Introduction – what is the report about and where does your positionality sit within the review?
The report is about decolonising the MA Graphic Branding & Identity canon. I am a Chinese-American woman and last year I joined the core team comprising of two white males. In addition to being a woman, a foreigner and a person of colour, I also have the least amount of experience as a teacher, an academic and with the cohort. This means that my confidence coming into the course is not very high and there can be a feeling of inferiority. As Richards writes in Inside the Ivory Tower, “raced and gendered discrimination that manifests in subtle day-to-day practices is largely invisible and goes unnoticed, except to those of us who experience it. This compounds our sense of being undervalued as women of colour.”
My privileges include my being from a Chinese family where education is of the utmost importance and hard work is assumed. This means I might be hard on my students and assume that they will apply the same kind of work ethic that I was raised on. This also means that I might have an unconscious (not so much anymore) bias in that I think the Chinese students are fast and hard-working designers like me. At the same time, as a person from Gen-X, I will admit that I tend to think the younger generations can be snowflakes. This can “affect how [I] engage, respond, and make judgements about students thereby increasing or decreasing the levels of inclusion for some students within the classroom.” (Tran 2021)
For the most part, I am able-bodied and that means that before this unit, my lectures, assignments and communication methods may not have considered neurodiversity and can be largely created under the assumption that everyone can understand me. Through this Inclusive Practices Unit I have been made aware of more stories of invisible disabilities that I will be ensuring to consider when I now prepare my lessons, design the curriculum as well as assessing my students. I say for the most part, during the pandemic I have been diagnosed with mild to moderate hearing loss which impacts my practice in that in a physical classroom with bad acoustics and background noise, I have a hard time hearing the students. I have taking motions to let the university and my line manager know about this but have yet to see any solutions put into practice.
As a woman of colour, there is an emotional burden on me and a sense of tokenism. I have noticed that the students that tend sign up with me for tutorials are generally Asian. I’ve been invited to the staff interview panel because I’m a BAME rep and found out about this later. Of course thoughts have crossed my mind whether I had an advantage in being hired because of the university’s Anti-Racism Action Plan.
Though my course leader has been very supportive in my raising of inclusive issues on the course, I need to be careful to protect my safety in this space and not become the standard bearer to fight inequalities on my own because that should not my cross to bear. As Richards shares in her contribution to Inside the Ivory Tower, “We struggle to evolve our learnt practices of oppression, and this is highly stressful.” How will I do that is a question I’m still figuring out. Perhaps more reading. Perhaps more communication.
Yet though I am an intersectional minority, I was still educated in the American system, and was “taught in classrooms where styles of teachings reflected the notion of a single norm of thought and experience, which we were encouraged to believe was universal.” (Hooks 1995) In order to succeed within “the system” I had to assimilate and conform to Eurocentric dominant culture. This means that I have become complicit in my own othering and as a teacher, perpetuate white hegemony.
Context – which course/department are you engaged with and why would this intervention be an important one?
I teach, lead units and design the curriculum on the course MA Graphic Branding & Identity at London College of Communication. In the field of Branding there are not many voices (especially published) from women or people of colour. “Abstracting and indexing discovery tools are predominantly captured material published in the Western world and very few include any form of nontraditional content, or content published outside of Europe of North America.” (Tran 2021) As one student rightly said in the RISD Room of Silence film, we hold a lot of power as medium-makers… we go out and we can… shape the way people unconsciously see the world.” Perhaps other than this being an initiative in UAL’s Anti-Racism Action Plan, because of my positionality, it is especially important to me that more people like me, that I identify with, are represented in the canon.
Inclusive learning theory – why is your work important within the Academy?
To promote inclusive learning, “we must examine what constitutes the ‘canon’ of our subjects and how we can ensure relevant and meaningful curricula, which students might address from the valid perspective of their own experiences.” (Bhagat and O’Neill 2011) We should “allow our pedagogy to be radically changed by our recognition of a multicultural world, [so that] we can give students the education they desire and deserve.” (Hooks 1995) Rather than attempting to decolonise solely from the staff’s content and reading lists, there can be an exchange of references from the students. As Freire says, we don’t want the students to “consume ideas, but to create and re-create them.” We want to change the perpetuation of citing sources from the same demographics and increase the voices and opinions within our field of study. We want to level up a diverse mix of opinions and thought in the Branding sector.
Reflection – what were the considerations as to your process of deciding on the artefact and a description of the artefact?
In attempt to de-centre white hegemony in our curriculum discourse, in the beginning of Unit 1 after the first lecture ‘What is branding?’, I created a Reflective Task Padlet (https://artslondon.padlet.org/psun/195n6kps5k24lgyx ) with the prompt, “What happens when there is only one demographic (i.e. a bunch of white dudes) that are the ‘prominent figures/influences/voices’ in branding/design? Share one person that you think should be included in our discourse on the map.” The students contributed 30+ pins around the wold and discussed how “it leads to a one-sided perspective of the majority class (how [the tutor] compared that history is also an opinion),” how it “creates a gap between what most people (not from this group) relate to” and that “there seems to be a stereotype, as if the designers of this group (white) are better than others, at least that’s what many people in China think.”
Action – How would this artefact be used/has/would be used and what does this mean to your practices?
I intended for it to be delivered at the beginning of each cohort to set a tone of inclusivity and continue to add to it every year. However to evaluate this artefact, I revisited this Padlet at the beginning of Unit 5 by presenting a short introduction to Decolonising the canon and reframing the Padlet as an opportunity to have a sharing discussion for them to consider broadening their references in their Final Major Projects.
Evaluation of your process – how successful was it, what you learned and how would/could you do things differently?
The session didn’t go as expected. The briefing ran overtime and the session got pushed back to after lunch in which our session of about 50 students went down to 18. The Collaborate room was very quiet and I had a hard time getting the students to share as most of the pins were from students not in the room. Padlet also didn’t seem be to the right platform as I had it as a world map to demonstrate people from various countries but you have to click on each pin to bring it up. I don’t think it was the right time to test it because it was after they had already handed in their Proposals to the Final Major Project which meant most of them had already done the bulk of their research.
Though I tried to emphasis that perhaps looking at the concepts behind the person’s work could be relevant, one of the students feedback that she thought “the resource is a great tool, but [not] relevant to [her] project.” Another said, “in general as a resource is great (as long as it keeps being populated) as it helps to expand our knowledge, compare to others’ inspiration sources! Also, probably the first times reading through will be quite random, as it is geolocated rather than practice based, but hovering around there might be some relevant person doing something related to our topics.” This has lead me to reflect that perhaps using a platform that is searchable by keyword perhaps like how SoN uses diigo.com might be more appropriate for students to look up references.
Though I did feel it was ironic and disappointing that my push for an Inclusive Practice got sidelined, without my prompting afterwards the Course Leader did acknowledge that the reason the session didn’t have much engagement was because the briefing overran and it got pushed to after lunch. I do believe there will be more opportunities for this in the future.
In our peer-to-peer feedback presentations, Steph Rolph made a good point that instead of using a picture of the person, perhaps it could be about their work, as the focus of this resource, originally as a Reflective Task, can become a repository of references for students to refer to. She also suggested that we revisit this task a various points in the curriculum before the end of the Proposal, in addition to at the beginning so that students are reminded of diversifying their references throughout the curriculum. This would ensure that it’s a sustainable transformation rather than a one-off artefact.
Conclusion – what are your key findings, observations and reflections regarding this process and your practices?
“In order to help our students recognise the different forms of understanding, knowing and explaining the world, we must first recognise our own form of explaining the world. Therefore, “before I can ponder what possible actions are required [to decolonize education] I must first identify [the] space from which I might speak.” (Tran 2021) Through this assignment, I realised that my positionality may affect my perception of engagement in my practice. As I revisited the notes and chat, I realised there were quite a few interesting comments that I didn’t pick up on while I was focused on other aspects like time management in the class. Not having confidence in the importance of what I’m delivering can create blind spots in not fully recognising that dynamics of the room.
“If a teacher brings into the classroom unresolved Eurocentric structures of the previous experience without having interrogated what this might mean for themselves and their students, the challenge of creating the environment of a decolonized classroom which facilitates access to voices and visibility of knowledge forms that are normally unseen and unheard, becomes even more challenging.” (Tran 2021) I constantly feel like I’m not as good as the other tutors. This is exacerbated by the fact that the student surveys have had comments like “I f-ing love Paul Jackson” or “Special thanks to Rob…” to which I have set for myself as the standard I should achieve. Though I realise that even when I was an MA student my preference would be been to have tutorials with the Course Leader or more senior lecturers in the course so it doesn’t always mean it’s a race or gendered reason, I wonder if I will ever match the authority that the other two white males command in the classroom.
I’ve come up with a student-centred tutor system in which they sign up with the tutor they would like to see for tutorials. This has proven to be a positive approach with the students but also means that there is a popularity contest with the tutors. Amongst the team, we even had an actual discussion about how the students really respond to the older, white male British Associate Lecturers.
From discussions with my course leader and peer-to-peer presentations, I’ve reflected that in order for inclusive practices to be sustainable and fully embedded into the course, it needs to be constantly reinforced at multiple points throughout the year so that there is an actual transformative result and change. We can’t just have it be a one-off, tick-box exercise. Therefore like in the Finnigan and Richards HEA report, “small changes linked to inclusive learning… giving them choice, is motivational, transformational and leads to creative intervention.”
As a core member of the team and in a classroom setting, I have become very aware of the power that I now hold, something that I’m not entirely comfortable with. I remember that though I was the Unit Lead, I didn’t want to give the first lecture. The Course Leader said, “whoever gives the first lecture will be the boss.” To which I said, “I don’t mind not being the boss.” As someone who always welcomes collaboration, I prefer non-heirachy, but it is interesting to reflect on how keen I was to give the power again. Again, I wonder if this is because of my positionality as a woman and a POC. Tran says that “at university, a teacher’s power is less associated with their authority to manage the behaviour of students and more related to the influence they have over what is taught and how. It is here understood that power in a university classroom is linked to how students are being led to learn.” (Tran 2021) So it is incredibly important that I assess how my positionality plays a great part in constructing my world-view thus shaping my practice in how I teach, what I teach and I how perceive what I am teaching.
Bibliography
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