Paula Corsini - CSM

After tutorials and peers’ feedback, I reworked my ethics form and started the data analysis. Since the questionnaire format was a development of the ongoing work and not actioned yet, there is still possibility to discuss the ethics with the course leaders and tutor.

The presentation attached will be showed and explained orally on 17/01/2024. It follows my rationale coming into this project, the links to the previous unit, the reflections and deviations as I went along and discussed it in tutorials and in person with my peers. Part of it was also discussed with line managers, course leaders and ideas were gathered over the past months to bring the idea to it’s current iteration.

Data analysis: The raw data will not be uploaded as there are sensitive data as names, e-mails and booking data. If I delete the sensitive information I would end up with an empty excel spreadsheet that is of very little use. The data and process of analysis it will be discussed in person during the presentation and Q&A. Part of this project was a learning curve on what to look for in the data and how to interpret it, so there is no way of doing it or one correct analysis to be made. There are many questions and answers within and it will be a valuable data going forward, with the possibility of making the booking patterns and data a tool to planning the space use and courses access in the future.

From previous post:

Expanding on the idea of giving all core users basic skills to navigate and play in the space based on their interest, could empower them to feel a sense of belonging. – Goes back to artefact idea.

Do they feel a sense of non-belonging? INTERVIEW

Are the students that consult more end up being in the space more? Courses like MABD who have a heavy workshop based curriculum end up being heavy users of the space. Correlation with the type of support given or reflection of the course brief?

Reflections for the future and points to keep always in mind when analysing questionnaire data:

Too comfortable in the space – goal achieved or another problem?

It came to my mind that the idea of belonging to a space for some, can create discomfort to others. For example, students that are perceived as regulars, who are comfortable and empowered to learn and explore, could be passing the idea of ‘model students’ and examples to be followed to those who don’t feel the same way? How can the constant presence of ‘regulars’ create an idea of a clique and a perceived status of ownership of the space? How can I intervene and avoid that?

Would the creation of different spaces and levels of support help?

Maybe would be worth considering the creation of different work zones for independent work and other spaces where more oversight is offered. The challenge, in my point of view, is to do it in such a way that it doesn’t create a divide and the perception that the spaces are inflexible. The one who inhabits one category can’t navigate to the other and vice-versa.  Would that create an undesirable structure?

At the same time, being able to offer more support who those who need, would give them more malleability to navigate the different spaces and the feeling of empowerment through independency. My interpretation of Freire’s work is that learning and belonging comes when the individual believes it has control and ownership of its pace and space.

Issues with creating different categories

As an expansion to the previous point, one could also argue that creating different spaces for different user groups could create stigma. An observation of mine is that students that struggle with language are more hesitant to ask for help and request time from the technical team. They end up trying to solve things on their own and getting things wrong, which in turn results in them being corrected and the sense of hesitation is perpetuated. They often tend to be quite apologetic when requesting support, and for me, personally, that is an indication of discomfort. How can I deal with this?

The offer of more one-to-one time is the strategy that we currently use, but if a student is not comfortable with verbal communication, the face-to-face 15min conversation might not solve the issue and even make it worse. If the student feel they are not understood or can’t get their point across, that might put them off trying again or returning to the space.

How can I make students from different language backgrounds and learning skills feel equally supported?

Written consultation / webchat? Those could solve the communication issue and make the student feel understood and the conversation flow in a pace that works for everyone. However, how those tools can be used in a technical space where practical work need to be demonstrated?

The observation regarding language barriers is reflected in the UAL attainment gap report case studies (Israel & Mackey, 2019) that also points to cultural differences when speaking in public.

DEVIATION FROM THE ORIGINAL POINT.

References:

Friere, P. (1968) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum

Israel, A. and Mackey, C. (2019) UAL attainment gap report. Available at https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/62935733/artssu-attainment-gap-report-14nov (visited on 17^th July 2023)

Focus on the following points:

• Students’ views and perspectives

• Are the course leaders happy with this usage?

• What I wanted to do with the data vs secondary research with the data based on time restrains and impossibilities.

• Focus on conversation with managers and course leaders who are excited to use the analysis as a tool, to be continued. Positive outcome regardless of initial limitations.

• Separate YR1 and YR2, vs consultations and see how times are distributed. Aside from course distribution.

• Ask students how comfortable they feel asking questions and exploring the space. Is the space open enough for exploration to be done your way, how to be more inviting?

• Ask stakeholders how they feel about students perceptions of the technical space and how that aligns with their plan to include laboratory experimentation in the curriculum.

KEEP ALWAYS IN MIND: Paulo Freire’s idea of social capital of communication, theory of social justice and equality.

Expanding on the idea of giving all core users basic skills to navigate and play in the space based on their interest, could empower them to feel a sense of belonging. – Goes back to artefact idea.

Do they feel a sense of non-belonging? INTERVIEW

Are the students that consult more end up being in the space more? Courses like MABD who have a heavy workshop based curriculum end up being heavy users of the space. Correlation with the type of support given or reflection of the course brief?

The attached questionnaire draft sums up my overall ideas and intentions. That would hopefully help me gain a better understading of the students perspectives. I could introduce this questionnaire at the end of term, as a feedback form open to all students to fill.

The idea of self-assesment of ‘frequent’ vs ‘sporadic’ user could bring interesting reflections and saves me from putting the students on the box of my own perceptions.

Another point that can have practical consequences is the feedback on time and space limitations affecting student experience.

I then needed to manually assign each student to a course based on my memory from who they are and which course they are from. The one’s I could not recognise I left to one side before doing a more in-depth comparison with the enrolled student’s lists that I got given by their course leaders.

A reflection I make here is that we should have a much better system of knowing who is booking and a way of keeping this data for future use. It is such an important piece of information that seems to be just thrown away and lost forever. It took me a long time, but I finally assigned the 359 names from 2022 and 1129 names from 2023 to the courses they belong to and organised in a month by-month secondary table. Again, I can’t post an example image of this here as the data contain many personal identifiers. They will be shown in the presentation.

I moved on to divide this data into courses, months, and which bookings were for workspace vs consultation time (one-to one). After doing that, I manually counted them and started playing around ways to visualize them in a meaningful way. At this stage, I admit I was getting confused about the way forward. My initial idea of analysing trends was no longer possible or comparing one year’s cohort with another was also not a reality anymore. I let the data and my curiosity lead the way and gave myself a couple of days to just observe and ‘play around’.

Challenge 3:

How can I reframe my questions without trying to force a narrative now that my initial idea is out of the window? I didn’t want to deviate from the core idea of the project. I still wanted to focus on the ideas of inclusivity, availability and perceived openness of the space and staff support. I had a few interactions with my tutors, colleagues and PgCert peers and that helped me add the following reflections:

Look at the data I have and try to gain relevant information, what can I learn from what is available?

How do consultations (one to one time) translate into usage?

Are the students feeling empowered to navigate the workshop through ono-to-one time or through technician lead workshops? – add this to the questionnaires.

Get formal letter of approval from Line manager to use data retrospectively.

Consider replacing the students’ questionnaire for a focus group.

Make sure to unpack terms such as ‘welcome’ and ‘experience’.

Initial idea:

The Action research plan came to my mind as an expansion of the Artefact and some personal observations of how the technical space is used. I wanted to quantify and qualify the usage distribution and reflect on how we can improve diversity and be a space where students feel welcome to explore, experiment and develop their skills in however way it feels right for them.

On my artefact, I reflected on the idea of making the space more equal, open, and fair. Based solely on my personal anecdotal observation of unequal usage distribution amongst courses, students’ backgrounds, confidence levels and language barriers. See below:

I wanted my research project to be a chance to quantify and therefore give significance on the issues I observed and reflected upon. Not to say that personal observations alone are not relevant, but they can gain strength when paired with data and analysed using appropriate tools. I embarked on a journey to organise my ideas and articulate where I wanted to get to – see scribbles below:

It is easy to see how I quickly found many questions and possible ways to deal with this project. It soon become a very ambitious project and also a quite exciting one, perhaps too big for the timeframe, but I continued on developing the idea.

After attending the workshop on 25^th October, I strongly resonated with the discussion around the Action research spiral by Kosher (Kosher et al, 2010). It was discussed how research sometimes can be a spiral of going back to the original question, reframing it, spiralling back and perhaps even changing the question based on reflection.

O’Leary’s cycles of research (Kosher et al, 2010: 8):

References:

Koshy E, Koshy V, and Waterman H (2011) Action research in healthcare. London: Sage.

Witness: unconscious bias

I do agree with Josephine Kwhali when she discusses the “unconscious bias” being used a free out jail card. Racism and issues around bias have been discussed for far too long for people to use ignorance as an excuse. The discourse that people still need to be educated and called out is somehow quite convenient for the perpetrators of the status quo. It really brings back the question of ‘educated by whom?’ by the same people that already feel oppressed, pretered and having to prove their abilities twice as hard? Not very fair and just another way of maintaining the inequalities without being called out.

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https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/retention-and-attainment-disciplines-art-and-design

After reading some SON passages, I started questioning my place in talking about race with students. Is it my place to bring this conversation when the context of my teaching practice does not touch on the subject of race or minorities? Science is quite controversially racist with many problematic moments of eugenistic points of view, but aside from ALL THAT, science in its core of experimentation and questioning is rather democratic. When a student comes to observe a plant or a microbe on the microscope we start dealing with the interspecies relationships and not human interactions. When we talk about working with DNA or experiment with chemistry, we are not looking into one’s skin colour or cultural background.

Perhaps is not up to me to bring race in the teaching practice but to think about it when creating a space where students feel welcome and heard. Where they won’t feel they don’t belong or they need to prove themselves to be heard, which should apply for any space within the University and beyond. Of course, that does not mean that I wish to wash my hands and step away from the subject, I’m just weary of my place and limitations and don’t want to shoe horn subjects in the wrong place and time. Perhaps I need to reflect further on how to make people feel welcome and how can I contribute to decrease the amount of drop-outs and all those worrying statistics that were brought up.

I, myself, grew up as white/mixed Brazilian and soon after moving to the UK found out that I’m indeed not white, I’m Latina (apparently). I always knew that I have the most wonderful mix of bloods within my family, Brazilian indigenous, black, European white, Brazilian white. Here in the UK I’m mixed race (other). Then I get questioned about which mix, if Caribbean or Asian. None. I’m none of that. Should I go back being just white even though I know I don’t pass as one? It’s a weird set of boxes that we are forced to fill and although the statistics are important and the questions need answering, when we don’t have enough boxes to fill, we become no one or inflate the wrong numbers.

Maybe my place of rediscovering my own race based on the eyes of others (this country in this context) can be a starting point to exercise the empathy with our diverse body of students. The difference between how we see ourselves and how that changes based on the environment we are it, can be the parallel I need to explore this subject in the context of science and nature.

• Comments found on:
  • https://mira.myblog.arts.ac.uk/2023/07/14/inclusive-practices-race/
  • https://relearning.myblog.arts.ac.uk/2023/05/29/decolonising-the-university/
  • https://anz2023.myblog.arts.ac.uk/2023/07/16/blog-3-race/

I do approach this task with initial apprehension and questioning where religion feature in my practice and workshop. In my experience with religious discourse, I associate it with quite negative connotations and oppressive history. It doesn’t sit well with me, the rebranding of religion without acknowledgment of the scars religious practices left in countries, communities, and people’s lives.

Not to say that is up to me to approve or not of religious practices and I truly believe in personal choices and freedom. What bothers me is how some religious groups consider themselves as having a free ticket to judge and point rules for all to follow. The sense of entitlement comes from a history that had for too long put religion above all.

As a scientist that runs science workshops in a laboratory, I have very little experience with dealing with religion. However, I do understand that some religious beliefs go against some core concepts of science and that might drive some students away. It is not up to me to force science onto the students work and they are free to come and learn as they see fit, it’s up to them whether they will go against some core beliefs to apply science or not, and not the other way around.

I always had the impression that most of our students come from a secular background or don’t bring their religion to their practices. However, Mark Dean pointed out some interesting statistics from CSM students where 50% of respondents claim to have religious beliefs regardless of that being an ongoing practice. This belief, as he reiterates, can come from following a structured religion or just a belief in some sort of spiritual life, not necessarily engaged with a set of rules and traditions. I question if part of belief in spirituality in a response to the fear of the after-life embedded in our culture by traditional regions, but it is not up to me to argue that.

Kwame interestingly points out that religion is not only a matter of beliefs, but also community and cultural backgrounds. One can belong to a community without believing in God or one can believe in scriptures without understanding them. I can resonate with this in my work as I don’t want students to approach their learning with blind faith in the subject or reading material. Critical thinking is important whether in science or religion, nothing should go unquestioned. Making sure the students understand the premises, limitations, and the scope of what is being thought is important. The freedom to question and challenge premises is the outcome I desire.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07z43ds

https://shadesofnoir.org.uk/journals/higher-power-religion-faith-spirituality-belief/

http://www.tariqmodood.com/uploads/1/2/3/9/12392325/6379_lfhe_stimulus_paper_-_modood_calhoun_32pp.pdf

Comments can be found on: https://relearning.myblog.arts.ac.uk/2023/05/29/learning-to-create-space-for-dialogue-and-understanding/

For this activity we split in groups of 4 people and each of us read and summed up one article.

The reading list was the following:

• Moon, J. (1999). Reflection in Learning and Professional Development : Theory and Practice. Abingdon: Taylor & Francis.

• Hyland, K. (1999) Academic Attribution: Citation and the Construction of Disciplinary Knowledge. Applied Linguistics 20 (3), pp.341-367 

• Dall’Alba, G. (2005) Improving teaching: Enhancing ways of being university teachers. Higher Education Research & Development 24 (4), pp. 361–372 

• Macfarlane, B., & Gourlay, L. (2009) The Reflection Game: enacting the penitent self, Teaching in Higher Education, 14 (4), pp. 455-459 – The reflection of this article by me is summed up on the previous blog post.

Summary and table discussion:

— Improving teaching Dall’Alba 2005 – Dan

Theorising the way they teach. Learning as an experience and not just giving information. 

Is teaching more difficult than learning? The care you need to have when trying to create new experiences taking in consideration Dif backgrounds. Teaching in a collaborative way and questioning the authority of the teacher. 

The most important thing is the literature being presented to produce reflexivity.

Being able to think on your feet and work the room.  

— Hyland K 1999 – Sade

Citation is really important for stabilising credible writing ethos. Construction of academic facts.

Locating within a body of knowledge where the gaps are and the reflections that can me made. Giving reference to those who came before and locate your body of knowledge within. Building blocks of knowledge. 

State the difference between citations in social sciences and place engineering and physics below the average. 

Table discussion: citation being important to build on knowledge but also a way to keep the status quo of knowledge as may voices are not published.

— Moon, reflection in learning – Don

Is reflection conscious?

Reflection as seeing the same, mirror image. Confirmation bias? Reflection taken a crude meaning of the word. 

1st March, a summary of ‘The reflection game: enacting the penitent self (MacFarlane & Gourlay 2009)’

The article draws a parallel between reality shows and reflective assignment. The idea being that in refl assignment students are constantly asked to reflect on their journeys and show willingness to change, to give examples of misbehaviour and evidence change after the pain, much like some reality shows that attempt to change people’s lives.

The authors present with some advice to “win” the game, it covers the need to “eat the humble pie” and through reflection admit its mistakes and faults, using the workplace as example of errors. It follows by the second advice which is “revelation brings conversion” in which they highlight the conversion pathway where through reflection and after admitting to the errors you can give examples of how you’ve improved and applied the new way of doing things.  Finally it gives the advice of “toe the line – or else” which I understand as keeping the new learned way of doing things as a dogma without questioning any aspect of it or how it even applies to your reality. 

By following those steps the learner who is a teacher themselves can game the system and use reflective assignment in a way of conforming to the norm in vogue. It doesn’t dismiss this practice as a valid way of teaching but instead question its application without criticism and validity within different course and cohort scenarios. 

It suggests that reflection can be driven by a real critical evaluation of theory and in a way use reflection to loop back into the practice in place at the time.