Reflecting on the rich insights I have gained, I am certain that I will never capture the full impact of Practising Freedoms. What excites me is the ongoing reverberations: body maps and paper expressions still fixed on studio walls, handwritten multilingual phrases appearing in students’ spaces; colleagues telling me of several tutorials where students continue to reference their works or are now creatively interrogating structural forces. This is what I had hoped for.
The strengths of PF have been its multimodal and multi-site design which combined creative, dialogic and embodied methods. For many students – as indicated by the data – this led to a meaningful exploration of justice. With key revisions1 to support different learning styles, there is potential for PF to become an important framework for teaching justice in Year 1 Drawing.
Significantly, I have been invited by the Course Leader to be extend PF into Year 2 and Year 3. New ARP cycles will enable me to deepen my enquiry and broaden PF’s scope, while working with the original students who inspired its conception. Slowly, I will continue to thematically analyse the 10 hours of interview audio.
Through this process I have realised that I hold power as a tutor, in sharing my positionality and experiences of cross-cultural living, multilingualism and marginalisation, as this gave ‘permission’ to many students to do similarly. However, this permission was not autocratically mandated but dialogically encouraged and equally extended to staff, as Feldmeyer noted in his observations, ‘I was happy to be invited to join, it felt bonding to be doing the same as the students. And also it felt like a part of me was seen that had never appeared in my work at UAL: me in my mother tongue’ (2025, p. 1).
Another realisation was that while the aim of PF was to foster critical consciousness in the classroom, it was intrinsically eliciting reflections on belonging which Goodenow describes as the ‘extent to which students feel personally accepted, respected, and supported by others’ (1993, p.80). Gravett and Ajjawi expand this by asserting that belonging should be understood as ‘situated, fluid and sociomaterially constituted’ (2022, p. 1393), recognising it as shaped by gendered, classed and racialised experiences, social contexts and institutional practices. Fundamentally, PF has challenged me pedagogically to move beyond prioritising students’ practices and works – usually due to time constraints – to also seeing their personhood.
While the rigid institutional frameworks and consumerist agendas of HE make this attentive mode of seeing challenging, I will continue to reflect on and seek ways to share in hooks’ hopeful vision:
To educate as the practice of freedom is a way of teaching that
anyone can learn. That learning process comes easiest to those
of us who teach who also believe that there is an aspect of our
vocation that is sacred; who believe that our work is not merely
to share information but to share in the intellectual and spiritual
growth of our students. To teach in a manner that respects
and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to
provide the necessary conditions where learning can most
deeply and intimately begin. (1994, p.13)
Bibliography
Feldmeyer, N. (2025) Practising Freedoms observational notes
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.
Gravett, K. and Ajjawi, R. (2022). Belonging as situated practice. Studies in Higher Education, 47(7), pp. 1386–96. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2021.1894118.
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.
- Revisions include:
1. excluding object elicitation to create more time for the Introduction to broader structures and body mapping
2. making group sharing and discussion optional: for instance, students who want to share will congregate to do so while those who prefer working alone and not speaking can continue exploring the methods.
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