“Diverse Student Voices in Creative Practice” Terry Finnigan - A Response
Abstract (taken directly from the text)
This paper [Diverse Student Voices in Creative Practice, Terry Finnigan] reflects on the development of a student voice project that researched into the positive learning experiences of high achieving art and design students from a variety of backgrounds. We wanted to build up a bank of positive case studies of student learning experiences and explore the institutional and personal factors that contributed to their academic success. The students chose to respond in varying ways often using the visual medium through sketchbooks, DVDs, books, and board games. These have been shared with staff and students through exhibitions and workshops where, they can interact with the artefacts and discuss diversity and achievement. This project has captured the imagination and interest of the wider HE sector as it relates both to student voice and diversity. It has also been transformational in our own CETL (Centres for Excellence of Teaching and Learning) developments around co-creating solutions with students.
The Tell Us About It project, developed in 2007-2008 brought together students and staff into a joint collaboration around learning and teaching in a range of CELTs nationality. Tell Us About It became a way to develop and explore diverse learners in a post secondary education level. This was an opportunity to shift the focus on to student learning experiences; reflecting on what did and didn’t work in higher levels of education. Students that were involved were required to answer three questions in a response of their choice. These questions were;
What were the challenges you faced and how did you overcome them?
Can you share any tips or strategies for new students?
One of the key elements that made this project so successful was the openness and freedom of expression that was involved in the process of answering these three questions.
In this case study, students were able to open up about personal and circumstantial issues that they were never able to express before. The expressive and creative element of this study gave the students an opportunity for self expression. When students are given this opportunity, they want to run with it. Being able to choose how to render their personal experiences and thoughts gives them the freedom of choice. In Post-Secondary education, there is never room for creativity or self expression. Your lessons are planned to the hour and all is planned prior to your first class. The syllabus is set in stone and there is no room for change. Assignments that have been implemented for the entirety of the professors career remain intact and will remain on the syllabus until their retirement. Assignments and Lessons are recycled and re-used year after year, with no revision or change. Being stuck in this cycle can be detrimental to students; students can loose their confidence, ambition, and their individual persona - for they begin to merge and blend into the faceless mass of the student body in the lecture hall.
Art Education, specifically, needs to be about the individual student rather than the mass of the student body. Individuality is often lost in larger schools and classrooms, for it is easy to ignore the lone student keeping to themselves and simpler to address the students as one giant entity. Individuality and self expression is essential in the Art class, and like in the Tell Us About It collective, students must be given the opportunity to take their practices into their own hands and develop their own ideas and values. Students must be able to take control of their own education, and as educators, we must be there to support and facilitate their form of discovery-learning. Student’s identities and sense of self are often lost and interconnected with wide social and power relations, across a range of differences and inequalities. In the Tell Us About It collaborative, students felt that they had been recognized and valued as individuals (Finnigan, 141).
This is important. This is why we, as educators, are here. We are here to support and facilitate the education of these students - without compromising their individuality and their self identity.
Conclusion (taken directly from the text)
‘Given the challenges we face, education doesn’t need to be reformed - it needs to be transformed’ (Robinson 2009: 238).
The transformation of education is what CETLs set out to do, to provide spaces for change within the academy and focus the work on pedagogy. This CLIP CETL project has given us the space, the time, and the money to explore and create something that is simple and complex and at the same time extremely powerful.
Through the process of developing, managing and reflecting on this project its shape has changed. It started as a project directed by staff in the academy, from a position of curiosity, which would enhance staff knowledge. It has become much more than that. What has been produced can and has been in different places and with different constituents within the institution and beyond. It has been used within a diversity meeting to discuss students’ views and in an induction event at the university or in partner FE colleges with prospective students. It is also being used to consider different ways to evaluate students’ views across the wider HE sector bringing the concept of visual learning to a wider audience.
‘We must shift the role of the critical intellectuals form being universalizing spokespersons to acting as cultural workers whose task it is to take away the barriers that prevent people from speaking for themselves’ (Apple 1991, in Bown 2007: 161).
The project has been exciting and rewarding over the last two years and the team has learnt so much. Students’ visual responses are always interesting and imaginative and help to capture the essence of the experience... Real student voice projects are about ‘challenging the academy to allow active participation from a wide range of communities and individuals who will help to redefine the parameters of higher education itself’ (stuart 2000: 33).
This Tell Us About It project is part of this wider movement and the student creativity that has been exhibited helps to engage and entice staff and students alike. Hearing diverse high achieving student voices through the medium of their choice and in ways that mirror the disciplines in art and design has been a significant learning outcome for the CLIP CETL and one which we intend to explore in the future.
This is not just limited to higher education. Implementing these same forms of self expression, self directed and discovery learning in high school and grade school can and will be beneficial for students. Giving students the confidence to take their learning into their own hands will build them the confidence to exist after they leave the school system.
