Learning awareness through object-based enquiry

  • Judy Willcocks: CSM Museum
  • Graham Barton: UAL Academic Support
  • Richard Daniels: UAL Archives and Special Collections

This Workshop starts at 11:45 in room T808. Back to Parallel Session 2

Brief description of session and activities

This proposal reflects support for Object-Based Learning, anticipating the new Learning, Teaching and Enhancement Strategy 2014-17, and responding to the UAL Strategy for Academic Support 2013-16.

UAL-wide Academic Support Events and Special Collections across UAL have jointly developed and co-delivered a range of sessions using objects from museum and archive collections as a point of focus for enhancing student research skills in creative practice.   These sessions encourage students to look at objects in detail as raw data for the exploration of material culture and as a vehicle for surfacing their orientations and habituated responses towards object-based research. Students are given the opportunity to examine the nature of enquiry and reasoning, and are encouraged to develop metacognitive awareness of the differences between the experience of information-seeking online and the more contemplative nature of traditional object-based enquiry.    The sessions have been successfully delivered to cross-College multidisciplinary groups from both undergraduate and postgraduate courses. Students have reported that they value the different ‘readings’ of objects undertaken by peers, and have learnt or extended their range of methodologies for object-based enquiry and approaches to questioning as a result. 

“[I was surprised by] how people from different areas had different ways of analysing an object.”

“I think this kind of workshop just opens my mind and I still need to keep thinking.”

We are proposing an experiential workshop as a taster session* to introduce conference participants to the pedagogic approach behind these object-based learning sessions and offer them the chance to carry out a detailed object reading, echoing the experience of our students. Through ‘reading’ objects in small groups, and drawing on established methodologies such as Prown (1982), participants will be encouraged to explore their own dispositions towards enquiry, and consider the value of collaborative meaning-making. 

* This session complements the session proposed by Sarah Mahurter

Will students be involved in the session? If so how?

No students will be involved

What will participants take away from the session?

Participants will leave the workshop with a basic understanding of the methodology for guiding students through a detailed ‘reading’ of an object. Participants will be given a simple worksheet which they can take away and use in their own teaching practice.