Interviewee B
Interviewer started with preamble, and explained rationale of the project to develop a webpage collating information on inclusivity in teaching in HE. That it would be a snapshot, with links to further information.
Interviewee B: One of the interesting things is that people who work on courses don’t know what the definition of inclusivity is. …I’ve made some notes on your questions.
Interviewer:What are your thoughts on this in the context of your own teaching?
Interviewee B: I think it’s a great idea. There’s a lot of info, issues or elements to it e.g. Investigating curriculum, how you teach. Confusion, language flipsbetween inclusivity in terms of access and disability, and inclusivity in terms of widening participation.
Interviewer: Like the word Diversity which is overused.
Interviewee B: It is really overused. Read an article recently by someone (6:50) from Harvard, “diversity” is a word trotted out by universities to make themselves sound good without having to do anything, one can get a bit cynical as well. It’s a shame, if you think about what Teaching is, or should be…I mean there is just so much…so I could say quite a bit about inclusivity about my own teaching, but your asking about the webpage
Interviewer: I am.
Interviewee B: So in the most basic way, because there is a lot of work at UAL around this field. In some ways we are a bit behind the US, where they’ve embedded discourse around this. It would be great to have somewhere where this information is linked to. Because even though I’ve been working in this field for quite a long time, every day I m discovering new initiatives! And also I think because so much of the staffing here is AL, there is a tendency when you work FT, you get into this mindset where you think everyone is full time and everyone knows what you know. Actually, it’s completely the opposite. If you can’t afford to pay AL staff to have staff Dev on inclusivity in teaching, then the next best thing is to have some resources they’re signposted to in their induction.
Interviewer: Ok. So do you need any staff Dev in this area? You need only answer briefly.
Interviewee B: (Sigh)
Interviewer:Just to say I am not investigating staff Dev…this question may be more appropriate if I were interviewing someone who hadn’t engaged with this area at all, and to ask them how they might want to be informed. So it may not be as helpful for you
Interviewee B: It may not be helpful in terms of your project, on the other hand, what would be helpful would be to have discussions with course teams to see what they think about this, so that academic support is better…that is for me to work on. For me, one of the biggest issues that come up every single day here is how the knowledge that happens within libraries, Ac Support, disability services, counselling, works with the courses. Cos if everyone is speaking a different language…what I am saying Is: does the information we have need to be contextualised in a different way so that they know what we are talking about?
Interviewer: Ok. Thank you. Are there any projects you’re involved in?
Interviewee B: Yes, the RAS project with Kate Hatton, head of inclusive practices; My colleague and I are writing a chapter for a book on drawing in relation to inclusion in UAL ; I work with the Insights programme, the WP outreach team; my JD is to investigate ways to support first gen students at CSM. It is written into my JD that I research these things. I’m on the WP LAS Group, that feeds into access and inclusion steering group. What else?
Interviewer: The thing you were talking about before we started the interview – chart.
Interviewee B: For the WP group. And I run pre-sessional programme for 1st gen students coming in to CSM.
Interviewer: Have you sought info on this, and where, or how did you search for it?
Interviewee B: Well there are a number of UAL publications which have been around for a while – have you seen the book Inclusive Practices, Inclusive Pedagogies? By Kate Hatton; Art for All; Duna Sabri has written a lot. Information Terry Finnegan produced. Shades of Noir. Towards an Inclusive Arts Education, Kate Hatton’s first book… Art for a Few. Quite a lot of stuff. I’ve been sent to loads of conferences, reacting to the ‘students who are hard to reach’ engagement initiative, retention and success, decolonising the curriculum…. Diversity and inclusion in art and design, closing the gap…. I do read a lot. What’s quite interesting about all those things is that they pretty much without exception tend to be very small case studies that are very localised. Most of the conferences I’ve been to have not been relating to art & design education, also have addressed very specific issues to do with local populations. What’s quite interesting is that a place like UAL has different challenges: major city, doesn’t have campuses, population is international, so have different challenges. Interesting as you get certain…nice to hear what others have tried, what works and what doesn’t…it’s very much about trying different things.
I have been to a number of talks at IoE, more about govt policy, and more or less until there’s a socialist revolution and neo-liberalism goes down the toilet, those kind of things…impact of fees combined with no culture of philanthropy and investment. So an interesting thing is trying to unpick issues to do with the practical e.g. students can’t afford to do stuff, or are they to do with pedagogical expectations. There is a lot of stuff at CSM – hidden costs. I tried to make a chart at one point about all the hidden costs across courses...
I read a lot – and was paid to do modules on the MA Philosophy of Education at IoE – quite interesting actually. Look back at early educational theory, talking about the same issues as now – what is the purpose of education? What are we trying to achieve? Then there are our issues of the day, e.g. Current emphasis on employability, worth debating. Also in terms of art and design, there is a tension there as we are not a traditional university subject.
Thinking about inclusivity ripples out into all areas of Education, and fundamental issues
Interviewer:(19:50) What I am getting at with q 7 onwards..(and I didn’t realise how much this is essentially your role)…when this webpage exists, if you didn’t know where to find it, where would you look for it?
Would you look on the intranet?
Interviewee B: It’s not there. The intranet is a shambles. Tried to go into Canvas, but lots of the links are broken. One of the frustrating things is that WP – most people don’t know that Kate Hatton is head of inclusive practices at UAL, most people haven’t heard of her…that’s to do with her visibility. There are all these people doing lots of things, none of them are connected on the intranet, and there’s no other way to find out things like that. Anecdotally, everything that happens at UAL happens because you met someone and they know someone…everything is between the cracks of these systems.
Yeah, I think it would be fantastic. Would it be an open page to students, and whether that would be a good idea..
Interviewer: Can you say a bit more about that? (21:13)
Interviewee B: Is there a portal for teaching staff?
Interviewer: I think Canvas is just for teaching staff, students still have myarts. I think.
Interviewee B: Oh, ok. That would be the right place to put it then.
Interviewer: There’s still where on the intranet…although it doesn’t matter where it actually sits as long as it’s discoverable
Interviewee B: There isn’t a teaching resources initiative, everyone is so localised.
Interviewer: There is the Teaching and Learning Exchange.
Interviewee B: Oh yeah, that would make sense,
Interviewer: They are working on a section of their pages about inclusivity in teaching, I spoke to Lucy P a while ago about This (this project), and the TLE pages are for internal and external, so we agreed that as mine is different and that we would link.
Interviewee B: So what would hers have on it?
Interviewer: There would be some overlap.. e.g. links to Shades of Noir and teaching practice
Interviewee B: What do Shades of Noir do actually? I know they have a good website
Interviewer: We used them on the inclusivity unit, they have inclusivity zines, on all sorts of topics – transgender, race and others.
Interviewee B: They are going through the handbooks…
Interviewer: The project – I can’t remember the name – where first generation students made a piece about their experiences at uni. Providing info as well as doing…
Interviewee B: This is a bit off topic, but one of the things that’s interesting is that a lot of courses expect some students to drop out, competitive, you either sink or swim. That sort of attitude is prevalent, especially in older teaching staff, which is interesting in terms of inclusion!
Sometimes inclusion in general can be seen as a cynical thing, we need to keep bums on seats…but that is not what it is.
Interviewer: I have some moments when I wonder if that’s why universities are engaging so much with it.
Interviewee B: Well, part of the logistics is there is the govt access agreement so they do it for funding. We have extra funding for first generation students, and to address the BAME attainment gap so we have to show we are offering something to those students, even though those students may not be the ones that need the support. It’s about offeringthe support.
It’s amazing how basic things there are that teachers are unaware of. Sitting in an induction for first years, in the front row were 4 girls in headscarves. The tutor came in and the first thing they said was “I bet you guys are all looking forward to going out to get pissed tonight”. Welcome to student life sort of stuff. I thought it was interesting about how the most general stuff…just recognising that there would be students who wouldn’t be doing that, but also that you would offer more than one option. That lack of awareness that there are people in the room with different situations..
Interviewer: That’s quite painful
Interviewee B: It is painful and I think a lot of that comes from what it was like to be a student watching the Young Ones, or whatever. Separate from all the pedagogical interest in identity (27:53) discussions in reading list, all that stuff, amazes me how little awareness there can be of the room!
Interviewer: That is quite astounding
Interviewee B: I’ve seen loads of things like that. Assumptions of knowledge. I used to work in outreach. The tutor was talking about charcoal. I decided to ask them how many knew what it was, who had used it – only a couple. It only took a few minutes but put everyone at ease. Then afterwards he said it seems so remedial, why did you need to do that? I said it’s not about being remedial, it’s about lowering the bar, or giving everyone a piece of information so that everyone is on the same page. Makes everyone feel they have a common thing. It is worrying they thought that wasn’t important. Maybe it didn’t make any difference at all, but I felt it did.
There is so much emphasis in society now on the individual, I think kids feel stressed and assume they’re on the back foot.
Anyway, that doesn’t help with this website… I’m interested in making things more inclusive on Academic Support Online.
Interviewer: Do you think that is inclusive, and has that in mind in its design?
Interviewee B: I’m a bit on the fence about whether digital platforms are inclusive at all, in essence. Because I think if make a digital platform, you make assumptions that people will know how to find certain things. I’ve very rarely seen a digital platform, apart form multi million dollar e.g. Facebook, where you have complicated sets of information that’s easy to navigate.
Interviewer: We can’t go into that now because…
Interviewee B: Oh sorry.
Interviewer: No no don’t be sorry, these particular questions aren’t relevant to me in this context.
Interviewee B: It is interesting and useful…there’s inclusivity with a capital “I” which is you’ve got here, which is out in the world as a pedagogical discourse. But there’s so many elements to it, the opportunity to be able to find something online that explains what it all means…to have a page which succinctly explains, and options to look at things around that. Most of my discussions with teaching staff here about what it means. And it means somethingdifferent all the time.
And also a lot of staff feel when you talk about inclusivity that you’re accusing them of something, of being not inclusive. That’s actually not the case, it’s trying to be more aware of it in terms of your discipline. I think it would be brilliant to have a page that people could investigate on their own…it would be great for someone like me to be able to forward to people, and say look at this.
Especially as so much of what UAL has produced is case studies. (33:26)
Interviewee B: It would be great to have a blog based on WP – it’d be a good way to share.
It is great now that the attainment gap dashboards can identify gaps by unit. Interestingly the gap has pretty much closed in contextual studies units, it’s the practice-based units.
Would be good to have a section for Resources for teaching, e.g. Zine collection at LCC, Chelsea archive, Shades of Noir…what else?
Interviewer: So do you think you would like things other than case studies?
Interviewee B: Case studies are really useful, but it would be great to have a landing page with definitions.
Interviewer: Where can I find that? (laughs)
Interviewee B: Errr… The official definition that I found is very generic “making sure when you’re teaching that everyone can access what you’re teaching”.
Interviewer: That sounds the sort of thing that Shades of Noir would have engaged with. I did the Inclusivity in Teaching unit on the PGCert last term…there must be something. I don’t know if we had a definition of what it is. I mean it is as simple as that, but then if you’re not engaged in that area you wouldn’t understand what that is getting at.
Interviewee B: No.
INTERVIEWER: is there information you would like…for instance when I was interviewing the other colleague, also really engaged with this area, at a different College, I was saying it would be introductory information, and he said no actually I would like NON introductory information. Something that is a case study, in a non-UAL context but is still really interesting, and to broaden his reading. That was interesting.
Interviewee B: Yes…Well who is your audience for the webpage?
Interviewer: Initially I had thought it would be for new staff, or people who just want to know a bit more. And some of the case studies, NUS report and those sort of things, some things you could find by Googling, but they would be in one place and easy to read. Visually clear to read. My start point is, and Terry Finnegan suggested this, is the bibliography that goes with Aisha and Terry’s report on attainment in Art & Design. So there are very general, and very specific readings.
Interviewee B: Maybe it could be a myarts blog? So that people who are interested in this kind of work could haver resources, a description
Interviewer: The blog is a format suggested by Jennifer W-B, and someone else suggested Workflow. It would be nice if people could add their own things they had found interesting.
Interviewee B: Yes, it would be great, as long as there were sections that..maybe there could be a few administrators that people could send in.
Interviewer: I would like to cluster them under headings. Do you have any thoughts on what the headings could be? One could be case studies, for instance
Interviewee B: Yeah, there could be official reports, e.g. HEFCE, then there could be university research, recommended reading, case studies, interesting weblinks
Interviewer: Maybe as broad as that would be good. I think I was overthinking it.
Interviewee B: I like on ASO for instance “Are you a teacher or a student?” “Are you interested in blah or blah blah” and it follows you through, but maybe that’s too complicated.
Interviewer: It might be…(laughs) but it could be a way of having a general heading and having a question.
Interviewee B: Your inclusivity doesn’t include things like dyslexia?
Interviewer: Well it doesn’t at the moment because that would be just too big for this project. But “inclusivity” does include dyslexia. In this context it’s more about race, the BAME attainment gap…it could develop into something more but at the moment this is what it is. Also, some of the feedback I’ve had from some of the tutors is ‘it would be a never-ending thing, what is sensible to have.
But you know, in the longer term it could develop into something more. Yeah
Interviewee B: You don’t want to give yourself a huge piece of work…
Interviewer: No, I can’t do that now, and the question I haven’t answered, and am not asking at this point is who will own it once it’s there. It can’t really be me, or necessarily be me.
Interviewee B: Teaching & Learning Exchange…
Interviewer: (40:000) It could be. If it gets built and is useful, intitally it was going to be a CSM thing, and Silke was keen. So it could have been taken over by CSM. I am meeting Silke again soon, next week, so we’ll see. But if it was taken on by CSM it would have to be accessible to all, not just CSM staff.