Would you be able to expand on the data collection/analysis methods? You mentioned autoethnography—was this student/participant autoethnography or researcher autoethnography?  

I elaborate on the data collection methods in Blog Post 06: Data Collection Tools (available via PDF). 

I ended up collecting a lot of data because I chose to focus the project on a series of activities rather than just one. This included formal and informal interviews with students, students’ creative work, my own field notes, reflection sessions with my co-tutor Roland. I chose to focus on the following data for my ARP project:

1. discussions with co-tutor Roland Reemaa (method: collective autoethnography) (Ellis, Bochner, 2019);
2. analysis of artefacts made by students in response to assignments (method: document/object analysis);
3. interviewing a focus group of students alongside the work they’ve produced (method: interview, object elicitation (Pauwels, 2019));

However, as the start of my parental leave meant an overwhelming amount of deadlines, I didn’t manage to interview a focus group of students. Instead, I decided to use the data gathered at the group conversation in the end of the drawing workshop. 

I used autoethnographic methods in two ways. Firstly, after reading some of the texts the PGCert course provided, I was inspired to incorporate autoethnographic methods into my teaching. This meant that as part of the Site Research Cycle, students were using autoethnography to research the site—they were encouraged to analyse the site through their individual lens. 

Secondly, I also used autoethnography to gather and analyse data for my ARP project. I did this in conversation with my co-tutor Roland, with whom we reflected on the workshop and compared it to previous iterations we had conducted at CSM, at the Estonian Academy of Arts and at TU Delft (Ellis, Bochner, 2019).

Could you expand slightly upon the social justice element of the project?

During the Inclusive Practices Unit, I realised that we are really missing an opportunity at CSM by not paying enough attention to the students’ lived experiences. UAL admission policies which are rooted in social justice have successfully increased diversity in the student cohort, but tutors are not provided with resource to focus on it in their teaching (re-think teaching, give extra attention to inter-personal relationships amongst students), which means diversification might become a mere tick box exercise (Tate 2018, Sadiq 2023). 

I was inspired by bell hooks’ idea for a learning community—creating an environment where the diverse student group can learn from each other (hooks, 1994). I am convinced this could be the best way to bring inclusivity to their learning and lay a foundation for social justice whatever the subject they are learning. I was inspired to tackle this issue in architectural site research after reading Kim England’s text ‘Getting personal: reflexivity, positionality, and feminist research’ (England, 1994). I realised, focussing on the lived experiences of the students when analysing a site for a project can reveal how people of different backgrounds experience a single place in varied ways. For example, people from minority backgrounds might feel in danger in certain places that are safe spaces for others, or simply someone whose main concern is the wellbeing of animals might really appreciate dark parks whereas someone else might have a bad personal experience from such a space, and their view on darkness in parks might be very different. Such complexities of understanding difference are often lost in professional architecture work, however, building empathy and teaching students to consider varied lived experiences is a way to bring more diverse opinions back into architecture via future practitioners.

Something similar is true for the nature of architecture projects. Currently, the discipline is dominated by speculation, gentrification, commercialisation and many of the more socially driven projects are not even seen as real architecture projects, because they might not end up with a building. However, by encouraging young architects to become spatial practitioners who propose spatial projects that would make a difference to their lived experience, be it a temporary spatial improvement, a community build, etc., we encourage a more spatially just discipline. We don’t want people to lose their experience and adapt to someone else’s understanding what architecture is. Rather, we want them as spatial practitioners to shape architecture. 

Were there any limitations to your project? Would you make any changes if you were to conduct the research again? 

The main limitation was the amount of work I needed to do before starting my parental leave. It meant I didn’t manage to discuss the actions I had taken with the student group as much as I had wanted to. If I was to conduct the research again, I’d definitely want to conduct focus group interviews throughout the Site Research Cycle. I’d like to use the method of visual/object elicitation (Pauwels, 2019) , i.e. use the ‘Act of Repair’ objects as well as the drawings to encourage the discussions.

Bibliography:

[1] Ellis, C.S. & Bochner, A.P., 2006. Analyzing analytic autoethnography: An autopsy. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 35(4), pp.429–449.

[2] Pauwels, L., 2019. Visual elicitation in interviews. In: P. Atkinson, S. Delamont, M.A. Hardy and M. Williams, eds. SAGE Research Methods Foundations. London: SAGE Publications Ltd, pp.3–13.

[3] Sadiq, A. (2023). Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. Learning how to get it right. TEDx [Online]. Youtube. 2 March.

[4] Tate, S.A. (2018). Tackling the ‘BPOC’ Attainment Gap in UK Universities [Online]. Youtube. TEDx/Re:Act, Royal School of Speech & Drama. October.

[5] hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress. Educations as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.
[6] England, K. (1994) ‘Getting personal: reflexivity, positionality, and feminist research’, The Professional Geographer, 46(1), pp.80-89. Available at: https://atrium.lib.uoguelph.ca/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10214/1811/18-England.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y  (Accessed 20 January 2025).

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.