed in the ARP workshop – there are multiple factors that are affecting students learning at anyone time. One of these other factors might be the reason that I didn’t see the data I was expecting.
When explaining my research to Thandi, I remembered one of the resons for me wanting to do the project – while research is considered the lifeblood of the university, often undergraduate students are quite disconnected from this. I think this is particularly problematic because framing your research as valuable and worthy is an important way of getting funding, and also how the univeristy brings in money. I was reminded of a conversation I had with a student immediately after I did the first data collection point where she said ‘I feel like that session was more valuable for you than it was for us.’