A short case study of an effective student learning activity

In 2004 Graham Gibbs and Clare Simpson published a seminal meta-analysis titled ‘Conditions under which assessment supports student learning’. The third condition on their list of ten is that assessments should help students 'engage in productive and appropriate learning activity'.

Most art history students are assessed by essay more than anything else, but experience - as well as a chorus of studies - shows that asking students to write essays in response to questions set by a teacher isn't always a good way to engage them productively and appropriately. One alternative is to ask students to devise their own essay questions but this is a notoriously risky approach and depends on having a small number of students in the first place. Setting a different kind of task altogether - a podcast, for example - can require a great deal of time spent in devising the task, writing new marking criteria, and evaluating it once it’s done.

Thankfully, I've come across one approach that is so simple in its conception that it must be worth trying. It comes from Alison Cook-Sather, Peter Felten and Catherine Bovill’s book Engaging Students as Partners in Learning and Teaching, and here it is, quoted almost in its entirety:

Quick seminar activity: Devise a Hierarchy of Agreement

Mark Meynell has a wonderfully rich and thoughtful blog called Quaerentia and some time ago he mentioned Paul Graham's 'disagreement hierarchy'. First published in 2008 on Graham's own blog to illustrate an essay called 'How to Disagree', the hierarchy is a way of classifying arguments on seven levels.

Paul Graham, Hierachy of Disagreement. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Graham%27s_Hierarchy_of_Disagreement.svg, accessed 2 October 2017.

Important advice for coming to university

Next Thursday is A-Level results day and for the first time in many years I’m anxious, because my goddaughter Saskia is one of those waiting to hear. Across the county new students will begin preparations for moving to university and university departments everywhere will be making final adjustments to their degree programme handbooks. 

More and more time is taken by the preparation and revision of welcome packs and other paraphernalia designed to support students through their studies. If much of it is unnoticed by students at the time, I hope they will reflect in future years (as I have) just how much care has gone into creating a supportive environment in which they can flourish. But I bet one really important bit of advice won’t appear in any department’s handbook, though. It’s a really crucial piece of advice, and it’s this:

Remember that you’ve come to university to study a discipline, not a subject. 

Let me describe the difference by paraphrasing my colleague Jason Davies, who spends his time thinking about these things.

Playing cards and portraits

Teaching my undergraduate class on Tuesday I used a new method to help students think about the work that portraits do. I've found that when students discuss portraits in a gallery setting they often refer to the way the sitter is represented, and how the portraitist has tried to make the subject (for example Elizabeth I, below) appear majestic, powerful, and so on.

British school, Elizabeth I, c.1590, oil on panel, 119 x 91cm. National Maritime Museum BHC2680.

The problem with this approach is that it doesn't help us understand the work that portraits do, and the effects they may have. It relies too much on reconstructing intentions, which are difficult to establish at the best of times, with any clarity. So I tried a method that I first encountered in a class on public speaking, and which a friend assures me is widely used in acting schools.

I gave all the students a playing card which they held on their foreheads. They couldn't see whether the card was a Queen, or a three, or an Ace (etc), but everyone else could. Then I asked them to walk round the room - a large room in Queen's House Greenwich, newly re-opened and with a fantastic display. As they walked past each other they were to behave in response to the card that they saw the other person had: if someone had a low number (a two or three, for example) you could look down your nose at them or turn away. But if someone had a high number, such as a Queen, you would defer to them, bowing or acting in an appropriately reverential manner.

It took some courage for the students to start walking round and bowing, nodding, or snubbing, but they gradually got into it, and we all had two or three minutes of fun.

The key question that followed was this: based on other people's reactions, what do you think is the value of the card on your forehead? This opened some interesting (and fun) discussion but everyone guessed fairly accurately.

Then  the really important question followed: returning to our portrait of Elizabeth I, what card - in a purely notional sense - do you think you're wearing when you look at the portrait? A pretty low number, was the consensus. And so to the important point: when we consider portraits, we do need to look at how the sitter is represented, but we also need to consider how the portrait represents us, the viewer, and how it manages to do this.

We followed this up by each finding a portrait in the room that was appropriate to our card number: one student with a two of clubs stood in front of Philip II, whereas someone with a seven could maybe stand in front of Anne of Denmark or the youthful Edward VI. (This helps raise questions about gender and age, as well as rank).

Netherlandish school, Philip II,  17th century, oil on canvas, 107 x 71cm, National Maritime Museum BHC2951.

It took some courage for me to do this but I think it worked well and would like to do it again, and at a suitable point, find out what the students thought of it all.

Practices of enquiry at UAL

University of the Arts London has put on a fantastic 'exhibition of teaching' called Practices of Enquiry, taking the imaginative and refreshing route of making creative education visible and communicating it to the UAL community and beyond, using the means at which they are most adept (and the rest of us aren't) - an exhibition, co-created (and curated) by students and staff. The private view was heaving and a second visit this morning gave more time for conversation and contemplation. I'll write more shortly, but here are some photos of one of the exhibits.

Dr Mark Ingham, Cultural Exchange Cafe

Tracey Waller, Meta-assessment (accounts discussions by staff and students about assessment)

Tracey Waller, Meta-assessment (detail of the central explanatory panel)

Graham Barton & Dr Alison James, Lego Serious Play

A response to the AAH letter about the axing of A-Level Art History

Plenty of harrumphing in response to AQA's decision to axe A-Level Art History, especially in the Guardian. A protest letter from the Association of Art Historians to AQA was signed by over 200 academics, none of whom would give Art History an ounce more weight on a UCAS form than subjects such as English or History, or even (I bet) a good A-Level in Economics or Chemistry. There's a very good reason why they're right not to.

The reason is that art history, while a highly specialised field, doesn't have the cumulative, atomistic nature of most 'hard' disciplines, where you need to study A before you can understand B, and where C is considered really difficult, and best left till your final year. A famous paper published a few years ago characterised 'soft' subjects as having a 'reiterative, holistic nature ... which can be described as spiral in their configuration, returning with increasing levels of subtlety and insight into already familiar areas of content'.

This brings weighty intellectual challenges, as it means that students are exposed to the full range of material in the discipline at an early stage of their study. Who could forget reading Kant as a new undergraduate?

But it also means that there are few prerequisites to studying the subject, which is why few Art History degrees will nominate specific A-Levels as an entry requirement, let alone Art History itself. The pool of potential applicants for an History of Art degree will always be far wider than the numbers who have studied it at A-Level.

So are the signatories of the AAH letter right to say that AQA's decision will 'have grave consequences for the future of the discipline in universities'? It may impact on numbers of applicants - although without evidence this case can't be made with any conviction - but it certainly won't impact on how, what or why any of the signatories elect to teach, still less to publish, and to this end I feel we need to be more balanced in our response to AQA's decision.

Digital pilgrims and other communities

'A fascinating project-in-progress report last night from the Digital Pilgrim team of researchers based at the British Museum who are producing 3D digital models of a few of the 900+ pilgrim badges in the BM's collection. (The BM is making 2D images of most of the rest for its Collections Online database).

St Thomas Becket ampulla by The British Museum on Sketchfab

The models themselves are fantastic - just take a look here. They enable the viewer to get a much better sense of the object's tactility and its construction than would a 2D image.

The presenters reviewed some of the uses to which the resource could be put, and echoed the government's own Culture White Paper (2016, p.38) in suggesting 'the benefits of digitisation are obvious'.

Obvious? Well I beg to differ.