#rhizo14 – week 2: Seeding independent learning: wrestling with writing

Lots of wrestling in FB this week with what could be argued to be an essential ‘issue’ with MOOCs – they are open – free – out there… surely this is thus egalitarian learning at its very best? But no – some are still silenced – some are still feeling the pain of not being good enough – that ‘fish out of water’ feeling that is the experience of so many non-traditional students in the traditional classroom.

We have some strategies that work here to overcome this: say hello – be welcoming – comment – reply – extend a welcoming hand to other students. In doing this we ARE the community, all of us, everyone who does this friendly human thing in this strange and potentially impersonal world.

I blogged about this before – how doing the MOOCs really reinforced the need to bring the human back into the physical classroom. To make time for students to get to know each other – to bond – to feel that it is okay to speak – to listen to and be with their fellow students.

This year we found that role plays and simulations in the trad ‘lecture’ time really helped this to happen. We had a Post-apocalypse scenario running over several weeks:

Who would you keep in your bunker and why?

What education system would you build – immediately on leaving the bunker; five years later; ten years on…

What cultural activities would you save and why – and how would you build a sense of self-efficacy in future students?

The students were puzzled at this strange ‘lecture’ programme at first – but leapt into the discussions and found their voices – and found that they could speak to and with their fellow class mates. I think they formed a ‘cohort identity’ (BLAH) – and the classes definitely FEEL different.

We are also using creative techniques: drawing, collage, poetry… to help us all to think differently – to find our voices in different ways and in different media… And we are asking the students to blog about their learning hoping that this semi-academic space which is open for their colonizing develops their voices in powerful ways.

At the same time, they are going to have to wrestle with the slow, painful and iterative process that is academic writing.

How can we encourage and support our students in this struggle? How do we keep the flow going – and hopefully the joy – when this mountain does have to be climbed?

It’s really hard because writing is hard and the fear of failure is so PRESENT. That fear of making a fool of yourself – of not getting it right – of making your own ignorance visible to the world – of being judged. (Yes folks – let’s check out our FB page – we fear it too – you know!)

Especially when this fear is manifest in a vision and practice of writing that seems to tell students that they must get it right first go. That writing is the pouring out of perfectly formed, pre-digested learning - rather than the stuff and process of learning – and anything else is just pure visible, recorded proof of personal inadequacy and failure.

Below is what I have just sent to a student who has already written her Project – all of it: the proposal part is not due in till W19 (this is W15) and the final report part of it is not due in till W30. She is engaged. She is a motivated student. She has started early. It’s a great first draft – yet I fear that any feedback that suggests that it needs revision will wound.

So this is what I wrote:

I can see that you are going to be a tortured perfectionist! Apart from the pain (!!!) - this will make sure that you do get a wonderful degree. But you are going to have to give yourself permission to write stuff which will not be perfect first go (and nor should it be!) - and then go over it a few times to knock it into shape.

So, yes, there are some bits of the writing that need a little 'smoothing' - some bits are better than others - but there is a project sitting there - waiting to be 'emerged' through a revision process.

This is one reason we *try* to get students to write early (but most of them never do!). When you first write something it is great and so are you! After a little while, because your brain has continued to wrestle with your ideas, you go back over your piece, you see that it is not perfect - and you start to tidy it up. 

You change a bit here and there... you realise that those two longish sentences can be cut down into one short sentence that actually makes your point in an even better way... 

This is the struggle to write - and it is what we all should do to get our ideas across. It is a brilliant, slow and sometimes painful process - but it is the writing process. 

We have to give ourselves permission to write something - and then to change it. So - give yourself a couple of days - then go through your writing again yourself. Try to be shorter (we always need to be shorter!) - make sure you are saying exactly what you mean - change it a bit... Remember to *Save As* the versions: v1, v2, v3 and so on (we often go through 17 or more versions to get to something we are happy with). It is great to keep all the versions - especially as sometimes we delete whole sections of our writing - and then think that it was really important and needs to be in the piece after all...

We need to learn that this IS proper academic writing: this PROCESS is... (and also - it will give you data for future auto-ethnographic studies!). Most people think writing should be 'right first go' - or that if they have to change something - then they are a 'bad person' or a 'poor student' - but no - this is the necessary process of writing. 

Think of it as having a structured academic conversation with yourself.

This is the hardest thing for us tutors to get students to do. It is also hard to get other academics to realise that THIS is what we need to help students to do. It's not about shouting about spelling, punctuation and grammar - important as they are - but making time and space for this slow and thoughtful process to happen - especially when our students do not want to do this. It all feels too slow and painful.

Anyway - once you have improved it a bit yourself - print all of that off - and bring it to the class on Wednesday. We can give you feedback and hopefully help you to the next step!

But these are just words!

When I was a first year student we had no high stakes assessment that I can remember. All the first year stuff was designed to get us to think – to engage – to learn… It was brilliant – it was a bit like… a MOOC!!

Since I went through HE, ‘they’ broke it a bit more – made it harder – more formal – with more opportunities to fail – and then they let a few more non-traditional students in – and started to blame them for their failure or their fears – or their ‘fragility’ – instead of trying to fix the problem of education…

And now I don’t know how to get these bullied students to embrace this horrible and beautiful struggle with writing….

I am enjoying #rhizo14 so much – and as the community is the curriculum – this is the issue I thought I’d pop out there this week. I do hope for some Comments here folks. I need your thoughts!

#artmooc week 3 Correspondence with memory – suggestions for practice

This week we studied ‘Mail Art’ or Correspondence with Memory – and connected with Fluxus Art of the sixties. There are elements of the personal and the surreal in this movement – from Van Gogh’s illustrated letters to his brother to Eleanor Antin and her series of 100-boot postcards capturing images of 100 boots as they journeyed from the Pacific to New York – and Ray Johnson’s provocative abstracts and collages – connected by cartoon-like bunny faces that then became a signature.

Our task was to create a memory of our own and capture it upon an envelope – front, back, sides and inside. This was to be extended by the insert(s) that we made and placed within the envelope; designed to intrigue the audience.

I chose to illustrate memories of Leysdown – a seaside town where we had a caravan by the sea. We used to go there from when I was about eight – and it was freedom.

I used a variety of media to make this artefact:

• Medium quality deckle paper for the envelope
• A4 paper for the insert
• Watercolours – for envelope and the ‘swimming’ shoes part of the insert
• Pencil and small brushes
• Small colour prints of Leysdown - pictures downloaded from the internet – cut to look like miniature postcards and photographs
• Shells and stones gathered from Leysdown itself
• Tissue paper sea and shore
• Small boat – in blue and white. 

I chose a square envelope shape so that it looked like an explosion of images and ideas when it burst open. I painted the front of the envelope to look like a postcard from the seaside. It is a Surreal representation (after Miro) of my niece sunbathing in black outside the caravan, by the sea. I chose Surreal to juxtapose the ordinary with the extraordinary – and thus illustrate the potentiality of the seaside. The external side flaps are drawn and painted with images of pill boxes – a common sight in and around Leysdown – from the war – but I’ve turned them into representations of the face of Ray Johnson’s rabbit – a nod to Mail art and its history and connecting it to Leysdown and its history. The top and bottom flaps show the flat sea and the sea forts (more memories of the War) in the distance – with seagulls. The images mirror each other: the top is more grey showing the more regular reality of the North Sea – cold and desolate – but the bottom image has more yellow and a lighter blue, it is slightly sunnier than the top. I’ve painted very sparsely, a few black lines of paint on white, on the inside of the envelope to create a simple, calm Buddha like face – representing my inner calm and peace when I go to Leysdown. The insert is a cut out of a ‘blind drawing’ of a pair of the ‘swimming’ shoes that I use, there are sharp cockles (shell fish) in the silt-like mud under your feet – I always try to swim there and it is so much easier when your feet are not bleeding. I also included many small pictures of the flat and desolate coast itself - and the shoes and the images are designed to fall out of the exploded envelope amongst small rocks and shells from Leysdown itself. I have placed this on layers of tissue paper – sheets of different blues and green mirroring the complexity of the seascape – and a layer of yellow for the shore. I added a small boat in blue and white to tie the whole together.

Here are a few pictures of all of the outside of the envelope – and the inserts – and the setting that I placed them in:

Possibilities for practice:  of course one possibility is just to do this Mail Art with your students as an alternative form of reflection – and perhaps as a precursor to writing. Other lessons: don’t wait for inspiration - because assessment can wound… and peer review is excellent. Let me unpack that a bit:

#5: Assessment can wound!

So – received my peer assessment and my grade – which incidentally was MUCH WORSE than the grade that my YOUNGER SISTER received! (And yes I do know that I am shouting.)

Three people reviewed my collage and none of them actually liked it. Nearly all of them gave me friendly and encouraging comments – but my grade was just a little over the average. Now I am not young and I’ve been knocking about Education for some very long while so I did not take to my bed and weep, but … Feedback can be dispiriting no matter *how* helpful. I wanted to discuss those comments with my assessors – and put my case – and change their minds… and yes I felt a lot less enthusiastic about this week’s task than I did before.  What can we do about this? We do mark and grade and we do give feedback and feed forward and we hope that it helps. Perhaps we need to actively develop resilience (not Gove’s form of resilience!) in our students so that they do not bend and break under our feedback? Perhaps we need to make more time to give feedback in person and in conversation – and wouldn’t it be great if that time was valued by our institutions.

#6: Let’s build in more work – and lots of peer review

MOOCs set a lot of work each week (and still we usually do *more*) – and peer review is considered to be part of the learning and part of the assessment process. I do know of postgraduate courses that set peer review, but everyone tells me that undergraduate students won’t do it. However, I hope that if we start in the first year and from the first week to set rigorous weekly tasks that are peer-reviewed as the norm, no one will even think to object. 

** If you have any suggestions and strategies for developing peer review in undergraduate courses – please do let me know. ***

#7: Don’t wait to be inspired – just do it!

As said, my feedback dispirited me somewhat, and I started to feel under-whelmed by this week’s task. However, I have studied often before – and I wanted to get the assignment done… so I just did it anyway. I always advise students not to wait for inspiration: have a set time and place to work – and just do it. Just start; just brainstorm; free write; put BLAH BLAH BLAH and move on … but get something down and you are on your way. I did exactly that for this task – and it is done.

Of course when working with ‘non-traditional’ students, we may need to help them build this work habit rather than just expect it to emerge. Hence the suggestion above that in at least one first year module we do set weekly, rigorous and hard tasks for them to do – and to peer assess as part of their learning process. If we help to build positive habits they too will be sustained when tired or uninspired or lovelorn or any of the things that get in the way of work.

NEXT WEEK – portrait with collage – ooo errrr.