PgCert Reflective Journal

Timed Session Plan

Introduction to the aim of the session, which is to explore the multiplicities of our perspectives and our viewpoints in forming knowledge about an object

• Map out session: object observation, discussion
• I will go into a brief history that situates my teaching practices, but if you don’t understand some of these words, please let me know. Oftentimes in the academia, or in the world, we are meant to understand these linguistic or vocabulary trends and turns, such as decolonising curriculum, without understanding what these terms mean. I think it’s important to unlock their meaning and history, instead of assuming comprehension.

Slide 2 (4-5 minute session):

1. Ask someone in class to volunteer an object
2. Divide tasks of knowledge collection: 2-3 people engaged in descriptive analysis; 1 person engaged in extra-textual online research; volunteer engaging in knowledge that is solely derived from one’s relation to that object
3. Show padlet QR code

Slide 3 (preliminary discussion 5 minutes):

1. What do we notice of the observations?
2. Are they easy to categorise?
3. What was difficult about the assignment?

Slide 4+: Teaching Component (5 minutes)

1. Unpacking the session alongside the theory that supported the activity

Key Decisions

            This session was scaffolded around my introduction to material culture, autoethnography and evocative objects workshops, building upon activities and theories which I planned to build with discursive participation, object-based research and collaborative knowledge production. In this activity, I explored the relation between vision and objectivity, emotional learning, familial memory and pluralities of knowing (see Jay, 1988; Crewe, Woodham, and Golyn, 2019; DeRocher, 2018). Initially, I asked a participant to volunteer their personal belonging. This was crucial to highlight the differences between knowing an unknown thing through observation, and an emotionally connected object. Each participant was then asked to review the object through their varied lenses, creating a composite profile of the object. After the session of observation, I offered an unpacking of the exercise through the framework of theory, which led into a brief discussion before running over time.

How the session unfolded/feedback

            The session largely unfolded as I anticipated, with the some of the participants observing what was the unknown object through visual language. In unpacking the observations, I illuminated how modernity forged a hierarchy of senses through visuality, folding in Martin Jay’s concepts around scopic regimes and cartesian perspectivalism into the explanation (Jay, 1988). One feedback comment was that the density of the theory required more time to unpack. I acknowledge this as one of the main challenges to teaching theory. It requires not only a concise explanation of the dense terms, but time to distill and retain the knowledge. In my longer sessions, theory is not only supported by an exercise, and an explanation, but an assigned seminar reading to enrich the learning outcomes. Unfortunately, theory often is difficult to unpack, and I too acknowledge that it needs a longer amount of time to understand. It often requires multiple sessions, building concepts in relation to one another,. I found that the time restrictions of this timed activity was reflective of the restrictions of the unit constraints. Time seems to be a problem when it comes to developing theoretical comprehension. It is also an issue that I do not know how to resolve, as like many of the other issues highlighted in the PgCert sessions, it seems increasingly an institutional problem. And I don’t think the solution is to dilute the theory. I think paring down the theory itself may be helpful, and I will make sure to fold it through tangible examples related to the everyday.

            One aspect that threw me slightly off in the conversation was one participant’s insistance that the way we see, through what I explained as cartesian perspectivalism and the camera obscura, was the way we see the world. It was my argument, drawn from Jay and other scholars, that this singular way of seeing the world was defined by power systems, but I was confronted with a confidence that I did not anticipate (see Jay, 1988 and Crary, 1988). I unfortunately had no time to fully unpack and address the comment. One challenge of the activity was the push and pull between my timed session and facilitating discussion. I always seem to privilege the latter and perhaps do not get through the materials that I have scheduled, which also reflects the practices of my own sessions often. I moved on to draw upon research on family archives and collective knowledge practices to map how our relation to objects enriches or complicates our knowledge and understanding through emotional histories. One feedback comment was that highlighting family archives could be alienating and excluding for people who didn’t have families. In my own sessions, the theories of the family archive are nestled within multiple other kinds of frameworks that we may read objects through. I acknowledge this potential for exclusion, and will ensure that going forward if my sessions are condensed into one or two theories, I will choose more inclusionary frameworks. I continued to write about this microteaching in another blog post, where I thought about play and how it was vital for creative practices. 

References

Crary, J. (1988) ‘Modernizing Vision’, in Vision and Visuality. Ed by. Foster, H. Seattle: Bay Press.

Crewe, V.A., Woodham, A., Gloyn, E. et al. (2019) ‘We are what we keep: The “family archive”, identity and public/private heritage.’ Heritage and Society, 10 (3). pp. 203-220.

DeRocher, P. (2018) Transnational Testimonios: The Politics of Collective Knowledge Production. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press

Martin, J. (1988) ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’ in Vision and Visuality. Ed by. Foster, H. Seattle: Bay Press.

Contextual Background (c.50 words): 

I teach Cultural Studies seminars for first-year students on Fashion, Jewellery and Textiles, who represent a diversity of ages, cultural backgrounds and life experiences. Seminars encourage the students to not only participate, but to develop the skills for discussion itself (see Herman and Nilson, 2018, p. 4). Two sessions have passed for this year’s co-hort, and already there are voices that are beginning to dominate, sharing personal experiences that lead the students away from the core theoretical discussion. I need to facilitate building a space where all the students can feel confident to participate, while also focusing on the theory.   

Evaluation (c.100 words):

To encourage participation and opportunities to discuss and unpack the theoretical issues, each seminar begins by asking each student, who are arranged in a circle, whether they have a question, comment or provocation about the week’s materials. Set as a weekly practice, this aims to encourage the quieter students to be able to prepare to participate; although, I do not enforce the need to contribute. In the first week, I forged this practice through an introduction of names. I seem to have an uncanny memory for names, which I have found makes the students feel seen, while encouraging accountability for their participation. Sometimes though I feel that I privilege the students’ comfort and empowerment over driving the conversation forward through theory, feeling weary of using my authority to moderate conversations, when it is increasingly necessary.

Moving forwards (c.350 words) 

My understanding of discussion is better informed by Herman and Nilson who argue that learning takes place in conversations of differences and disagreements (p. 13). The privilege of teaching at an arts institution has not been felt so fully to me, until this year, when I have had to yield and moderate comments about not accepting they/them pronouns and positive racism (whatever this means). These kinds of comments are indicative of the pushback against, what I read as decolonial ideas, and seem also reflective of the community at large. With seminars taking place each week, my initial strategy was to establish confidence, openness, and empathy within the classroom before moderating and critiquing the contributions. However, with these behaviours now reiteratively emerging, and perhaps becoming normalised, I need to develop my own authority as a lecturer to challenge these kinds of comments, and also to empower others to do so as well. 

My strategies for moving forward are informed by pedagogical research that addresses discussion and strategies for Gen Z students and narcissists who ‘treat the discussion as a social’ (Herman and Nilson, 2018, p. 38; also see Camfield and Bayers, 2023). While I am weary to use this pathologizing latter term, I do want to treat the repetitive behaviour of a couple of voices that seem to constantly discuss familial histories, and personal anecdotes that are largely unrelated or tangentially related to the themes. Following Herman’s and Nilson’s outline for good discussion, I aim to 1. Reiterate the learning outcomes: a final assessment that needs to unpack theory in relation to an example; 2. Converse about good discussion practices; 3. Moderate and build non-violent communication practices (see meenadchi, 2018). 

With the students working toward a 1500-word essay, that requires them to understand theory, I need to reinforce the learning outcomes in the discussion as well. In my next session, I will facilitate a 5-minute conversation about good discussion practices, build a constitution to moderate discussion, and finally introduce some firm rules to moderate the conversation from digressing. I will ask that the comments need to be qualified or justified through the applicable theory. I will ask the students to assert their ‘opinions’ and personal reflections as arguments that draw upon the course materials to support the perspectives. 

References (additional to word count) 

Camfield, E. and Bayers, L. (2023) ‘From Antagonist to Protagonist: Shifting the Stories to 

Support Gen Z Students’, Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Vol. 23, No. 2: pp. 1-14.

Herman, J. and Nilson, L. (2018) Creating Engaging Discussion: Strategies for “Avoiding Crickets” in Any Size Classroom and Online. Sterling, VA: Stylus.

meenadchi (2021) Decolonizing Non-Violent Communication, 3^rd ed. Los Angeles: Feminist Center for Creative Work.

Figure 1 Blistered palm from micro-teaching session by Tanya Noor. February 5, 2025. London College of Communication. Photo is author’s own.

We began our collective micro-teaching session by making blisters on our palms. Tanya, who teaches make-up and special effects at LCF, prepared her microteaching by handing out palettes of wax and paints, initially demonstrating to us the process of creating these grotesque wounds (fig. 1). In my own research I am interested skin and the openings of porous surfaces; and the act of making this wound filled me, and seemingly the group, with joy. This was followed by a session experimenting with different yarns and cords, making our individual interpretations of fabrics. Without the constraint of needing to develop a desired outcome, the session’s timed limitation was creatively freeing. I identified what I was missing and yearning for: play.

Transported to my own childhood classrooms, I remembered the tangible skills that I developed through touch-based learning. In my own session, I explored the scopic regime of modernity. As a concept and theoretical framework, modernity sets the foundation for modernization through a logic that privileges linear progress through rationality, sciences, and technologies. The framework is complicated, but I derive my understanding from decolonial scholars that see this as inextricable from coloniality (see Mignolo and Walsh, 2018). Modern development was driven by resource exploitation, genocide, and human enslavement, setting the foundation for world as we know it today, through the invention of racial capitalism, gendered inequalities, class disparities, able-bodism, and so on. Modernity sought to privilege the visual, losing sense of touch-based, emotional, and other knowledge systems (see Jay, 1988). 

The feedback to my session was encouraging and illuminating. This session was adapted from methodological sessions I run on object analysis, thus it was helpful to receive feedback on the connection between experiencing objects and theory. Comments also noted the desire for the session to be longer as the information was quite dense, and the alienating potential of working with familial histories. In my own teaching practice, the family history component is one theory amongst several that are offered as frameworks to further explore, but it was a helpful comment nonetheless to highlight the need for inclusive sensitivities. As part of the Cultural Studies team, and contextual history/study component, my work is often framed as a theoretical component. However, I was a practitioner in my previous life, and I had forgotten how much creativity and play delighted me.

I conclude this reflection with a desire to investigate play in pedagogy. Importantly, how integral the role of this is to creativity in learning itself. While a survey of Google Scholar reveals research that explores the relevance of play in early childhood education, I aim to explore further the radical potential of the term. Perhaps otherwise known in its adult form of leisure, it seems to be an antithesis to the outcome-driven capitalist society of today.

Works Cited

Jay, M. (1988) ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’ in Vision and Visuality. Ed by. Foster, H. Seattle: Bay Press.

Walsh, C., and Mignolo, W. (2018) On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Now I want to make an impassioned plea for reading. In the process of writing this blog post, I read Paulo Freire’s ‘The Importance of the Act of Reading’, where he describes that reading the word is reading the world. He describes how it is a political and creative act that transforms the world by a means of ‘conscious practical work’; in doing so, it leads people to critically perceive culture by developing an understanding of ‘how human practice or work transforms the world’ (Friere, 1983, p.8-11). It is the act of reading that helps us to critically reflect on these processes of how we imagine, interpret and transform the world around us.

It is difficult to watch the world change around me. Particularly as I hear about all the books that are being banned in the US now. If reading is such a political action, why prompt us away from the challenges of reading? As I edit this blog post now, to refine my writing through a reflective lens, I too could not finish the reading from last week. It was Sara Ahmed’s text about use, which I only read half. I wonder if AI could have picked up upon the nuances of language in that essay – which thought about use, using, used, and all its iterations while reiteratively using the word in its many forms (see Ahmed, 2019). Oh what I would have lost if I had not engaged with that text! Even if I only finished half of it, it was the kind of text where the form and the rhythm seemed illuminate the very content. I worry about a world where our creative acts shaped by bots that these losers built (see Shaw, 2025).

Works Cited

Ahmed, S. (2019) ‘Using Things’, What’s the Use: On the Uses of Use. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 21-67.

Brown, W. (2003) ‘Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy’, Theory & Event 7(1) https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tae.2003.0020 [Accessed 14 January 2024]

Freire, P. (1983) ‘The Importance of the Act of Reading’, translated by Slover, L. The Journal of Education 165(1), pp. 5-11.

Li, P., Yang, J., Islam, M. and Ren, S. (2023) ‘Making AI Less “Thirsty”: Uncovering and Address the Secret Water Footprint of AI Models’ arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03271 [Accessed 14 January 2025]

Luccioni, A., Viguier, S., and Ligozat, A-L. (2022) ‘Estimating the Carbon Footprint of Bloom, a 176B Parameter Language Model’ arXiv. http://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.02001 [Accessed 14 January 2025]

Ren, S. (2023) ‘How much water does AI consume? The public deserves to know.’ OECD AI Policy Observatory. https://oecd.ai/en/wonk/how-much-water-does-ai-consume [Accessed 14 January 2025]

Savage, P. (2022) ‘“The New Life”: Mozambican Art Students in the USSR, and the Aesthetic Epistemologies of Anti-Colonial Solidarity’, Art History 45(5), p. 1078-1100.

Shaw, R. (2025) ‘I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers’, The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/16/i-knew-one-day-id-have-to-watch-powerful-men-burn-the-world-down-i-just-didnt-expect-them-to-be-such-losers [Accessed 24 Feb 2025].

Vincent, J. (2024) ‘How much electricity does AI consume?’ The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/24066646/ai-electricity-energy-watts-generative-consumption [Accessed 14 January 2025]. 

Fig. 1. Photograph of data centre growth from Nicholson, R. (2024) ‘Data centre growth seen in scaled schemes and retrofits’, Construction Journal. Available at: https://ww3.rics.org/uk/en/journals/construction-journal/data-centre-demand-retrofit.html [Accessed 14 Jan. 2025].

A prompt was sent via our PgCert Moodle page about how to prepare for Workshop 1A: if the reading activity was challenging, it suggested that we ‘also try [to] run the text through ChatGPT and ask it to summarise and/or clarify it for you.’ I found this disheartening, as I can imagine a future where people have increasingly short attention spans, and less capacity of critical thinking. Reading, like writing, is a practice, and letting AI replicate those tasks for us seems to diminish the process of learning itself. In my assigned paper, I learnt a new word: ‘metanoia’ (Savage, 2022, p. 1081). As I edit this blog post now, I’ve completely forgotten what it means, but that’s ok. Unfamiliarity, challenges, and difficulty are markers that I am learning.

Some academic writing is confusing, but our ability to communicate in our own unique ways is something to preserve in this world. Feeding texts through ChatGPT allows it to determine what is important, how we should read the text, when it is our engagement with new materials that is part of learning. I think the problem that we are not addressing here is perhaps the difficulty of the materials, or more likely, the fact that none of us seem to have time to engage with these texts properly.

ChatGPT seems to be able to condense and reduce a 23-page text into 2 or 3. It can probably condense hours of reading into 10 minutes. But I worry about what gets lost in this process. I also worry about Elon Musk taking over the world, and the massive problem with sustainability as these machines consume. Because they are out of sight, they very much become out of mind. Yet, I have read reports about the water and land (see fig. 1) that these machines take up (Luccioni, Viguier, Ligozat in Vincent, 2024; Ren, 2023; Li et al., 2023). Already it seems that our jobs are at risk, but now we have machines responding to machines, and I worry that the world we’re continuing to develop makes us ‘useless’ – at least in the perspective of this techno-feudalist society that these tech bros are building.

The reality of neoliberalism is that we have allowed these multinational corporations and capitalism to go unchecked (see Brown, 2003). This system of profiteering privileges the few, while continuing to destroy the environment and dehumanise more and more groups of people. Corporate profiteering certainly shapes UAL as well, on a bad day I feel like a cog in a machine – an act for a consuming student public. We talk about decolonisation, but I wonder how I am cared for; it sometimes seems like an abstraction that has no material foundation.

To be continued in Part 2…

Monday, 9 December 2024

Hello, welcome to the blog and reflections of Christin Yu. I am a Lecturer of Cultural Studies at Central Saint Martins, teaching on the Jewellery, Textiles and Fashion programme, as well as in the MA Fashion Histories & Theories course. I am also an Associate Fellow of the Transnational Art, Identity and Nation Research Centre, and the Secretary of the British Association of Korean Studies. 

Not sure if it’s helpful to list all these credentials, the practice of writing this blog feels like I am positioned in an overlapping space between performing a public persona and reflecting upon private matters. A few weeks ago, our team delivered a module about Web 1.0 transitioning into Web 2.0, and I was reminded of platforms such as livejournal. This blogging platform was a precursor to the public lives that Instagram, and TikTok have now produced, but there was a seemingly ‘authentic’ vulnerability in those posts. I think maybe it helped that we were not posting our images, but our thoughts – it was an embodied versus solely visual practice. Anyway, I find it difficult to mediate between what I should be writing as an earnest reflection of my thoughts, or as a performative profile of myself. Do I write to an audience or as I did in my adolescent diaries? I write this interjection in a space of privacy, which lends itself to a personal reflectivity that I did not feel comfortable accessing in a classroom yesterday. Perhaps this speaks to accessibility and temporality in learning…

My pedagogical practices are informed by decolonial feminist aims that include seminar-led discussions, and collaborative writing practices to imagine and re-exist toward an otherwise. I am a design historian, and material cultural specialist that is interested in the non-visual world, and embodied practices of being, alongside generative practices of knowledge making that privilege communal and polyphonic stories.

As I embark on this PgCert course, I look forward to generating strategies and practices that can inform my teaching as we move through an increasingly polarised world. My difficulties of experience thus far have included questions about how to mediate controversial worldviews (although these instances have been few and far between). I hope to learn more strategies toward my own resilience, as I teach a student body undoubtedly afflicted by anxieties, and perhaps worse, an apathetic worldview. As a marginalised person in a position of power, I want to undo the historical relations of authority, while also maintaining some protection over my own integrity.