Irrespective of having taught or presented to many people, I was a bit apprehensive about doing the Microteaching session. I suppose I still get the nerves no matter how many times I’ve done it. And I can’t say that I was all that excited about the notion of Object-based Learning.
But it was a great learning experience – seeing many different teaching styles and approaches, above and beyond the classical pedagogy of lectures and discussion. I’ve picked up lots of ideas: Tash playing music during her session, Oli reallocating the student pairings, Salima’s coloured post-it notes to get inspiration going, and Becca’s breathe and stretch pre-session – all through the brief of using an object to create a 20 min workshop. In many sessions there was a sense of magic – a magician setting the stage and then – voila! – finding out what the purpose of all this is for – what are we here to learn at the the end.
My session went as I had hoped. The discussions people had surrounding the objects lead to them all guessing correctly who it belonged to which easily flowed into notions of branding, identity, signifiers and cultural capital. The first group discussed the colour and touch of the Airpods which indeed was one of the reason’s why Lan liked them (material design). Becca’s water bottle lead to a discussion about anti-brand (values). Alex’s keys brought up themes of class and access. It was a much smaller and more intimate group by the end of the day. I would now have to think about how I might translate this session for a bigger cohort but I really enjoyed how it made people look at one another and pay attention to the unconscious ways in which we are making assumptions about other people and also the signifiers of our identity, culture and taste through our relationships with the objects that we surround ourselves with.