Contextual Background
I am one of only two non-fractional teachers in the MA Design for Data Visualisation course, and I work with outgoing students to develop their Final Major Projects during their last term, which overlaps with the first term for new students.
Challenges/opportunities: I don’t work with new students until the second term in a large group for Unit 2, which makes it challenging to traverse cultural and language differences to quickly build a dynamic learning environment. This hinders the quality of their Unit 2 outcomes.
Evaluation
Current strategies for meeting student needs:
- Introduce playful prompts in early sessions
- Establish iterative making, and ‘learning through making’ activities to traverse perfectionism
- Give students opportunities to share work with the whole group to promote agency and confidence
- Model best practices by introducing practitioners and their projects that embody experimental, risk-taking ethos
- Have casual progress checks and conversations with individual students during in-class project development
- Embody the kind of attitude and energy that I aim to cultivate with the group.
- Design and introduce microprojects to boost iterative making dynamics
- Communicate expectations for outcomes and approach to making
- Emphasise reflection on outcomes as just as important as the outcomes in small microprojects and model critical analysis
Effectiveness of my approach(es):
- Some students are more naturally inclined to a looser, experimental approach, and they do well with this.
- I see some students break through the confidence wall and build trust through our one-on-one conversations about their work, but it isn’t always possible to connect with them all in a short amount of time.
- There is typically good energy in the room, especially as approach a deadline and after the students share their work with each other.
- Embodying/projecting the energy and atmosphere becomes exhausting when not enough students are stepping into that same space with me.
Moving Forwards
Some students are great at picking up on the formula of my teaching style, and I have noticed that they will work to a point of being able to show me flashes of progress just to appease me when I stop by to check in. I understand that some students are naturally more inclined to genuinely care about their progress, but some of the problems I am facing might have to do with some students feeling stressed about other work or life stuff, or they might just be having trouble with time management.
One solution is to provide students with expectations in print form. Reliance on oral communication and presentations seem to only resonate with a portion of the students. This will allow them to have easier access to expectations outside of the classroom/session and work at their own pace. The printouts will help fill the gap between oral instruction, memory, and additional language barriers.
Preventing drift with dyadic reflective spaces (Thompson and Thompson, 2008):
I will insert more structured feedback into each session. This should help the students manage their time and reinforce best practices while also boosting confidence. This could also help me from feeling too exhausted from modelling engagement and learning dynamics. It is often the case that when they are also juggling their Final Major Project Proposal and their Collaborative Unit submissions during the same term, they struggle more to engage with Unit 2 work since these second term projects are holistically assessed as part of a Portfolio submission in the third term and don’t feel the same urgency.
References
Thompson, S. and Thompson, N. (2008) The Critically Reflective Practitioner. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. pp. 55–76.