I’ll allow myself to start out by indulging in my exhaustion but a very happy mood and a high level of motivation after today’s seminar in LCC. Ohhhh, how I prefer in-person learning and teaching. Don’t try and tell me it is regressive, I have reasons. Here’s some of why, all experienced today:

* The natural buzz in the room when several smaller groups / pairs discuss simultaneously. Catching a word, sound, phrase in the background can spark a new idea and feed into a different conversation.

* Not having to go in turns with awkward looking-into-nothingness just-slightly-too-long silences in-between. Not always having to stare at each other’s faces when discussing in a small group but also looking at the sketching the other is doing and getting important layers of information from body language. Simultaneity of different types of interaction must be a thing. Is the lack of it why I get so bored at online sessions and start to fiddle around with other things, checking social media etc?

* Not feeling like there is so much weight on saying or asking something.

* Casual conversations, incl. during breaks.

* Moving my body in response to people speaking from various directions, looking at different backgrounds. It keeps me alert.

* Gauging others’ engagement, reactions. That keeps me alert too.

I’m learning infinitely more when in-person. I feel like I’m a part of something that matters beyond myself and the immediate space around me. It just is so. much. better. So much more motivating.

Now that’s done, I will focus on three take-aways from today’s Designing and Planning for Learning Seminar.

1) Teaching Formats and Strategies Paperchase. On top of the very insightful reflections within our group on the different teaching formats, their benefits and challenges, everyone’s recommendations for methods and strategies on how to overcome some of the challenges or enhance the benefits, the paperchase method itself proved to be something I’m sure to try out in my own teaching. As Lindsay highlighted at the end of the session, her and John had “taught us nothing” during the exercise. The learning was all done within the groups themselves without the teachers giving any prompts or information in between. Strictly keeping to the time and facilitating smooth transitions between groups and the physical space are itself important contributions to enable the learning. 

2) The revealing moment (for me) when Sakiko highlighted how she felt the AM chat about the blog and how we are supposed to take it easy and just use it for our natural reflections on the seminars and lectures, almost like a sketchbook, was totally undermined once we got to discussing the blog as contributing to the course’s Learning Outcomes and forming a part of our assessed portfolio. Even though I didn’t experience worry at the time, I too did sense a discrepancy between these two ways of discussing the blog and my immediate reaction was to “blame” the discrepancy on the structure of the course. However, once Lindsay, again, grounded us in our own teaching by saying something along the lines of, “Isn’t that exactly what you’d be asking from your own students too? Feel free, experiment, do what you like, don’t worry! And then before the submissions they are faced with the expected Learning Outcomes and Assessment Criteria…”. That incident absolutely helped me gain some empathy within this complex situation of outcome-based learning with clearly spelled out criteria versus the process-based and open-ended learning we are encouraging our students to do and that we find so crucial to any art and design practice. Next step: figure out how to close that gap (or at least make it narrower) to support our students better.

3) Mat’s (D. ? Sorry Mat… It was Mat from John’s Cohort) poster from Learning Design Workshop Part 2. Mat drew his poster as a quick board game. I’m thinking it could be developed into a pretty exciting and insightful Snakes and Ladders version too to loose the linearity. But also it gave me the idea of attempting to visualise the complex bundle of requirements and hopeful outcomes of architecture design studio as a cloud diagram. With my own poster, I only got as far as to construct a baseline for what seems like a bit of a problem on our hands currently – in the case of the design studio, the students are having to engage with three separate briefing documents, all text based, to get information on one single unit. The official status of these documents vary, but surely that makes little difference to the students. The documents are also full of overlaps and repetition, however to get a full set of information, all of them need to be engaged with. So here I am giving myself some homework and setting an outline for a future blogpost: draw a second version of the poster imagining it as something like a board game – cloud diagram – network of parameters. Visualising the teaching-learning experience makes sense especially because that’s again something we would always ask of our students too – we would probably just send them back “to the drawing board” if they came to present their work as just text. “Visualise it”, I would say.