Category: Cathy Elliott

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The Politics of Nature in the UCL Art Museum

We did more experiential learning this week, this time in the UCL Art Museum. We are incredibly lucky to have an impressive art collection at UCL, related to the Slade School of Art. And we are even luckier that it is staffed by deeply knowledgeable curators who helped me put together an exhibition of artworks that helped us think about various aspects of how nature is, and has been, depicted.

Students in the UCL Art Museum with a work by Winifred Knights in the foreground

I’ve been working with the Art Museum to deliver teaching using its collection for a few years. Before that, I used to take students to the many free exhibitions in London and it was a chance conversation with a student who put me in touch with the UCL curators and made me realise that I could do the teaching I wanted to on our very own campus! This is a huge privilege (in our exhibition we had a Turner!), but wherever you are, there is probably an art gallery or museum in your town that would fit the bill, depending on what you want to teach.

What I want to do in these sessions is enable students to understand artworks as political objects: to become critical readers of the visual, to see through the facticity of images and understand the ways in which pictures are often generic and repeat familiar ideas, thereby reproducing and relegitimising them. The reason we take them for granted as reflections of reality is more to do with the way they repeat key narratives that we are used to and take to be commonsensical than any actual correspondence to an independent world. This is quite different from an approach that might, for example, focus on how works are made, or what their deeper meaning is, or an appreciation of their aesthetic qualities as such. You can read more about how and why I teach in art galleries here.

#teaching

If you want to have a go at getting out of the classroom and doing some teaching with artworks, here are a few tips and ideas.

  • Be clear about your purpose: there are lots of different reasons why you might want students to engage with artworks, but make sure you are clear in your own mind about it, so they and you understand the purpose of the exercise. Otherwise, you will have a nice time, but it might be a bit aimless. In my case, for my politics of nature class this year, I wanted students to understand that the ways landscapes and the rural have been depicted for centuries is often generic. Works in the pastoral tradition prettify the hardships and difficulty of rural lives, whilst images of the sublime invite rugged individualism and mastery. One of this year’s students – herself a student of the Slade Art School! (I am very excited to see her portfolio!) –  explained decolonial readings of the idea of the sublime reminding us of earlier reading about the dangers of narratives about the ‘lone, enraptured male‘. A range of different works, on the face of it all different, all lent themselves to making these points which reinforced work we are doing throughout the module.
  • Relatedly, be clear about how the work in the gallery relates to the rest of your module: I included artworks that depicted colonialism and enslavement, building on last week’s work at Kew, helping students see how pastoral, sublime and picturesque artworks legitimised enslavement and glorified adventurers like Captain Cook (depicted heroically at his death in a work by Bartolozzi), whilst depicting indigenous people as ‘savage’ and ‘close to nature’ in ways that deprive them of political agency. The works also picked up other themes in the module, for example, returning to ideas we encountered in our week of queer ecologies about how parks and beaches have been celebrated in art for certain sorts of leisure and relationships (the courting heterosexual couple, for example) and not others.
  • Provide context through reading and other materials: For this week, we read a chapter by Nomi Lazar on discourses of ‘primitivism’ and an article by Jennifer Peebles on the ‘toxic sublime‘ to support students in noticing these discourses in the artworks. I also provided short ‘flipped classroom’ materials on how we can look at artworks as political objects and on the genres of ‘pastoral’, ‘sublime’ and ‘picturesque’. I did my best to relate the discussion back to these materials as we discussed the works.
  • Teach students how to look: Tate Modern’s studies show that visitors on average spend about eight seconds looking at each picture! By creating an exhibition of just a few works (I used ten, which was probably too many if I’m honest), you can get students to look at bit more closely. Encourage them to stay with a few works that interest them rather than trying to look at every one. I always suggest that they spend time sketching. No-one actually did that this year, but in the past students have stayed in the gallery for longer than the allotted time to look and draw. This is the best way of getting them to notice all the details, especially in complex works. It’s also worth spending a bit more time getting them to describe the key features of a work before launching into questions about what political work it is doing. That way, students often help me notice things that I hadn’t seen myself!
  • Work with curators: The way I have always put my exhibitions in the UCL Art Museum together is to ask advice from the curators. I tell them the broad themes and concepts from the module and then they pull out a range of artworks. I always want to use them all, but with painful difficulty they help me whittle it down to a manageable exhibition. Their deep and extensive knowledge of the collection makes this easy and fun work – whereas slogging through the catalogue myself would have taken much longer. Two curators also kindly helped me by circulating among the students and talking to them about the histories of the works, how they were made and what other interpretations have been made of them, drawing on in-depth knowledge that I just don’t have. This is gold dust, and much appreciated by the students! Curators and education teams at public galleries have always been equally helpful.
  • Make it fun: attending an exhibition is a pleasurable experience. Bringing that enjoyment of art and being together in a different sort of space into an encounter with close looking and critical thought leads to a different kind of embodied learning that will hopefully stay with students as they encounter more works of art in future. I usually encourage the students to wander round as if they were in any other exhibition, as well as giving them encouragement to look closely and sketch. I give them a few questions about each artwork, some of which require some close and slow looking. I give them a chance to do all this before I start circulating round and helping them. Unfortunately, this year, every time I started talking to a small group of students about a particular artwork, the whole class gathered round to hear my wisdom. This is probably because the Art Museum is a small space and I was using my teacher voice, but it did take away from the joy of individual discovery a bit, as well as depriving them of chances to chat with the curators, who were also on hand. I need to think about how I avoid this next year. There is probably a bit of me that enjoys being the centre of an attentive crowd a bit too much that I need to keep an eye on….
  • Don’t be scared of difficulty: Some of the questions we asked in the Art Museum were confronting, particularly when looking at a picture of a Jamaican plantation with enslaved people in the foreground, using the tradition of the pastoral to make this scene look pretty and ‘natural’, or the way that Captain Cook is portrayed as a saintly, Christ-like figure being brutally murdered by Indigenous people. Looking at the exquisite Turner watercolour depicting the first steamer on Lake Lucerne, we asked ourselves whether it would have been better if the Industrial Revolution had never happened – delving into how even if we wanted to disentangle it from dispossession, capitalism and colonialism, it is hard to see how we ever could, despite wanting to keep a lot of the benefits that have accrued to the lucky ones like us. The discussion was difficult and sometimes faltered, but in some ways that is easier in a space like an art gallery than it is in a classroom. This is partly because we were not staring right at each other but looking at an object and partly because silence in a gallery is ordinary and expected, as we let the questions sit, and not awkward or embarrasssing. It is also fine just to wander off and look at something else when in an exhibition, and therefore easy enough to exit a conversation if it’s getting a bit intense.
  • Think about assessment: For my class’s portfolio assessment, students may (but do not have to) write labels for the artworks in the gallery to help visitors understand the key ideas we have discussed or write an entry for an exhibition catalogue. Last year, lots of students did this to good effect, with some particularly beautiful catalogue essays. Students can also make their own artworks and are encouraged to reflect on how they reproduce or disrupt the discourses we see in the exhibition. The UCL curators would love to hold an exhibition of the same works for the public with labels written by my students plus responses from members of the UCL community and visitors. Subscribe to this blog if you want updates on this, if and when it happens!

I hope this might give you a few ideas about teaching with art. Artworks also aren’t by any means the only types of objects you can teach with and I love to hear other people’s ideas about object-based learning and how we can make it work in our discipline. Let us know in the comments if you have an approach that really works well.

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Outdoor learning

Last week was probably the highlight of my and everyone’s term in the Politics of Nature module: I took the class to Kew Gardens. We had a wonderful time, great weather and a brilliant learning experience. Unsurprisingly, the students love getting out of our dingy classroom at UCL, travelling to Kew and having the chance to explore on their own as well as talk together, with me, about the politics of botanical gardens past and present.

Students in the Palm House at Kew

It isn’t all fun, fun, fun though…. Nonsense, it is, but we are there to do a job and that job is learning. The theme of the week is Colonialism and Nature and ahead of the class we have read about the politics of native plant advocacy and a short article by the current Director of Science about Kew’s involvement in colonialism and how decolonisation of botanical gardens might work in practice. The flipped classroom materials for the week include short histories of three ‘plant hunters’ (Hans Sloane, Joseph Banks and Marianne North) as well as some interactive opportunities to reflect on the nature of ‘weeds’. This sets us up to talk about what it might mean to move plants around the world and what the consequences have been, including the spread of invasive species and monocultures, and the production of gardening trends that have led to the persecution of useful and beautiful plants like dandelions.

When we arrive at Kew, we go straight to the imposing Palm House and contemplate its size, beauty and majesty from outside. The activities we do next were suggested by the brilliant Dr Caroline Cornish, who also facilitated our entry to the garden (for free!). I send the students on a bit of a treasure hunt, asking them to have a wander round for 20 minutes or so and look particularly at the signage, to consider what Kew is telling us about the garden and who they are as an organsation, as well as what we might like to know but is not there on the signs. They love having a good explore and the phone cameras all come out. We come back together and students have usually noticed that the signage tells us the plants’ names and area of origin, some scientific facts about them, their usefulness for medical or technological purposes, and perhaps any work that Kew is doing to conserve them, particularly if they are rare. What is not usually explained is how or why the plants came to be here in London.

The imposing Palm House at Kew

We then report to the rubber tree, and with a bit of interactive discussion – particularly from students who might come from countries where rubber plantations have been a feature of the landscape or who can make an educated guess about what the consequences of rubber monocultures might have been – we discuss its history and how that links to the history of Kew. Whilst now a delightful day out for tourists and keen gardeners, as well as hub for scientific enquiry and conservation, Kew was deeply involved not only in technical work of figuring out how to propagate and grow rubber on an industrial scale for industrial purposes, but also in commisssioning ‘explorers’ to take the seeds from Brazil (illegally!) in the first place. This is usually an interesting surprise to the students… which leads of course to some questions about why the signage doesn’t mention any of this fascinating and dark history. We also think again about how imposing and impressive that glass house is, considering that it was built as early as 1848, and how its magnificence and technological sophistication would have legitimised and celebrated the imperial endeavour. (‘How do you think they heated it?’ I ask. ‘No,’ I say, ‘Don’t look up…. look down!’) We talk about what Kew might want to do now to make repairs for this involvement in colonialism, including supporting botanical science and biodiversity in formerly colonised countries as well as providing an honest reckoning with its past to its visitors. We also talk a bit about why the latter might not be happening, a theme we will pick up later in the term when we discuss the National Trust’s work to tell truthful stories about their collections and the backlash they have experienced as a result. In their portfolios for this week, they are invited to writen new signage or guides for Kew, which many do, often to great effect, and last year a student wrote an impassioned letter to the Director entreating him to lead Kew towards new decolonisation projects in order to attract new audiences.

I also ask the students to write, if they want to, about what the experience of learning in the garden was like. After all, we could learn about the history of the rubber plant, the grandeur of the Palm House and look at examples of Kew’s signage back in the dingy classroom, using slides. They generally write about how actually being there helps them translates theory into practice. They also write a lot about enjoyment and pleasure, the joy of exploration and the feel and smells of being in a glasshouse. They definitely relate the week’s learning to new topics of their own discovery, too: one student spent some free time in the garden up on the treetop walkway, where she saw a huge flock of parakeets, leading her to research these birds and reflect on the nature of ‘invasive species’ and which get controlled, and how, building on our reading about native plants.

I think there is an intriguing epistemological dimension to outdoor learning that I haven’t quite yet put my finger on. It seems that standing in the very place that the rubber tree is growing at Kew, in the very glasshouse where it was originally propagated, and engaging in the history and present of that incredible building whilst enjoying its heat and humidity, its lushness and earthy smells, is epistemologically significant. That is, that the very knowledge we are engaging in and developing as a class is different from what we could know from a dry old, cold old Powerpoint. If, as I tend to argue, knowledge is the emergent property of sets of relationships within communities who know how to do certain sorts of things, then being there is a different way to being in relationship with Kew and its past and present practices. The very familiar pleasure that we feel on a day out at a nice garden is complicated by bringing it experientially into contact with some of difficulty of straightforwardly enjoying these places with these histories. The act of hunting out and really looking closely at the signage puts students in charge of their learning – in a sense they are engaging with primary data here – whilst also reminding them that there are many ways to read, and write, these signs, of the sort that they will often encounter in their role as consumers of pleasurable days out. Perhaps the bodily association of learning and critiquing with the pleasures of being a tourist and visitor, will engender a lifelong criticality that nevertheless won’t ruin the real and evident enjoyment that such places offer. Perhaps by having conversations and building relationships among ourselves in beautiful places, we will be closer as a group, with all that shared, emotional, embodied experience, and this will enable more, deeper, critical and analytical conversations for the future with each other and to other people we might spend time with in gardens and glasshouses.

I’m still thinking about it. But somehow, in my bones, I know that something happens to a class when we escape the bonds of the classroom and all the norms that come with them. We will be doing more outdoor and out-of-classroom learning as the term goes on.

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Is it in the assessment criteria?

I zoomed into an excellent QAA event this week on implementing racially inclusive practice in assessment, based on a project at University of Leicester, partnering with Birmingham City University and University of Wolverhampton. I’d very much recommend that you have a good look at their report in detail. The take-home for me was that that whilst an inclusive or decolonised curriculum and role models are incredibly important for engagement and for inspiring students, particularly racially minoritised students, if you want to tackle race awarding gaps, the solution is pedagogical.

Their approach is deceptively simple: they focused on making sure that the hidden curriculum is made visible for all students and the tacit is made explicit, that students understand exactly what they have to do to succeed, with no guessing games involved, with clear documentation of what is required, and that all assessment criteria are clearly and transparently explained with examples of what good or less good work against those criteria would look like. One of the staff who had implemented the intervention very disarmingly said that he felt a bit embarrassed that he and his colleagues hadn’t been doing this already! He also said that although there was some initial resistance because of worries about ‘spoonfeeding’, the improvement in the students’ work that he saw and the way they engaged allayed most of those fears. They found that by doing this, they could reduce awarding gaps significantly, improve student enjoyment and confidence, and also improve staff experience of teaching and assessing!

There is a lot to learn from in the report. Personally, I’ve already thought a lot about assessment criteria over the years, in an attempt to be inclusive, yes, but also because I just wanted to communicate with students what I wanted them to do, so they would learn better and I could read better work when assessing. As a less experienced teacher, I realised that I was marking work down for not doing things that I had never taught or told the students to do – which offended my sense of justice. But I knew I did want the students to do those things (such as make a coherent argument, evaluate evidence, use examples, write for an audience, use appropriate referencing), so it got me to thinking about how I might teach those things in the context of a disciplinary and substantive module. I came to the conclusion that having transparent criteria and spending some time making sure that everyone understands them would help me communicate what skills I wanted to see and how they might develop them. It turns out to be a practice that serves all students – not just those who have been previously disadvantaged, but also the ones who keep doing pretty well, but don’t know why.

As we know that tutors are often looking for different things in their students’ work, it usually doesn’t work in a discipline like ours to have generic or departmental criteria. It is an incredibly useful exercise for you, as a tutor, to sit down and write out what it is you are looking for in students’ work. This helps clarify expectations for me and helps me think about what and how I will teach. When team-teaching, working with other tutors to clarify not only what the assessment criteria are but also what they mean in practice is extremely useful for making sure that teaching and marking are fair and consistent. And working with students to help them understand marking criteria doesn’t so much help them ‘tick the right boxes’ in a spoon-feed way, but, much more importantly, understand what skills they are learning and why.

For my current module, the assessment is a portfolio, and the assessment criteria are as follows (although I do allow students to negotiate them, which I won’t dwell on here but will come back to another day):

  • Depth of understanding of how politics and power are shaped by, and shape, the natural world
  • Ability to weave together ideas from the module into your own coherent text
  • Depth and originality of critical evaluation of your own relationship with the natural world
  • Ability to argue for your perspective on how nature should be governed or cared for, by whom and in what ways, including use of reasons and evidence
  • Appropriate selection of multimedia on the portfolio
  • Ability to write appropriately for a particular audience (please specify: eg visitors to an exhibition, policy-makers, everyday readers of narrative non-fiction)
  • Creativity of your work on the portfolio
  • Evidence of learning and development over time in the module
  • Depth of critical engagement with the module materials and readings
  • Extent of additional research and further reading
  • Craft of writing, including readability, spelling and grammar
  • Accuracy of bibliographic materials

I like the approach of starting with a noun plus preposition, like ‘depth of’ or ‘ability to’, because it demonstrates that these are skills one can be better or worse at in a qualitative sense. Thus, this is not a box-ticking exercise for students but rather an invitation to engage in deep and dialogical reflection on what, for example, the ‘ability to argue’ or ‘appropriate selection of multimedia’ really looks like in practice.

It’s very important not to stop with listing the assessment criteria, of course, but rather to make them the centre of an ongoing conversation. Here is my top tip: every time a student asks a question about the assessment, or about what ‘good work’ might look like, I bring it back to the assessment criteria. So, let’s say they ask, ‘does my portfolio need to be consistent week by week?’ I will say, ‘Is that in the assessment criteria? No. So, I won’t be looking for that. If it’s something you want to learn, that is, how to create your own consistent style, that’s great – you can do so and add it to the assessment criteria for your self-assessment. But it’s not necessary from my point-of-view.’

Here is my top tip: every time a student asks a question about the assessment, or about what ‘good work’ might look like, I bring it back to the assessment criteria.

Or let’s say they ask, ‘Can my writing be more personal?’ I will say, ‘Is it in the assessment criteria?’ This is a longer conversation – the answer is, yes, I am asking them to give an account of their relationship with the natural world, so more personal writing in the first person is clearly appropriate. However, if they are using part of their portfolio to write for policy-makers, this can lead to a deeper conversation about what sort of writing, evidence and argument a policy-maker might be interested in. Distinguishing these different crafts of writing and talking about when they are appropriate, or not, is much more useful for learning than just prohibiting one of them without explaining why.

Other ways of getting students to engage deeply with the assessment criteria might include:

  1. Guided marking exercises where students mark examples of work with reference to the assesment criteria. Your aim here is to get them to focus on the criteria and not make the sorts of vague comments (‘this was not well structured’) that they have probably experienced themselves at times.
  2. Peer feedback where the focus is on giving each other feedback according to one or more of the assessment criteria.
  3. Formative feedback from the tutor where they have to tell you which criteria they want feedback on. (I have a form and they can’t have their feedback unless they tell me which criteria they are particularly interested in.)
  4. Self-assessment where students have to tell you how well they met the criteria, and where they could have done better.
  5. Any other discussion with examples of the criteria and what they mean, preferably iteratively, so they can improve over time.

Summative feedback should also, of course, refer constantly and closely to the assessment criteria. But by that point, this is just an exercise in demonstrating that you could be trusted to do what you said you were going to do. To return to the QAA discussion on racially inclusive criteria, the return of summative work should not be an opportunity to say: ‘Ta-DAH! This is what you should have done.’ What the students should have done should be clear right from the get-go, or else how can they learn how to do it?

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The secret(s) of happiness

On Friday I took my class to the beautiful Chelsea Physic Garden to learn about queer ecologies as part of my Politics of Nature class. (One student said: ‘I can’t believe that we’ve been reading about queer ecologies this week and then the tour we did here was all about queer ecologies too! What an amazing coincidence!’ Thus was the line ‘anything that happens in this class that causes you to learn probably did not happen by accident’ in next year’s syllabus born.)

After the outdoor class itself, I told students I would park myself on a bench and they were welcome to come and have a chat about anything at all and ask any questions about the class, the readings, the rest of the module or whatever they wanted. One pair of students sidled up to me and said, ‘You always seem so happy! Can we interview you and find out your secret?’ So they did. Their hypothesis – that I spend a lot of time outdoors – was a good one. It’s certainly true that I was grinning from ear-to-ear all afternoon in the Chelsea Physic Garden (and so were most of the students most of the time), whereas in a timetabling meeting earlier in the day, I was a bit less joyful. The conversation about happiness developed in lots of directions, though, ending up in a long discussion about whether there is such a thing as ‘human nature’ and how far practices of ‘self-cultivation‘ are important for politics.

This got me to thinking about how far happiness is a skill and, if it is, is it a skill we can deploy in our teaching? And is it a skill we can teach to others?

Happy students in the Chelsea Physic Garden

The students were correct – I am a pretty happy person, at least at this point in my life. I wonder what exactly it was that they noticed and were responding to, though. I think they can probably tell that I enjoy teaching them, chatting to them, being outdoors (or indoors) with them, hearing their ideas and trying out my own in their company. They were probably picking up the fact that I smile a lot, that I interact with them informally, that I am friendly, warm and open. That I have a sense of humour – I laugh at their jokes (when I understand them) and enjoy things that are silly or ridiculous. I am guessing that they find me enthusiastic about both the subject material we are working with and about them as people, their own interests and enthusiasms and jokes.

Mostly all this comes pretty ‘naturally’ (or automatically) to me, but that’s not to say that some days it isn’t a bit of an act. We all have an act that we do when we’re teaching, right? And mine is often joyful enthusiasm. It tends to work, probably because it goes with the grain of who I am and what I believe. It’s important to me that students trust me, and each other, and enjoy the work, so they’re not scared to make mistakes. I believe that we learn best when we feel relaxed, safe, even joyful. That learning takes place in communities and emerges out of strong relationships. And, as a question of values, I want to try to disrupt hierarchical relationships where I can. I also – with a nod to Jennifer’s post last week –  really want students to do the reading because they want to, because I have conveyed to them emotionally and viscerally how much I love this work in order to intrigue them and get them interested in finding out more. Therefore I can draw on the skill of happiness – if that is what it is – to get the class to go the way I want it to and bring the joy of learning to us all.

I know some people really worry about inhabiting an informal persona in the classroom, and there is certainly no one way of teaching. It’s always going to be a case of whatever works for you. But if you are formal or reserved – perhaps insisting on Dr Surname rather than your first name or trying to avoid any emotional connection with students – because you are afraid that warmth and friendliness will breed disrespect, I would suggest that you could experiment with finding other (better?) ways of drawing your boundaries, if you want. Although I am in many ways a ferociously serious person, as a woman of short stature, casual attire, with my LGBTQ+ lanyard always on display, curly hair that generally will not be ruled, the ghost of a Northern English accent, a friendly and smiley demeanour, and a sense of humour, I am relatively vulnerable to being underestimated and even mansplained at on first meeting. Though usually not by students and it doesn’t usually happen twice. As my brilliant colleague, Emily McTernan, explains people are generally pretty good at negotiating these sorts of microaggressions and passing acts of disrespect – and it seems to me that if we are acting, speaking and living with a sense of ease and joy, we are all the better at those negotiations. Power is always there, of course. Students are humans and therefore some won’t behave very well, or even indulge in abuse, and the people on the end of all that are, of course, the same people who are always on the end of abuse and micro-aggressions. Still, do we want that behaviour to be the thing that sets the tone for everyone else? Or can we push back firmly and confidently on nonsense precisely because we cultivate strong relationships and connection? There’s only one way to find out and that’s to try out a range of repertoires until you find the one that suits you.

Happiness is looking closely at a toad

But how do we develop and expand the range of emotional repertoires we can draw on?

Another disclaimer first. Whilst I am not the most privileged person in the world, it’s certainly true that the main reason I am happy a lot of the time is because of strokes of good fortune far too numerous to count. To put it very bluntly, a lot of life’s problems that really make people miserable can be solved by money and autonomy, and, whilst far from wealthy, like a lot of academics who have won the lottery of a secure, full-time job in the UK, I live a nice life. I’ve also been lucky so far in terms of my own health and, by and large, that of the people I love. Such a lot of good luck sometimes feels unbearably fragile. It is also almost embarrassing to admit to, in a world so broken. But as the inspirational Roxani Krystalli reminds us, people who are in pain do not ‘want others to live lives devoid of joy or to tell stories exclusively about suffering’. ‘Joy,’ she tells us, ‘is not a threat to peace’ but rather ‘animates resistance’ to war.

But lots of people are lucky – even luckier than me! – yet don’t seem that happy. So, what do I put it down to and can it be learned and taught? Well, at different points in my life (some in childhood and some embarrassingly recently!) I know I was taught some things that I suspect contribute to the fact that I’m usually in a good mood. I was taught to love music, nature, gardens, stories, art and comedy. I was taught to notice the little things, to look carefully, to feel grateful for small blessings and mercies, to plan for the worst but hope for the best. I was taught that to look forward to something, and then to remember it, is almost as good as experiencing it. I was taught a sense of wonder, curiosity and awe. I learned that there is no such thing as a guilty pleasure, no, not even singing loudly to dad rock.* I was taught that it’s important to work hard, to challenge yourself, to take risks, to keep practising, and I also learned to draw boundaries, to rest. I learned to try to see the best in people, to be more forgiving than judgemental, not to label, to value relationships, friendship, love. I learned that if you feel a negative emotion, you can notice it and allow it to play out, without thinking it will last forever. I learned that if you have talents, and you put them in service of other people, then you will have more yourself. (Pretty sure there’s a parable in there somewhere…) I learned that if someone gives you feedback, they are probably trying to help, and that you don’t have to agree with them, but they also might be right. I learned to try and live my values but also to go easy on myself when I fell short. I learned to say sorry when I was wrong (or even might have been wrong), to listen to other opinions but not to hatred, to accept a compliment or an apology gracefully, to raise an eyebrow rather firmly at a micro-offence or an attempt to take advantage. And, you will no doubt know, everyone** from the North of England is taught to make others laugh and to take pleasure in the absurdities of the world.

These are all things that I myself have had to learn. And by ‘learn’, I don’t mean that I can recite them as a set of rather pious*** rules for living. I mean I learned the only way we ever learn – the hard way – through embodied practice, through doing them, through making mistakes, through discussion, through feedback, through trial and error, through good teachers. And I muck lots of them up several times a day, just like everyone. But implicit in all of this is a conviction that people and their dispositions and behaviours are not static or fixed, that the future isn’t written yet, that we can always do better.

By and large, these practices are also all things that I teach. By this I mean that, alongside modelling them as part of my ‘teacher act’, I also take any opportunity to notice and promote discussion and meta-cognition in class when I see them playing out. As I explained in previous posts, I demonstrate to students that I want to have good relationships with them by learning their names and I facilitate and make space for conversations about what to do when we get things wrong, how we might go about learning, what sorts of practices and norms help and hinder our work together. I encourage them to value collaboration and relationships above competition in the way that I structure the assessment and opportunities for feedback (more on this in a future post). I create opportunities for them to make friends, if they want to. I push them to notice the details and to observe the world around them in lots of ways, from using social annotation to asking them to put pictures of the natural world on Padlet boards to getting them to write, or even podcast, about what they are noticing in nature. I give them readings that I myself enjoy and I ask them to relate their reading to their own lives and values, as well as asking them to write about how they live, and how they would like to. I push them to develop the skills they might need to put their talents in service to the world. I get them to read stories, to listen to music, to look at artworks and to produce their own if they want to learn how, or to get better. I trust them. I shower them with micro-affirmations whenever justifiable. I try to encourage them to trust themselves and each other. I do my best to say sorry when I get it wrong and to accept apologies and compliments quickly and with ease. I try to be kind but assertive when invisible lines of respect and courtesy are crossed. And if I can, if it isn’t unbearably weird, I narrate those apologies, those acceptances, those negotiations and boundaries, so they can see what I’m doing and why I’m doing it. Also, I don’t know if I’ve told you, but I’m pretty funny with the jokes.

I don’t think anyone learns to be happy from a ten week module, even if they were pretty lucky to begin with (and lots of our students aren’t, of course). Still, we might plant a seed, or water a seedling that’s already growing, or nourish a plant that’s going to bloom early and well. It all matters. And perhaps those same skills also teach us to deal with adversity, those times when we cannot be happy.

Happiness is only one emotion and there are lots of others in your classroom and in mine. I’d love to know what emotions you are dealing with in your teaching and whether there are any you have learned or try to teach.

*Today it was Eagles, since you are good enough to ask

**Approximate figures

***I sometimes accuse myself of piety, but my friends’ daughter, aged 6, was puzzled by this (once the concept had been clarified), saying, ‘But she can’t be pious! She’s cheeky!’ I’m glad I had the chance to explain this – I don’t want you getting the wrong impression.

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Social Annotation: how to look at a cartoon

This week in class I’ve been using the social annotation software Talis Elevate with students to help them understand what ecofascism is and some of its key features. This is a very important thing to do early on in a module about the politics of nature because ecofascist discourses, as well as materials that might draw unknowingly on some ecofascist tropes, are very common when we talk about nature and landscape. I therefore always want this acvitiy to be almost the first thing we do, so students can recognise and critique far-right narratives as soon as they encounter them. Before delving into the specifics of the exercise, though, I want to acknowledge that it was particularly difficult to talk about the antisemitic elements of ecofascism this week because of the unspeakable, horrific violence taking place in Israel and Gaza. Antisemitism is always hard to talk about, as are the other topics we touched on in class including racism more broadly, homophobia, transphobia, ableism and eugenics. But it was particularly tricky at a moment like this. I will try to write about the charged nature of our classroom conversations another time, when I have had chance to sit with them. For now the difficulty is simply worth noting, so I don’t give the impression that technical fixes like Elevate can enable us to avoid the complexity of some of the conversations that we nevertheless must have.

Returning to social annotation, though, what Elevate does is quite simple. It allows students to click anywhere in a text or an image to create a pin, to which they can add a comment. Students can agree and reply to each other and I can see the conversation as well as judiciously replying or agreeing too. Nothing is anonymous, so it has the feel of a classroom conversation, but it enables students to engage with the image together and in conversation outside of the class.

In this instance, I put a cartoon on Elevate that had previously gone viral among nature-lovers and others on social media and asked them to note any key features, discuss what is going on, what political ideas are being advanced and whether the ideology underlying the cartoon has a name. In the previous week’s work, we had done a reading that touched on ecofascism, so it shouldn’t have been a new concept for most students in the group.

You can see the full exercise and how last year’s students did with it in this video:

The beauty of using a cartoon like this is that it is very concrete and students could pull out lots of individual features of the image from the whiteness and size of the family in the foreground to their heteronormativity; from the implicit racism and homophobia of ideas about ‘shrinking cities’ to the eugenicist implications of the anti-vaccine and mask imagery; from the ableist assumptions to the antisemitic coded langauge. Having noted all these individual elements before class on Elevate, the classroom discussion itself then enabled us to bring them together, to understand how ideologies contain lots of disparate ideas, tropes and discourses, that together produce a vision of the world, and to make sure we would be on the alert to any one of these problematic ideas in future by understanding how they link to all the others. In keeping with my overall focus on what I want students to be able to do as a result of the class, I hope they will be able to recognise, describe and challenge ecofascism in future and quickly understand that it’s not a good thing to ‘like’ or ‘share’.

I’ll write more about my adventures in social annotation later in the term, especially if they work out. (As you can see in the video, I haven’t quite cracked when and how to use it, yet.) Let us know if you have used it yourself and have any thoughts about when it is, or isn’t, useful.

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‘We sit in silent judgement’: the ‘visceral rhetoric’ of classrooms

On Friday, it was the first seminar of the year for my Politics of Nature module – a couple of hours of pure joy each week in autumn term in the midst of a job with less teaching and more admin than there once was in my life.

I take very seriously the advice that we could all stand to take out a bit of content from our teaching. Less is more when it comes to deep engagement. I therefore allow my first seminar of the year to breathe a little, taking the opportunity to get to know the students, answer their questions in full and set the tone for the work that lies ahead. I have discovered that it really does pay dividends to do this. When I was a new teacher – piling in all my knowledge and all my enthusiasms on students so that it felt like a tidal wave – I used to suffer as much as the next person from the silent classes, where getting anyone to say anything was like pulling teeth. My classes these days – with hard-won experience – are much livelier and chattier, and students quite often tell me that they find them a place where they feel they belong and can talk openly.

There are lots of things I do that cumulatively help me achieve this – and no guarantees, of course, that one year things won’t go wrong. But that first session of the year that sets the tone is really an important one. I’m therefore going to tell you what activities I do and also some thoughts on my embodied pratice. The activities are easy enough to adopt, but I think it is the combination that makes it work.

As regular readers know, I start out by making a public commitment to learning everyone’s name. They have already filled in a questionnaire where they may have given me a pronunication guide, and I have already looked up their online UCL record, so I have seen a photo and I know their year and programme. We go round and introduce ourselves, perhaps with a bit of detail about why we’re in the class. The questionnaire (I may write more about this in a future post) will already also have helped me to get to know them a little, so if relevant, I can refer to that in passing in conversation. For example, ‘Oh yes, you’re the student doing your dissertation on farming? Great to have your expertise in the class!’

Next, I make sure that everyone understands what a ‘norm’ is (as there are many Politics students in the class, someone can usually give a really pithy definition by this point in their degree). And then, I ask them to find out the name of the person or people sitting near them and have a chat about what the norms have been in University seminars up till now and how useful those classroom norms have been for learning. A lot of animated conversation and laughter usually ensures. Then we go back into plenary and we discuss those norms, how they feel and whether we want to carry on with them or do something new.

I want to stress now what this activity isn’t. It is not an exercise in crowd-sourcing or agreeing ‘ground rules’. This may be an activity that works for you – in which case, as they say, carry on. But whenever I have tried this, it always ends up with a pious recitation of very nice rules, all of which go unobserved for the rest of term. My activity is something different. It is a conversation in which we really try to reflect on how it feels to be in a classroom, what is going on in everyone’s head, what our fears, frustrations and insecurities are, and how hard those things are to change.

Lots of things reliably come up in that conversation. One student this time said, ‘As everyone on my degree programme knows, in seminars, we sit in silent judgement.’ The whole room burst out laughing – clearly this hit a nerve. Students talk about not wanting to speak unless they are certain of the answer. About fearing the judgement of others if they get something wrong, even though they know that they are putting the brakes on their own opportunity to learn. About the constant worry of ‘cancellation’ even as they also fear that hate speech will not be addressed because of ‘freedom of speech’. About imposter syndrome and feeling stupid. About resentment towards the person who ‘sounds clever even if he [yes, they say, it’s usually a he] hasn’t done the reading’. There is so much going on under the surface of our classrooms.

The one thing I don’t try to do in these conversations is solve all this. And this is where the embodied practice comes in. I was listening today to a great podcast with Stephanie Larson who has written a book about ‘visceral rhetoric’ (which I am now so excited to read!). Her research is not on classroom dynamics, but she does use one classroom example to explain what ‘visceral rhetoric’ is. She explains that whilst a long tradition in the study of rhetoric assumes a deep commitment to argument and rationality, it is often embodiment and emotion that in the end enable listeners to come to judgement: ‘the body of your professor will tell you something before that person even speaks. You could imagine yourself in a large lecture: that person who walks on stage, stands behind a podium (if they can stand) is going to […] shape audiences’ perceptions of credibility, of how good of a professor this person is going to be.’ Whether we are lecturing or not (and I avoid it as much as I possibly can, which I may also write about another day), students are looking to our ‘visceral rhetoric’ to set the emotional tone of the classroom experience, to decide if they trust us, to enable their own effective practice of visceral rhetoric to emerge.

So, what I do is try to be relaxed, open and calm as they tell their stories about classroom norms. I really listen. I don’t fill every pause, but let the silence sit as the feelings and the courage to speak bubble up slowly. I try to display warmth and understanding. I sympathise. I smile and laugh with them. That laughter is incredibly important, actually – the public, joyful, communal, and embodied acknowledgement that we do some ridiculous, self-defeating things because we’re scared or judgemental or both. I don’t come up with rules or even many suggestions, though I do ask questions like, ‘And is that a helpful norm?’ or ‘How would it feel if we didn’t do that?’ or ‘Will we try to do something else in this classroom?’ I do my best to show that I understand it’s complicated. We can’t sort this all out rationally with a set of rules. We have to work at it slowly and patiently, as a set of embodied practices.

Usually – as this year – we end with a mutual commitment to do our best. To say no to hate speech but yes to getting things wrong. No to shunning but yes to challenge. No to holding forth pointlessly and yes to questions. No to fear and yes to learning. There will be times it won’t work, when it will be hard, when someone will go away from my classroom feeling miserable or wishing they had said something or nor said something, or deeply angry with me for correcting them. There will be plenty of times when I kick myself for insensitvity and occasions when I front up and apologise. The point is not to get it perfect, but to notice when we don’t and to keep going. I’ll let you know how it pans out this year. Meanwhile, feel free to give any of this a try yourself and let us know what happens.

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My number one top teaching tip ever

Before I reveal my number one top teaching tip ever, I’m going to keep you in suspense for just a moment to tell you what my Politics of Nature class are doing this week. Don’t worry, it isn’t really a digression.

They are going out to find out the name of at least one plant.

Alarmingly, last year, quite a few of the students – who had opted to take a class on the Politics of Nature, don’t forget – had a lot of difficulty in naming any plants or other wildlife. When I asked them to ‘meet me by that silver birch over there’, a look of terror came into their eyes! One student asked me if buddleia and lavender were the same plant.

I’m not laughing at them and it’s not their fault – they were never taught how to differentiate between plants, so the world has ended up looking to them like a ‘green blur’.

We learned together that learning the names of plants is a political act: the world comes into focus in new ways. We start to become aware of the beauty, the detail, the nuance, the complexity of the world around us. We respect it and love it more, take care of it better. One student even made a wonderful podcast about the experience.

So, perhaps it is already obvious what my teaching tip is. But if not….

…[drumroll]…

It is this: Learn your students’ names.

Depending on the context you work in, you may find this piece of advice obvious or even strange. When I was studying Czech for my undergrad, there were only three of us in the year, so it would have been most peculiar if my tutor, the language teacher, the librarian and all the other students hadn’t known my name. If you are in this fortunate position, you can carry on thinking about the plants.

On the other hand, perhaps you are thinking that you can’t learn your students’ names. Your memory is too poor, you can’t pronounce half of their names, you are not too good with faces, you will get two students mixed up and embarrass everyone, you are too busy, too stressed and too tired, your class is too big. I completely understand this because I fall into all of these categories too.

Nevertheless. I promise you. If you want to be a great teacher: learn their names.

There are tricks you can employ. Your University system probably has photos of all the students in your class with their names in the record system. You can make it into a game and quiz yourself publicly at the start of class every week. You can send round a questionnaire asking them to provide a pronunciation guide. You can humbly ask them to keep correcting you and assure them that it will be worth it once you get it right and you really get to know them all. I have never had anything other than a warm response to the effort, even though I do often muddle two students up in the first couple of weeks of term. (I sometimes get someone’s name wrong even after teaching them for weeks – but then, my mum sometimes calls me by my sister’s name, so I think most people recognise that this is just being human.) You can even make a prize available for any student who can get all their classmates’ names right on a quiz by the middle of term, thus roping everyone into the game.

The biggest class that I have learned all the names of had 80 students in it. If you never teach a group smaller than 80, then you are really broadcasting rather than teaching, and perhaps different rules will have to apply. But when I have taught larger groups (up to 500 some years), at least in my department, we did some teaching to the whole cohort in lectures, but we also had small group teaching in classes of 20, and Teaching Assistants worked alongside us. In that case, I would learn the names of my small classes and I would ask the Teaching Assistants to learn the names of theirs. So, as a student, someone on the teaching staff knew your name. Yes, I know that your TAs are busy and stressed and not paid enough. Still, they are the teachers of the future, so why would you deprive them of the top teaching tip ever? I still get emails from erstwhile TAs thanking me for making them do it and assuring me that they still learn all the names now. It really is that good a tip.

Once you know someone’s name, you can differentiate them from the others. You will, almost without realising it, learn a bit about them. You will be able to ask them really relevant questions and tailor your teaching to what matters to them. You will inspire their respect and loyalty because they are in relationship with you. You will, at least if you are anything like me and my former TAs, be happier, because you are developing an understanding of the people who surround you – in all their wonder and individuality and diversity – and you are seeing what your work as a teacher is doing for them as individuals over time. If someone starts behaving discourteously, or in a way that interferes with their learning, or someone else’s – as Jennifer described last week – asking them by name to stop and having a conversation with them as someone they know and trust is much more likely to help. And also makes them less likely to do it in the first place, I tend to find. Once students realise you know them, they will seek your good opinion, knowing that you will remember it was them and not someone else.

It breaks my heart a bit how many students tell me that I’m the only teacher at Uni who has ever learned their name. At UCL, we take attendance. I once sent the register round and got it back to discover that someone had been signed in despite self-evidently not being there in the room. This brought home to me that students take it for granted that their tutor doesn’t know their name or whether they are in the class or not. This is incredibly sad. You can imagine how I hammed up my response(!): explaining how shocked and offended I was that students would blatantly falsify the register for their friend in front of my nose, how hurtful it was that they would do something like that even when they knew how hard I worked to learn their names and knew fine well who was there and who wasn’t. The absent student was in my office before the end of the day to say sorry. We were all fast friends again very quickly once apologies had been proffered, but it stuck with me as a worrying example of how cynical and thin the average classroom relationship has become.

In a world of metrics, big student numbers, loneliness and isolation, knowing your students’ names is a political act. It shows them they matter. It shows everyone involved that teaching matters. It is by far the most important thing I will be doing in the first couple of weeks of term.

What are your top tips for remembering and pronouncing those names?

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New Contributors (and request for readers’ advice)

Hello, I’m Cathy Elliott and I am joining the ALPS blog as a regular contributor along with my friends and co-conspirators – JP, Kalina and John – from the UCL Centre for the Pedagogy of Politics. I’ve written for ALPS once before, which led to some really interesting conversations, so I’m very excited to be blogging more regularly about my favourite subject: active learning (or, as I prefer to call it, ‘learning’, since I very much doubt that passive learning is actually a thing.)

Student in Chelsea Physic Garden for my class last year

Despite that first post on simulations – which was very on-brand for ALPS – I don’t do so much with games and simulations in my teaching at the moment, though there is a always the chance that I might come back to them. However, with the start of the UK autumn term fast approaching, I have lots of exciting plans for my Politics of Nature module this term, which I hope to write about every week or two. In this class, we do outdoor learning, object-based learning, portfolio-based assessment with a strong focus on optionality and choice, and we make lots of use of technology including flipped classrooms, eportfolios and social annotation. So, there will be lots to say!

I’m also a Vice Dean Education at the moment, so it’s quite possible that I will stray into questions of policy and strategy every now and again. However, my heart will always be in the classrom and with my undergraduate students. I’m very happy to hear your thoughts if there’s anything you’d particularly like to read about.

Meanwhile, I have a new and hitherto unexpected problem. I am of an age where I have just acquired my first ever pair of glasses! This is all good news as it’s a miraculous treat to realise that I can see again! However, they are only for reading and everything from the middle distance outwards is hopelessly blurred when I wear them. So, how do I teach now? Luckily, I avoid lecturing as much as possible, but I have to do it sometimes. How will I look at my notes and my slides and the students’ faces? And in the seminar room or other settings, how will I switch from my notes to look at the students? Seasoned spectacle wearers, give me your best tips!

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Health Policy in DevelopmentLand: a practical policy simulation

This guest post comes from Cathy Elliott (UCL). A detailed instruction pack for this activity can be downloaded via the link at the end of the post.

One thing that students in my International Development class find intriguing is the fact that, in a previous career, I used to work for the British Government in Pakistan. Relatedly, one of the things I find difficult is students’ received ideas about what a job in international development like that might be like. When students join the class, some fall unreflexively into a discourse of “us” “helping” “them”. Others, meanwhile, bemoan unequal power relations in the world, imagining that a supplicant Pakistan is being pushed around by overbearing British development workers coercing them with huge amounts of conditional aid on offer.

The first position smacks of White Saviour attitudes and is at best patronising to local people and movements pushing for their visions of change. The second, meanwhile, bears little resemblance to my actual experiences of trying to spend relatively small amounts of money in ways that would be acceptable to the governments of both countries. Students also come to my class in search of solutions to global poverty and one recurrent grumble on my student evaluations is that they do not leave the ten week module knowing how it might be “fixed”. Meanwhile, I want them to question these sorts of technocratic attitudes that encourage them to seek the simplistic solutions.

In response, I have developed a 3 hour simulation game that attempts to give a glimpse of what the world of international development is actually like. It is based on my own experience of living and working in Pakistan for three years, and of course other experiences are available. However, I have found it a useful activity for getting students to understand some key ideas from the literature, including the role of power and networks in policy-making, the importance of powerful discourses including international goal-setting agendas such as the Sustainable Development Goals, and the open-ended, processual and contingent nature of political and policy-making practices.

The premise is quite simple: for the duration of the class we will be in the fictional country of DevelopmentLand, which bears a striking resemblance to Bangladesh in every way unless something different has been specified. The students (usually between 40 and 60) are split into small groups and assigned roles with detailed descriptions. The groups are broadly as follows:

  • The Minister of Health and her advisory team
  • The World Bank
  • The UK Department for International Development
  • A group representing the country’s religious leaders
  • A British consultancy firm
  • An international maternal health NGO
  • A local national maternal health NGO
  • A group representing local traditional birth attendants
  • A local NGO that saves lives by teaching children to swim
  • Local NGOs working on neglected tropical diseases

On their cards, students are given information about where they went to university, who they already know and whether or not they speak English. I try to organise the groups so that friendship groups within the class map onto networks that you might expect. Sometimes I also add a group of journalists.

The aim of the game is straightforward. The groups have to persuade the Minister to work with them to develop health policy in the country. Each group has to prepare a 5 minute presentation to persuade the Minister. However – and this is the really important bit – the Minister can work with more than one group if they are able to work together in a consortium. For groups that decide to work together, they can also pool their time. This means that if two groups work together, for example, they jointly get ten minutes to present. A class-wide “win win” situation is therefore possible: there is no reason in principle that all the teams could not get together and put a proposal to the Minister that she and her team would find acceptable.

This has never actually happened, though, because – in classrooms as in life – the game is rigged. The Minister and international donors are preoccupied by meeting the Sustainable Development Goals. The Minister is also keen to be re-elected and the group of religious leaders may have a role to play in enabling or, crucially, wrecking her chances. Some of the groups find that their very good cause doesn’t fit in well with her aims and it is more challenging for them to find partners to work with. Some groups don’t speak English or have dinner with the right people. And not all the groups know everything about what is going on in the other groups. They can usually find out by asking, gossiping and listening in but it often doesn’t occur to them. Intriguingly, no-one yet has produced a crumpled fiver from their wallet to grease the wheels, although I sometimes spread the mischievous rumour that previous classes have tried this!

The groups spend about 90 minutes making what they will of the situation and then they do their group presentations. Afterwards, they talk among themselves about what they think will happen, while the Minister and team make a decision, which they then present back to the group. The debrief session afterwards helps students make sense of the experience and understand, with guidance from me, how their experience fits into the broader theories we have been studying, as well as my own experiences.

One thing I like about this exercise is that it gives students an insight into ordinary everyday politics, as they are most likely to encounter them. There is no dramatic threat about to overwhelm DevelopmentLand and the always unrealised possibility of a win-win ending means that there are no bitter enmities, only ordinary political rivalries and invisibilities. The international donors are powerful, but so are the government and other local players, and all of them are operating in a landscape of power relations that they did not create and cannot reshape on their own. This gives students an understanding of the crucial point explained by Maureen Mackintosh: “Deciding what should be done is relatively easy. But achieving it requires alliances with others”.[1]  The infuriating nature of having to work with other people in conditions of unequal power is a great learning experience, above all for students of politics. As one student put it: “It helped me understand the process of politics, particularly the necessity of working with people with different agendas”. Another made me happy by remarking: “It was a challenge to cynicism – maybe things can change, but there aren’t easy answers.”

Michael Buroway once wrote that “[o]ne cannot both play the game and at the same time question the rules”.[2] This doesn’t seem right to me; surely it is only through playing the game that we can understand the rules, their consequences and possibilities for effecting change either working within them or by transforming them. Policy simulations like this give us some tools to help students begin to play the game and to ask critical questions about the rules that they probably could not access otherwise.

Full instructions for DevelopmentLand simulationDownload

[1] Mackintosh, M. 1992 ““Creating a Developmental State: Reflections on Policy as Process” in Gregory Albo, David Langille and Leo Panitch (eds) A Different Kind of State? Popular Power and Democratic Administration Toronto: Oxford University Press Canada: p. 44)

[2] Buroway, M. 1979. Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism Chicago: University of Chicago Press : p.79