We have created an end of year space for all UAL staff to discuss and share their most pressing educational issues and priorities. What have we learnt, either looking back at an extraordinary year or facing forwards to the upcoming challenges in 21/22.
Strand 1: Interplay between Teaching, Research and Knowledge Exchange.
Enter the Teaching, Research and Knowledge Exchange Room
Last year’s Learning and Teaching Conference 2020 theme will form one strand of this year’s conference. The interplay between teaching and research is a long-held dynamic in higher education, with the notion of ‘research-informed teaching’ serving as an umbrella term for multiple ways in which the two interact. More recently there has been a formalisation of the role that higher education plays in contributing to society via ‘knowledge exchange’, understood as the ways universities collaborate with non-academic partners to achieve commercial, environmental, cultural and social benefits. You can make a new proposal to add to this strand if you wish.
Strand 2: Equity and Equality
Enter the Equity and Equality Room
This strand represents a range of dialogues, presentations and workshops on themes related to institutional equity and equality. Across a range of contexts from teaching, to assessment, careers, disability services as Universal Design, technical curricula and teaching staff perspectives on creative pedagogies, this wide-ranging theme also has a key presentation on maintaining a ‘consent culture’ indicating how student well-being is kept in mind throughout this strand.
Strand 3: Student-centred Practices
Enter the Student-centred Practices Room
Innovations in student-centred practices feature across this strand. Starting with an employment context this theme explores student belonging in depth, an innovative project on art psychotherapy, a digital learning perspective on assessment, input from creative computing, lessons from the technical frontline over this year and fascinating projects on material culture and practices of making online, each examples of cutting-edge student-centred best practice.
Strand 4: Crisis and Transformation
Enter the Crisis and Transformation Room
Given the challenges that Covid has presented us and the enormous efforts we have made to work remotely, support students and deliver innovative education online; can funding and flexibility now be found to address long-standing racial and social injustice and tackle the climate emergency? Sessions in this theme are especially focussed on systemic and transformative proposals for Higher Education; including LCC changemakers, healing pedagogy, cross disciplinary online practice, critical ecologies, Deleuzian experiments, education and power, the post neo-liberal university and lessons learnt, amongst others.
Arts’ Student’s Union: Student Experience
Enter the Collective Room
There will now be an annual appearance from Arts' Students Union who will have a strand of workshops/talks looking at the student experience from the student perspective of academic representation, campaigns, and services they provide for their members. These sessions will provide academic staff with an understanding of Arts SU as an independent student led charity and what the organisation provides for the student experience that can be utilised by all UAL staff. Further to this, these sessions will provide staff with tools and guidance to work with Arts SU on various partnership projects that exist between Arts SU and UAL such as the 1000 course rep network, Arts' Awards and decolonising the curriculum initiatives.
EPRG Social Space
Enter the Collective Room
EPRG hosting a social space on the 6th July from 3pm onwards.
UAL’s Experimental Pedagogies Research Group will be your hosts for this social event where we charm, accommodate, swarm, entertain, invite, and welcome you to this chatty occasion. We will entertain you and you will entertain us. Come as you are, as you were, as you are going to be, as you want to be. Come and play with the EPRG in a series of creative conversations. This assembly will traverse and converse the gaps, fissures, pauses, silences of our digital pedagogical world. Come and experiment with the opportunities it offers to chat about pedagogies beyond the norm, find advantageous places, make a small plot of new land at all times for rest, chat and conviviality. In summary, come and practice the pedagogy of picnicking with the EPRG, lay out the rug, kick off your shoes and Bring Your Own ideas.