Context
Year 1 BA Drawing students experience many transitions in their first year of university. These include leaving home for the first time, becoming independent, navigating the new context of HE, encountering new socio-economic and power dynamics, peer-peer and student-teacher relationships. It is a vulnerable period that may impact their sense of belonging which Goodenow describes as ‘the extent to which students feel personally accepted, respected, included, and supported by others in the [school] social environment’ (1993, p. 80).
Evaluation
Sixteen years ago, I began my first day on this course. It did not go so well. Our summer homeworks were critiqued harshly by a tutor and I left disheartened but, with new friends. This experience motivates me to do better. Coming full circle, I now lead the first Unit 1 talk and workshop called ‘Drawing Together’ which situates drawing as a relational process. In small groups, I invite students to pick two fortune cookies, unwrap and break them. Inside they discover my folded strips of open-ended instructions (in place of a fortune) inviting them to make a drawing intervention around Camberwell and Peckham. Throughout the day, they realize playful and intriguing multidisciplinary works. Yet in our reflections what takes precedence is not only the works created but their social interactions and how they navigated working together.
Moving forwards
Workshops that foreground social interactions and students getting to know one other – such as the above – only exist in Unit 1. I think interspersing similar ones throughout the year will foster a stronger sense of belonging. In future, I would like to lead a Skills Exchange where students teach and swap the non-art skills they consider separate to their studio identities. Inspired by gift economies, I want to encourage reciprocity. By students introducing their hidden identities, it could lead to the discovery of shared interests and the formation of new communities among students. Conceptually, I will ground this in the ‘Educational Turn’ in contemporary art where pedagogical methods and activities took centre-stage in European public galleries (Rogoff, 2008). A great example is Hayward Gallery’s Wide Open School where over 100 artists led classes like how boxing can be applied to painting.
A sense of belonging has been linked to students’ positive engagement, mental health and wellbeing (Gopalan et al 2022; Wonkhe & Pearson 2022). Yet one area which unsettles this is the not knowing of Fine Art. After Unit 1, students are expected to begin an independent practice however many find working without a brief overwhelming and anxiety-triggering. Orr and Shreeve (2017) observe that in the ‘complex and ambiguous territory which constitutes learning in creative practice … tutors need to reassure students that it is acceptable to not know what the end goal might be.’ I usually do such reassuring in tutorials.
Perhaps another approach could be a seminar inspired by the book On Not Knowing: How Artists Think; the authors ‘describe a kind of liminal space where not knowing is not only not overcome, but sought, explored and savoured; where failure, boredom, frustration and getting lost are constructively deployed alongside wonder, secrets and play.’ (2013, p. 8). I will introduce the question What do you not know? in future tutorials to affirm its significance in the artistic process. There might be some confused looks, but by embracing ambiguity not as an inadequacy, I hope students will in time begin to feel at home with it.
Bibliography
Fisher, E., Fortnum, R., & Kettle’s Yard Gallery (2013). On not knowing: how artists think. London: Black Dog Publishing.
Goodenow, C. (1993). The psychological sense of school membership among adolescents: Scale development and educational correlates. Psychology in the Schools, 30(1), pp.79–90.
Gopalan, M., Linden-Carmichael A., Lanza, S. (2022). College Students’ Sense of Belonging and Mental Health Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic. In Journal of Adolescent Health, 70 (2): 228–233.
Orr, S. & Shreeve, A. (2017). Teaching practices for creative practitioners. In Art and Design Pedagogy in Higher Education: Knowledge, Values and Ambiguity in the Creative Curriculum. Milton: Taylor & Francis Group.
Rogoff, I. (2008) Turning. [online] www.e-flux.com. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/00/68470/turning/
Wonkhe & Pearson (2022). Students’ perceptions of belonging and inclusion at university. Available at: https://wonkhe.com/wp-content/wonkhe-uploads/2022/02/Belonging-and-inclusion-survey-Wonkhe-Pearson-Feb-22.pdf.