My Micro-Teaching session was focused around Wearable Technology (electronics, programming, robotics etc). My role is to empower students to incorporate interactive wearables into their practice. Within the role I find the most important part is to get students with zero previous experience in the subject, to become interested and passionate about the field. I find this challenging as fashion is predominantly a traditional craft focused discipline with the vast majority of students visiting me, never considering the implementation of tech outside of software. Within my teaching practice I start by trying to achieve a ‘wow’ moment – the sort of feeling you get when you try something new, succeed in it, and have a tangible outcome; The trial flight, a heavily designed/controlled environment with minimal or expected pushbacks.
With this context in mind, and the limiting time period involved, I decided to try and isolate that ‘wow’ moment. To do this I stripped the activity to its core points and removed any additional aspects that would require a greater level of knowledge to understand – my aim was not to inform, but to enable a light bulb moment where a student begins to consider how this could be implemented into their practice.
To achieve this ambitious goal, I broke my micro-teaching into a first 5 minute contextualisation and a 15 minute activity (3 x 5 minute activities). The aim of the contextualisation was to inform the participants that they didn’t necessarily have to understand the complex inner-workings of the objects, instead that by following simple guides were able to build complex systems that could be integrated into a huge range of disciplines – and hopefully the interest or excitement to pursue the area further. This is crucial as I tell my students “nobody just wakes up and is able to program or create circuits – instead it’s just like very early levels of our creative endeavours, we copy, we paint by numbers, we follow recipes – and then we adapt.”
The object I was focusing on was a small little computer, that is the ‘brain’ of most interactive art. To remove complex learning curves, I created kits, to be shared one-between-two, with exact components needed to complete a series of tasks (print-out provided to all participants is attached below). The participants simply had to plug-in the components as shown on the diagrams. I would float around helping spot problems and support the groups when challenges rose.
The feedback I received was very positive and appeared to have been enjoyed. As expected there was the occasional technical blip – but this was resolved swiftly with the redundant kit I had bought incase. To my surprise, I believe I achieved that ‘wow’ moment, the moment after successfully plugging in their components (always after a slight little struggle or missed element – and would argue this is the most important aspect) the lights would light up, and so would faces, often followed by a quick picture on their phones.
The feedback was incredibly supportive, and seemed like they had fun, which is really important in making my area as engaging as possible to promote uptake and reduce barriers to entry such as elevated expectations. Participants found the handouts very useful, something I don’t usually provide – which has shown me that this is a much better approach as it allowed each group to go at a suitable pace. This showed me that a layered approach of building up small activities one at a time, rather than aiming for a more initial ambitious outcome – is a blueprint that I will be incorporating into my teaching practice going forward.
Appendix A