Write a summary proposal about a change (intervention) you would like to make that promotes inclusive learning in your practice.
Object-Based Learning Intervention
Following on from the Microteaching Task: Object-based Learning along with relevant resources in the TPP Unit and the current IP Unit, this intervention proposal synthesises my reflections on intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1990) from Blog Task 1: Disability and Blog task 2:Faith, religion, and belief.
Drawing from Georges Perec’s book Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (a spatial autobiography), I probe Perec`s yearning for “An idealised scene. Space as reassurance.” For the student transitioning from the university culture into the industry landscape, however, the corporate creative sector can be a space of alienation rather than reassurance.
The tutorial gym ball (disability) and the student prayer mat (faith, religion, and belief) may serve as case studies of how ordinary objects operate as nuanced material manifestations of identity, care, and embodied defiance. This proposal merges Foucault’s spatial heterotopias with Gaston Bachelard’s poetics of space, transforming abstract accommodations into physical sites of intersectional negotiation to navigate real-world workplace scenarios.
The Proposed Intervention & Feasibility
This intervention takes the form of a pre-placement workshop that holistically evolves into a teaching and learning resource, titled ‘Space as Reassurance: Navigating Identity and Access Needs in Creative Workplaces ‘.
Designed for BA Jewellery and Textile Design students undertaking the Diploma in Professional Studies (DPS) at the CSM JTM programme, it utilises Object-Based Learning (OBL) to scaffold the anxious, liminal passage from university into industry (Meyer and Land, 2005).
Shifting away from conventional, individualised CV tutorials, this small-group intervention invites students to select an everyday artifact—such as a gym ball or a prayer mat—anchoring their complex, intersecting identities. By applying Judy Willcocks’s (Head of Museum and Study Collection at CSM) exercise on the’emotional or extra-rational reading of an object’, students will draft a literal ‘Curriculum Vitae of an object’ that echoes their own spatial autobiographies within their future workplaces and intersectional access requirements. By analysing how these objects are ‘rendered employable’, students bring their full selves into a shared, intersectional space to actively demystify their workplace rights and protections under the UK Equality Act 2010.
The intervention is logistically feasible as the workshop repurposes existing DPS briefing sessions. It also draws upon the CSM Museum and Study Collection, rendering a static archive as a living, post-workshop resource for independent student research.
Positionality and Intersectional Lens
Operating through an intersectional framework, this intervention synthesises invisible disability, faith, social class, and race. My positionality fundamentally drives this focus. My lens is informed by the intersections of social class, migration, chronic illness, and family caregiving. Coming from a working-class background and migrating from Greece to the UK in my 30s, I have firsthand experience navigating unfamiliar, elite institutional norms without inherited social capital. This outsider perspective is entwined with a lifelong proximity to disability; as a long-term carer for my brother, who lives with a severe mental health condition, and an active support system for my autistic niece, I have intimately witnessed how ableist societal structures pathologise and marginalise families.
Students from marginalised backgrounds frequently confront career precarity and covert institutional barriers, creating intense pressure to “save face.” Whether masking chronic illness, concealing religious or spiritual beliefs, or navigating racialised vulnerability to conform to dominant corporate norms, students internalise access needs as private impositions. This project aims to voice these silent challenges, moving students away from professional masking and the fear of academic or professional pathologisation.
Links to Practice
Drawing from Alison Shreeve’s (2008) framework of “pedagogy as art practice,” I integrate my role as a DPS Placement Tutor with my identity as an artist. My creative practice explores how repurposed, fragmented, and ordinary found objects are never neutral; they hold memory, witness loss, and carry living narratives.
This pedagogical lens directly informs how I experience the complex, liminal transition from an educational space into the competitive real world of practice. Addressing this precarity as a Threshold Concept (Osmond, 2009), this intervention is explicitly designed to voice the silent challenge of non-disclosure due to the intense pressure to “save face” and a deep fear of losing employment opportunities—forcing a heavy burden of professional masking.
To scaffold this liminal transition and address this precarity as a Threshold Concept (Osmond, 2009), I use my own lived experience as an embodied pedagogical tool. Due to a chronic musculoskeletal condition, I bring a gym ball to CSM tutorials as a direct replacement for rigid institutional seating, actively normalising reasonable adjustments. By openly disrupting ableist university structures, I physically show students that claiming space is a fundamental right, not a career liability.
Building on Daniel Miller’s premise that “things make people as much as people make things” (Miller, 2010), the workshop functions as an active, theatrical dialectic space. Integrating Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy with Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, students use their chosen identity objects as physical props to role-play workplace scenarios. Enacting these scripts as active “spect-actors,” students shift from passive subjects of the industry hidden curriculum into collective agents of change.
Through this intervention, the ‘Curriculum Vitae of an object’ transitions from a simple definition of material properties into a mirror for the students themselves—empowering them to navigate the hidden power dynamics of both educational environments and future creative workplaces, whilst repurposing themselves not as professional liabilities, but as complex individuals holding rich, living narratives that need a safe space to be integrated and made visible.
References and Further Reading:
Bachelard, G. (1958) The poetics of space. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Boal, A. (1974) Theater of the oppressed. London: Pluto Press.
Foucault, M. (1984) ‘Of other spaces, heterotopias’, translated by J. Miskowiec, Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, (5), pp. 46–49.
Foucault M. (1988) Technologies of the Self. Technologies of the Self, a Seminar with Michel Foucault, pp 16-49. The University of Massachusets Press.
Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the oppressed. London: Penguin Random House UK.
‘Heterotopia (space)’ (2024) Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterotopia_(space) (Accessed: 4 June 2026).
Land, R., Cousin, G., Meyer, J.H.F. and Davies, P. (2005) ‘Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (3): implications for course design and evaluation’, in Rust, C. (ed.) Improving student learning: diversity and inclusivity. Oxford: Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development, pp. 53–64.
‘Liminality’ (2024) Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminality (Accessed: 4 June 2026).
Miller, D. (2010) Stuff. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Osmond, J.and Tovey, M., 2015.The Threshold of Uncertainty in Teaching Design. Design and Technology Education: An International Journal, 20 (2), pp. 32-45.
Perec, G. (1974) Species of spaces and other pieces. London: Penguin Books.
Shreeve, A. (2008) Transitions: variation in tutors’ experience of practice and teaching relations in art and design. PhD thesis. Lancaster University.
Willcocks, J. (2018) Central Saint Martins Museum & Study Collection: object-based learning and the modern art school curriculum. Judy Willcocks Copenhagen Presentation. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3O7MM5WuFo (Accessed: 4 June 2026).
Willcocks, J. (2021) Central Saint Martins Museum & Study Collection: emotional responses to objects. Available at: https://arts.ac.libguides.com/c.php?g=686452&p=4906489 (Accessed: 4 June 2026).
Willcocks, J. and Barton, (2017) ‘Object-led self-reflection’, in Chatterjee, H.J. and Hannan, L. (eds.) Engaging the senses: object-based learning in higher education. London: Routledge, pp. 43–56.