‘Peckham Tourist’ – a full-day workshop for Year 1 BA Fine Art Photography, offsite at Peckham Levels and around Peckham High Street.
Contextual background
Students had recently returned from the Winter break, with three weeks until an assessment, so this workshop was intended to be a catalyst for new ideas, encouraging students to respond perceptively to the local area. The group has a broad range of abilities and experience, with a number of students requiring language support.
Evaluation
As a kickstarter for new ideas, the workshop was successful. We concluded the day by sharing the work made and discussing how this might be developed further back in the studio. Some previously unengaged students became enthused by their discoveries in the local area, which enabled us to identify an area of interest for their work. I was particularly pleased that a pair of neurodiverse students who usually struggle with group activities became very interested in the map-making task and produced some highly innovative work. The number of tasks meant that every student had produced something they felt to be of value in at least one activity.
Moving forwards
I previously ran this workshop in the summer term, and the students were more lethargic and reluctant to try out something new. By re-positioning it at the beginning of a new term I felt it was more successful as they were more receptive to an open-ended task that might support them to generate new ideas. However, the close proximity to their Unit 2 assessment meant that attendance wasn’t high as some students decided to concentrate on their forthcoming essay rather than attend the workshop.
The objective of the day was to perceive the local area in new ways. Damiani (2018) describes how neurodiversity ‘brings differences in thinking, in seeing, in filtering, in analysing and responding to what surrounds us’ so it makes sense that some of the most original contributions to the workshop were from neurodiverse students, who chose to ignore the majority of the tasks but presented highly creative maps constructed of found fragments from the area and their own drawings. Their initial concern was that they might be in trouble for not following all the instructions, before I was able to celebrate what they had produced. In future I would emphasize that students could take on one or all of the tasks in order to alleviate this concern.
I had re-written the brief to be more succinct and portable, putting the tasks alongside the rationale as a reminder of why they were being asked to do ‘unusual’ activities. As a consequence, I received less questions this time about the purpose of the activities, but shyness remained a barrier and some students opted out of certain tasks.
I was disappointed that only two students chose to partake in the ‘sound walk’, which to my mind was the most revelatory of the set tasks. Many felt self-conscious to be blindfolded in a public space, so I think next time I would begin by doing this myself with them. This would reverse the hierarchy of the situation and put me in a vulnerable position, supported by student guides. Orr & Shreeve (2017) describe collaboration in this way as a teaching strategy that allows tutor and student to work ‘together on a journey of discovery’.
References
Damiani, L.M. (2018) ‘On the spectrum within art and design academic practice’, Spark: UAL Creative Teaching and Learning Journal, Vol 3 / Issue 1, pp. 16-25
Orr, S. & Shreeve, A. (2017), Teaching practices for creative practitioners. In Art and Design Pedagogy in Higher Education : Knowledge, Values and Ambiguity in the Creative Curriculum, Milton: Taylor & Francis Group.
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Further links: Project brief and instructions for students
Some examples of student work
Student ‘maps’