Please see attached here the records from all three-teaching observation:
- Me Observing → Sidney
- Sidney Observing → Me
- Lindsay Observing → Me
Teaching Observation Reports
Posted in Additional Task Term 1, Term 1
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Case Study 1 | Knowing and meeting the needs of diverse learners
Introduction & Background
My role as a specialist technician in wearable technology at the London College of Fashion, is to introduce and support students in the field of wearable technology (see my first blog post for context). This includes drumming up interest, developing a workable/usable knowledge base whilst lastly supporting students.
Evaluation
Over the past year, I’ve been placed in a fortunate position where I have been funded to be able to design an ideal lab environment and generate my own curriculum of workshops outside of academic scrutiny. Despite this prime position the largest issue I face is student engagement within the college – and further the consistent lack of experience alongside varying levels of expectations.
Although interest within the subject seems high at initial contact, the reality is without direct 1-to-1 support the learning curve is steep without any prior knowledge; this results in the labs underutilisation albeit a handful of highly dedicated students – mostly grouped from the MA Fashion Futures course.
My biggest concern and challenge is to balance the recruitment of students, with the over reliance on myself in supporting students work, striking a line between teaching instead of running a production-level support service for students.
The issues that need to be addressed are:
- The Large Barrier to Entry
- The Underutilisation of the Lab
- Students Expecting Too Much Out of The Technician, To the Point of Being Detrimental to The Students Learning Experience
Moving Forward
Within the rest of this case study I will attempt to take steps to address these issues going forward.
1. Large Barrier To Entry
To help students negotiate with the large learning curve I had initially developed a curriculum of different workshops to cover a range of different areas (see figure 1), however, on reflection I believe it could be beneficial to in addition create clear learning pathways for example if I wanted to create an ‘AI enhanced Jacket’ laying out a clear route through workshops 2, 3, 8 & 9 may make it more manageable (see figure 2) – which could further be supplemented through additional learning materials and guides for specific areas.
Additional learning materials is something I have already attempted to implement (see figure 3), however, on reflection a much larger collection of resources paired with a learning pathway could really show a clear direction (Oliver & Herrington, 2003).
2. Underutilisation of the Lab
Showcasing successful projects is something that feels like an obvious solution and is something that I have been doing already without thinking about it. However, I believe if I were to now fully lean into this, I could drum up a lot of interest in projects, but also use these projects as an opportunity to highlight the students experience, such as highlighting the project difficulties, timelines, skills learned – instead of just showing the final outcomes. This further feeds into my other difficulties regarding barriers to entry and student expectations.
3. Lowering Expectation of Technician Offerings
As stated in point one, additional learning guides paired with a pathway could also lower student expectation through showing a clear route of the work that goes into a particular project – an array of these different project pathways (see figure 2) or ‘templates’ could demonstrate and make clear the hidden complexities in certain projects (Atkinson et al., 2000) – further allowing myself as a technician to refer students back to these, allowing the technician to be free to support students by focusing on specific support/problem when complex problems arise – which in turn should significantly improve the student experience.
Bibliography:
Atkinson, R. K., Derry, S. J., Renkl, A. and Wortham, D. (2000) ‘Learning from Examples: Instructional Principles from the Worked Examples Research’, Review of Educational Research, 70(2), pp. 181–214. doi: 10.3102/00346543070002181.
Oliver, R. and Herrington, J. (2003) ‘Exploring Technology-Mediated Learning from a Pedagogical Perspective’, Interactive Learning Environments, 11(2), pp. 111–126.
doi: 10.1076/ilee.11.2.111.14136.
Image Index:
Figure 1. Wearable Tech Workshops (2024) Available at: wt.lcfdll.com
Figure 2. Conceptualised ‘Learning Pathway’ for an AI Garment (2024)
Figure 3. Wearable Tech, Additional Guides & Useful Information (2024)
Available at: wt.lcfdll.com
Posted in Case Studies Term 1, Term 1
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Micro-Teaching Exercise | Lightbulb Moment
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
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Understanding My Positionality & Influence
Although we are only just beginning to start the curriculum, I’ve been struck by how important it is to just leave time to reflect – although obvious on paper. Within the brief time spent reading papers – especially ‘The New Life’: Mozambican Art Students in the USSR, and the Aesthetic Epistemologies of Anti-Colonial Solidarity by Polly Savage (2022); alongside understanding timelines and history of higher education and most importantly conversing with colleagues, it has led me to really question my position as an educator. It is then no surprise that I have found the readings related to positionality especially interesting and food for thought – often reflecting on my way into work of how my own experiences reflect on the way I teach. I find positionality particularly interesting as this brings both good and bad attributes to my assumptions and methods. One distinct aspect I’ve recognised as both a positive and negative is my economic background – as someone who struggled to fund their degree I tend to put an emphasis on trying to save my students money on their projects (although I believe this offers those in a similar situation a large benefit and equal opportunities that they should be privy to.), however, on the other hand of the spectrum I often come across students who simply want the easiest and quickest solution to their idea regardless of the costs associated and have to be able understand this and be responsive to those students regardless to how I would do it.
It’s funny really as this seems like such an obvious adjustment when written down, however, to me cost was not only just a limiting factor to my education, but also a motivator. As a child it motivated me to be able to create what other people had or could easily get, teaching myself the skills along the way (or more importantly the skills, in which to learn new skills) until I was able to use those skills to go beyond what others had, to create new and interesting ideas and believe that if I had not had these constraints my own knowledge and skill set would be significantly lower or even none existent. Now where this becomes important in my beliefs within my role as an educator is to understand that students come with a huge range of constraints that may not be economic, and instead could be social (such as family pressure to create the best work possible) or otherwise, and that I should not instantly draw my students into a workflow that I have developed due to my own circumstances.
Going forward I will instead try to recognise when I make assumptions and instead make sure I am taking the time to understand my students needs, goals and expected outcomes to the projects they wish to create – outlining the constraints they have and seeing how we can work together to work around those.
Bibliography
Savage, P. (2022) ‘“The New Life”: Mozambican Art Students in the USSR, and the Aesthetic Epistemologies of Anti-Colonial Solidarity’, Art History , 45(5), pp. 1078–1100. doi: 10.1111/1467-8365.12692.
Posted in Blog Posts Term 1, Term 1
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An Introduction to Me | Start of My PgCert Journey
Hello, so this is my first blog post for my PgCert in Academic Practice. My name is Elliott Hall and I am a Specialist Technician in Wearable Technology at the London College of Fashion – essentially I work with students to help them incorporate physical computing elements into Garments, Artefacts and Retail Experience’s. On paper the main aspects of my role are to create workshops, run and maintain a safe and usable lab space for wearable tech including procuring the equipment that is needed to go with that, alongside supporting students directly. Examples of my some of the exciting work I have had the pleasure of supporting students with includes Ai enhanced garments that judge the garment owner for mistreating their clothing. Robotic installation work that questions the intersection of the physical and digital fashions worlds, but also garments designed for medical benefits such as inflating/massaging clothing.
Within my role I cover areas from conceptual design, programming, robotics and physical computing (embedding different types of sensors and actuators), 3D design and prototyping, projection mapping and VFX, alongside electrical skills such as soldering. I believe wearable tech / physical computing to be an exciting and cutting edge area in the field of art and design across a whole range of disciplines – but have accepted it will take some time to raise the interest and uptake in this area within the London College of Fashion, and hope to my best to create an ecosystem that supports students from conception, production to exhibition.
Outside of my Job at LCF, I am a design tutor with an MA in Interaction Design from LCC and wish to continue my research into a practice based PhD. With keen interests revolve around Phenomenology, Human Experience, Existentialism, Death Anxiety and Transformative Experience Design; and hope that I can bring my research interests into this work.
You can read more about my work at: elliotthall.co.uk
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