“Who am I”? What is my role as a teacher within the context of the higher education sector and the ever-shifting landscape of the creative industries? How open am I to the requiring changes in my identity and worldview as I re-encounter myself as a learner? How both my own teaching practice and creative practice interrelate and connect my experience with that of the students as they embark on their year-out-in-industry? An optional, experiential work-based learning opportunity where students can test, develop, and exchange knowledge and skills in a professional context for one academic cycle. As a Diploma in Professional Studies tutor I facilitate the space between second and final year study for the CSM BA Jewellery Design and BA Textile Design students to reflect on real-life experience, contextualise placement learning as appropriate to their creative practices, meet the learning outcomes and assessment criteria of their DPS year before they resume and complete their BA degrees; a dialogic space, created to elicit student perceptions on their creative practice, aptitude, diverse background and life experience as well as to allow professional practice norms, industry ethical and sustainability approaches to be challenged, reinterpreted and reevaluated.
Yet how do I reevaluate my teaching practice embedded in the context of real-world relationships, opportunities and constraints (Mckie, 2022)? As I progress through the PgCert academic practice programme I`m provided the space to reflect on my professional identity, familiarise with new to me language of higher education literature, teaching philosophies and theory, pedagogic methods and techniques applicable to my local context of teaching; being provided with the initial framework for reflection to be enabled to try out ideas in a safe space that I can ‘mess up’ if necessary (Mckie, 2022).
The online session from the TPP Event Series led by Annamarie McKie: Reflect on this..or that? Enabling space for reflection on the creative arts outlined different contexts for reflection and strategies to set up safe spaces to deconstruct teaching terms, experiment with educative technology and un-learn practices. How lecturers are enabled to derive ideas from their disciplinary practices to put a fresh perspective on their reflections as educators.
The prep reading for the session: The Critically Reflective Practitioner (chapter 3, Contexts for Reflection, pages 55–69) cover the concepts of Personal Reflective Space and Dyadic Reflective Space (Thompson & Thompson, 2008) and refer to David Clutterbuck’s comments on reflective space at three levels: personal (quiet thinking, time on one`s own); dyadic (one-to-one); and as a group or team (1998, p.15). Notions of philosophical thought and Friedrich Nietzsche`s work and the school of existentialist thought of being a free spirit is consistent with the philosophy of critically reflective practice as opposed of being bound by mindless acceptance of teaching habits that may need adjustment; being immersed into day-to-day workload pressures I often find myself losing sight of my own role as a university teacher but also of my own disciplinary practice in the process and I may suppress learning opportunities presented through critically reflective practice and some valuable aspects of academic identity work.
Ben Miller on his paper Brookfield’s Four Lenses: Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher (2010) argues: “The most important aspect to excellent critical practice involves going beyond the collection of feedback (from self, student, peer or scholarly lenses) by altering teaching methods and goals, documenting those changes and any progress toward goals, and becoming a student-centred, flexible and innovative teacher. Overall, Brookfield argues that excellent teachers, in a deliberate and sustained way, continually attempt to shape teaching and learning environments into democratic spaces of knowledge exchange (Brookfield, 1995).
References:
Mckie A. (2022) An exploration of How Creative Arts Lecturers in Higher Education Talk About Reflecting on Their Teaching, Doctoral Thesis [EDD] University of Roehampton. Available at: https://pure.roehampton.ac.uk/portal/en/studentTheses/an-exploration-of-how-creative-arts-lecturers-in-higher-education
Miller B. (2010) Brookfield’s Four Lenses: Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher, Faculty of Arts Teaching and Learning Committee, The University of Sydney. Available at: https://valenciacollege.edu/faculty/development/courses-resources/documents/brookfield_summary.pdf
Perec G. (1997) Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. London: Penguin Books, pp 15
Thompson S. & Thompson N. (2008) Contexts for Reflection, The Critically Reflective Practitioner, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, pp 55–69
Further References/Reading:
Brookfield S. (1995) Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher, San-Francisco: Jossey-Bass