Em's PgCert Blog

Introduction and Context:

I explore the intersection of Object Based Learning (OBL) and Pedagogies of Discomfort to propose an intervention that uses emotive, tactile engagement to foster critical reflection and transformative learning.  

This proposal is grounded in my teaching across BA and MA Sculpture at Camberwell, and BA and MA Illustration and Visual Media (IVM) at London College of Communication, and my work as a material-led sculptor. A central concern across both practices is how material can be used as a critical and affective tool to challenge hegemonic narratives. My desire to explore this intersection stems from my interdisciplinary teaching experiences, where I’ve observed how framing material as a narrative device is highly transferable.  

I draw on key theoretical frameworks: intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991); the entanglements of racism and imagined futures (Garrett, 2024); and the role of shame in higher education (Hu, 2024). These underpin my engagement with both Pedagogies of Discomfort (Cox, 2025) and OBL (Willcocks 2025; Willcocks and Mahon 2023), offering a foundation from which to explore the emotional, material, and political dimensions of the proposed intervention.  

Key Theory and Pedagogical Intersect:   

Garrett’s (2024) paper, Racism Shapes Careers: Career Trajectories and Imagined Futures of Racialised Minority PhDs in UK Higher Education, has helped me meaningfully situate—and therefore better articulate—the “spatial context” of the institution as it relates to whiteness (p. 2). They define whiteness not as a personal bias, but as “an invisible structural feature of the institution”— “an ecology of hostile structures and practices that shape what we consider to be daily norms” (p. 5). Xu’s (2024) paper, International Students’ Feeling of Shame in Higher Education, extends Garrett’s work by highlighting “the nuanced interplay between power structures, institutional spatial configurations, and emotional experiences” and their impact on marginalised student groups (p. 81). In doing so, Xu contributes to a broader discourse on how higher education continues to reproduce the knowledge, cultural, and emotional capital of the West—and, by extension, whiteness (Ahmed, 2007; Fanon, 1952). Building on Garrett’s framing, Xu stresses that “it is imperative to view emotions not as individual possessions but rather as socially and relationally constructed phenomena” (p. 71). This understanding of emotion as structural and relational has informed my thinking around affect in the classroom. My proposed intervention, which centres on tactile and material engagement, seeks to respond to what Xu identifies as a “pressing need to critically examine how social and embodied forms of emotion, particularly shame, are utilised as mechanisms of exclusion and control within the higher education field” (p. 71).  

It is through this lens that I bring together OBL and Pedagogies of Discomfort. OBL is a pedagogic practice that foregrounds reciprocal engagement with objects as a way of understanding the world. As Judy Willcocks (2025) shares, “I see the world as a very rich and complex landscape which is constantly morphing and changing, and in which people’s understanding of reality is co-constructed not just by their interactions with other people but by their interactions with stuff.” Similarly, Sara Ahmed (2019) reminds us that “to inhabit a world is to be inhabited by use,” (p. 26) pointing to the ways material encounters are shaped by—and shape—our social and emotional orientations to the world.  

I encountered Pedagogies of Discomfort through Leah Cox’s talk (2025) Utilising Pedagogy as a Decolonisation Tool in Teaching and Learning Practice, where she argued that “the idea of avoiding discomfort, avoiding emotion, is one of those things that maintains the status quo.” Instead, Cox proposes that educators must “actively and intentionally engage with emotion in teaching spaces.” This resonates strongly with the work of Garrett (2024) and Xu (2024), particularly in their attention to how institutional norms uphold racialised and exclusionary dynamics through emotional regulation and spatial configuration. If, as they argue, the dominant structure of higher education causes emotional harm by privileging comfort for some at the expense of others, then our pedagogical practices—and how we teach—must also shift.  

By bringing OBL into conversation with Pedagogies of Discomfort, I propose an intervention that uses tactile, material engagement as a means of confronting and working through discomfort. Willocks (2025), an “arch collaborator” within the delivery of OBL at UAL, has generously put together a task sheet for educators to use when delivering OBL sessions. My intervention is small but considered – the adaption of this task sheet to include questions that foreground the learner’s emotional response. Please see below.   

Case study, mitigating potential problems and reflections:  

I have not yet had the opportunity to use my task sheet. However, in May I ran an OBL workshop with Y1 BAIVM students using Willcocks’ task sheet. I would like to share some reflections on that experience here. 

The workshop was developed in response to Ursula K. Le Guin’s (1986) The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, which invites us to reimagine the first human-made object not as a spear, but as a container—challenging dominant, patriarchal narratives of history rooted in conquest and aggression. What was particularly striking was how students responded through an intersectional lens, expanding the feminist reframing into an anti-imperial one. They questioned how the notion of humans as inherently dominant might be disrupted through this shift in perspective. This reminded me of an OBL session I read about on the relationship between colonialism, botany, and botanical drawing (Mahon and Willcocks, 2023). In it, students analysed 18th-century botanical illustrations—beautifully rendered flowers isolated against neutral backgrounds—that served as artefacts of a “comprehensive system of extraction” (p. 191) under colonialism. Both sessions illustrate how OBL can facilitate critical engagement with the complex, entangled histories embodied by objects. However, I was left reflecting on whether students had been provided with an adequate emotional space to process and contend with the violent histories and structures we were addressing. This is one of the reasons I am keen to interject an emotional facet.   

Feedback from Linda, along with ongoing conversations with Can from my blogging group, have emphasised the importance of preparing for situations where a session might trigger emotions in a student that become too challenging for them to manage—whether within the classroom or beyond. Below I propose some strategies for creating a supportive environment where students feel safe to express and process their emotions:  

• Ensuring multiple staff members are present so that students can be accompanied if they need to step out.   

• Establishing clear protocols for emotional support during sessions. This could be done by providing some initial protocols and then asking the student to coauthor some more so that everyone feels they have actively participated in the construction of the learning environment and its aims.  

• Signposting to external resources, such as counselling services or peer support networks.  

• Offering space for reflection and time to debrief. For example, building 20 – 30 minutes of ‘free time’ into the end of the session so that students can stay in the classroom, talk with each other and/or staff to process the learning experience.  

• Foregrounding group work.  

In the session I ran with BA Illustration and Visual Media, students worked in small groups. This structure helped diffuse emotional intensity through discussion, preventing emotional build-up and enabling students to identify shared experiences. Leah Cox (2025) has observed that while emotion is often valued by students, the primary source of discomfort tends to stem from peer dynamics rather than staff-student relationships or the subject matter itself. Designing for supported group work feels crucial in addressing one of the central tensions within pedagogies of discomfort. Group work also aligns with OBL’s capacity to challenge traditional modes of learning, where authority resides in a singular expert voice. Instead, it invites students to co-create meaning in the classroom; ensuring diverse experiences, knowledges, and contexts are central to the learning process. Collective pedagogic approaches are also encouraged by Garrett (2024), who argues that “colonial practices such as individualism and valuing ‘objective knowledge’ . . . alienate community and cultural academic knowledges” (p. 11). Working in groups helps shift away from these dynamics by relieving pressure on individuals, allowing students to process and contribute in ways and at a pace that feel safe and authentic to them. This supports a plurality of engagement and honours the complexity of cultural experience. As Xu (2024) reminds us, “emotional responses are intricately intertwined with gendered expectations and intersect with nationality, underscoring the gendered and raced dimensions of silence and silencing” (Rodriguez, 2011, p. 112, cited in Hu, 2024, p. 79). Group work can play a vital role in addressing this, as it takes the onus off the individual and allows students to choose how they engage. In this context, silence is reframed—not as a sign of disengagement or suppression, but as an act of agency, allowing space for students to participate on their own terms. In writing this, I am mindful of my own positionality as a white, cisgender female educator. Facilitating effective emotive group work will require me to actively practice humility—listening to, learning from, and with both students and colleagues.  

Conclusion:  

I have proposed an intervention that brings OBL into dialogue with pedagogies of discomfort, aiming to create space for emotional engagement in the classroom through encounters with objects. Although I have not yet implemented the intervention in full, I have drawn on my teaching practice to anticipate potential challenges and explore strategies for addressing them. I have also considered how this proposal might contribute to ongoing conversations and practices around anti-racist, anti-imperial, and equitable pedagogy. Looking ahead to the next academic year, I plan to collaborate with year and course leaders on the BAIVM programme to pilot an OBL workshop that incorporates this intervention. I will use the revised task sheet and apply the strategies for creating a supportive learning environment outlined earlier in this report.  

Reference list:

Ahmed, S. (2007). A phenomenology of Whiteness. Feminist Theory, 8(2), 149-168. 

Ahmed, S. (2019). What’s the Use?: On the Uses of Use. Durham and London: Duke University Press.  

Boler, M. (1999) Feeling Power. Emotions and Education. Abingdon: Routledge. 

Cox, L. (2025), Pedagogies of Discomfort, [Recorded lecture]. Inclusive Practices. University of the Arts London. 14 May. Available at: https://moodle.arts.ac.uk/mod/folder/view.php?id=1401553 (Accessed 15 May 2025). 

Crenshaw, K. (1991). ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.’ Stanford Law Review, 43(6), pp. 1241-1299.

Racism shapes careers: career trajectories and imagined futures of racialised minority PhDs in UK hi

Fanon, Franz. 1952. Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto Press.

Garrett, R. (2024). Racism shapes careers: career trajectories and imagined futures of racialised minority PhDs in UK higher education. Globalisation, Societies and Education, pp.1–15.

Hu, X. (2024) ‘International Students’ Feeling of Shame in the Higher Education: An Intersectional Analysis of Their Racialised, Gendered and Classed Experiences in the UK Universities’, Sociology Study, Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 69 – 89

Le Guin, U.K., (1986). The carrier bag theory of fiction. In: U.K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. New York: Grove Press, pp.165–170.

Mahon, K. and Willcocks, J. (2023) The potential of online object-based learning activities to support the teaching of intersectional environmentalism in art and design higher education in Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education, Vol 22 / Issue 2, (October 2023), pp. 187 – 207 

Orgill, G. and Willcocks, J. (2024), How to . . . use objects to support learning and teaching, [Recorded Lecture]. TPP. University of the Arts London. January. Available at: https://ual.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Sessions/List.aspx#folderID=%2261e304ce-5498-4672-a72b-b10600e460e4%22 (Accessed: 17 March 2024). 

Below is a list of quotes cited in the recording with time stamps:

0 minutes and 27 seconds: White privilege is “the absence of having to live with the consequences of racism” (Channel 4, 2020, 0:36)

1 minute and 3 seconds: “Whiteness is an invisible structural feature of the institution” (Garrett, 2024, pp.3)

1 minute and 12 seconds: “to understand this, whiteness must be seen as more than an ‘optical privilege’ in the workplace but as an ecology of hostile structures and practices that shape what we consider to be daily norms”. (Garrett, 2024, pp.3)

3 minutes and 31 seconds: “colonial histories of UK institutional landscapes shape the identities we consider to be ‘normal’ and form social and cultural practices in the image of whiteness” (Jones and Okun 2001 cited in Garret 2024, pp.3)

5 minutes and 28 seconds: “numbers are not neutral and should be interrogated for their role in promoting deficit analyses that serve white racial interest” (Bradbury, A., 2020, pp. 244)

7 minutes and 30 seconds: “higher educational spaces need to address the racist cultural expectations based on whiteness they placed on racialised minority academics to be ‘model minorities'”. (Garrett, 2024, pp.9)

8 minutes and 14 seconds: “how can I become something I can’t see?” (Sadiq, A., 2023, 2:00)

11 minutes and 39 seconds: “As Fanon articulates, race itself is an imagination of colonial minds to maintain Western authority. Geographies of the globe are formed through banal projected imaginations, constructing the West as the enlightened superior to the inferior East and South”. (Garrett, 2024, pp.5)

11 minutes and 58 seconds: “If imaginations have the potential to transform our political, social and cultural understandings of the globe and communities within it, they also have the ability to transform career trajectories within academia”. (Garrett, 2024, pp.5)

12 minutes and 13 seconds: “Imaginations are potent and are affected by whiteness and racism in institutions as tenuous structures of race attempt to dictate what imaginations do or do not manifest”. (Garrett, 2024, pp.5)

Reference list:

Bradbury, A., 2020. A critical race theory framework for education policy analysis: The case of bilingual learners and assessment policy in England. Race Ethnicity and Education, 23(2), pp.241-260.

Channel 4. (2020) The School That Tried to End Racism. [Online}. Youtube. 30 June. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1I3wJ7pJUjg (Accessed: 10 July 2025).

Garrett, R. (2024). Racism shapes careers: career trajectories and imagined futures of racialised minority PhDs in UK higher education. Globalisation, Societies and Education, pp.1–15.

Le Guin, U.K., (1986). The carrier bag theory of fiction. In: U.K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. New York: Grove Press, pp.165–170.

Orr, J. (2022) Revealed: The charity turning UK universities woke. The Telegraph [Online]. Youtube. 5 August. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRM6vOPTjuU (Accessed: 10 July 2025).

Sadiq, A. (2023) Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. Learning how to get it right. TEDx [Online}. Youtube. 2 March. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HR4wz1b54hw  (Accessed: 10 July 2025).

In the audio recording I paraphrase a couple of quotes. I am sharing the full quotes below along with their time stamps:

2 minutes and 20 seconds: “it is knowledge of who religious people are that is at stake” (Rekis. J, 2023, pp. 788)

4 minutes and 23 seconds: “what may appear to be a case of deplorable passivity and docility from a progressionist point of view, may actually be a form of agency but one that can be understood only from within the discourses and structures of subordination that create the conditions of its enactement”. (Rekis. J, 2023, pp. 794)

Reference list:

Jawad, H. (2022) Islam, women and sport: the case of visible Muslim women [Online]. Religion and Global Society (blog), London School of Economics and Political Science, 22 September. Available at: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/religionglobalsociety/2022/09/islam-women-and-sport-the-case-of-visible-muslim-women/ (Accessed: 3 July 2025).

Rekis, J. (2024) ‘Religious identity and epistemic injustice: an intersectional account’, Hypatia, 38(4), pp. 779–800. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/hyp.2023.86 (Accessed: 4 July 2025).

TED (2014) Kwame Anthony Appiah: Is religion good or bad? (This is a trick question) [Online video]. YouTube, 16 June. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2et2KO8gcY (Accessed: 3 July 2025).

Trinity University (2016) Challenging Race, Religion, and Stereotypes in Classroom [Online video]. YouTube, 1 December. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CAOKTo_DOk (Accessed: 3 July 2025).

Proposed intervention 

I am interested in contributing to the Pedagogy of Discomfort framework by intersecting it with Object-Based Learning (OBL), exploring how tactile knowledge can evoke emotion in the classroom and support its use as a collective critical tool. 

Leah Cox’s talk, “Utilising Discomfort Pedagogies as a Decolonisation Tool in Teaching and Learning Practice” (2025), serves as my entry point into pedagogies of discomfort, and I am currently working through her reference list to deepen my understanding. The foregrounding of emotion resonates with my own pedagogic practice, and I am particularly interested in the potential of emotion as a shared, critical resource in learning environments. 

OBL is another framework I encountered through the PgCert, and it too resonates with me. Rooted in tactile engagement and, by extension, the body, OBL offers a way to centre sensory and embodied experiences in learning. As Judy Willcocks et al (2023, 2024) demonstrate, it can also be employed effectively as a tool for critical engagement. I believe that the inherent criticality and corporeality of OBL make it well-suited to be used as a strategy for bringing emotion into the classroom in purposeful and transformative ways. 

My proposed intervention is a workshop framework that engages students in a layered encounter with objects, beginning with their material qualities and progressing toward critical reflection. Students start by exploring how an object feels, then consider how it relates to their body, followed by emotional responses, before contextualising the object within broader frameworks. This structure acknowledges affect as a generative source of knowledge and seeks to activate bodily and emotional awareness as tools for critical inquiry. 

I am interested in designing a framework that can be shared and adapted across contexts in response to shifting groups and needs, with the aim of foregrounding emotive and affective knowledges to challenge hegemonic frameworks and practices. 

Bibliography (loosely categorised although many sources intersect) 

Understanding pedagogies of discomfort: 

Ahmed, S. (2004). The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh University Press.  

Ahmed, S. (2004a). Affective economics. Social Text, 22(2), 117-139.  

Ahmed, S. (2004b). Collective feelings: Or, the impressions left by others. Theory, Culture & Society, 21(2), 25-42. 

Boler, M. (1999) Feeling Power. Emotions and Education. Abingdon: Routledge. 

Connelly, L., Jospeh-Salisbury, R. (2019) Teaching Grenfell: The Role of Emotions in Teaching and Learning for Social Change. Sociology 

Cox, L. (2025), Pedagogies of Discomfort, [Recorded lecture]. Inclusive Practices. University of the Arts London. 14 May. Available at: https://moodle.arts.ac.uk/mod/folder/view.php?id=1401553 (Accessed 15 May 2025). 

Understanding the affective and emotive potential of OBL: 

Ahmed, S. (2019). What’s the Use?: On the Uses of Use. Durham and London: Duke University Press.  

Hardie, K. (2015) Innovative pedagogies series: Wow: The power of objects in object-based learning and teaching, Higher Education Academy. Available at: https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets.creode.advancehe-document-manager/documents/hea/private/kirsten_hardie_final_1568037367.pdf (Accessed: 10 March 2025) 

Mahon, K. and Willcocks, J. (2023) The potential of online object-based learning activities to support the teaching of intersectional environmentalism in art and design higher education in Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education, Vol 22 / Issue 2, (October 2023), pp. 187 – 207  

Orgill, G. and Willcocks, J. (2024), How to . . . use objects to support learning and teaching, [Recorded Lecture]. TPP. University of the Arts London. January. Available at: https://ual.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Sessions/List.aspx#folderID=%2261e304ce-5498-4672-a72b-b10600e460e4%22 (Accessed: 17 March 2024). 

Understanding how emotion can help students, staff and insitutions engage with and challenge hegemony: 

Ahmed, S. (2007). A phenomenology of Whiteness. Feminist Theory, 8(2), 149-168. 

Arao, B. and Clemens, K. (2013) ‘From Safe Spaces to Brave Spaces: A New Way to Frame Dialogue Around Diversity and Social Justice’, in Landreman, L.M. (ed.) The Art of Effective Facilitation: Reflections from Social Justice Educators. New York: Routledge, pp. 135-150  

Crippa, E. ‘From “Crit” to “Lecture Performance”’. In The London Art Schools: Reforming the Art World, 1960 to Now. London: Tate Publishing, 2015 Fernandez, D. et al (2024) ‘Gender and social class inequalities in higher education: intersectional reflections on a workshop experience’, Frontiers in Psychology, pp. 1 – 10 

Haraway, D. (1988), ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3. pp. 575-599  

Hooks, B. (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York: Routledge.  

Hu, X. (2024) ‘International Students’ Feeling of Shame in the Higher Education: An Intersectional Analysis of Their Racialised, Gendered and Classed Experiences in the UK Universities’, Sociology Study, Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 69 – 89 

Lin, J.C.P. (2023), Exposing the chameleon-like nature of racism: a multidisciplinary look at critical race theory in higher education. High Education 85, pp. 1085–1100. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-022-00879-9  

Before reading, I invite you to check out this short post for context.

In reflecting on how we can better support students with chronic illness, I have watched the set videos for this task, as well as the recording of Leah Cox’s talk “Utilising Discomfort Pedagogies as a Decolonisation Tool in Teaching and Learning Practice” (2025). I have also read “International Students’ Feelings of Shame in Higher Education” (Hu, 2024) and “Gender and Social Class Inequalities in Higher Education: Intersectional Reflections on a Workshop Experience” (Fernandez et al, 2024).

Together, these materials have helped me think more deeply about: 
a) the paradox of disability being both hyper-visible and invisible in society, and 
b) the relationship between visibility and emotion, and emotion as a critical tool in the classroom.
This has led me to consider adjustments I can make in my own teaching to better support students with chronic illnesses and other disabilities. 

The paradox of disability being both hyper-visible and invisible in society: Adepitan (2020) uses the concept of “discrimination by design” to illustrate how exclusion is embedded in infrastructure—drawing connections between the historical legacy of racial segregation and the contemporary inaccessibility of public transport for disabled individuals. The clustering of wheelchair users into a designated bus section exemplifies how visibility can become a form of control or marginalisation. Christine Sun Kim (2023) also reflects on the politics of visibility, asking, “What is lost and what harm is caused because of this?” She notes that in her artworks, scale equals visibility, and visibility shapes what is socially valuable. These critiques point to the current limitations of positive scheming, which often prioritise visible disabilities while overlooking the realities of people with less visible or chronic conditions. 

This has prompted me to consider some changes I can make in my teaching: 

Intentional classroom setup 
To support diverse abilities in my classroom, I will ensure the space is set up in advance with accessible areas for rest (fatigue is common with chronic illness). These spaces will be available to all students without requiring them to disclose a reason. 

Accessible teaching materials 
Brain fog is a common symptom of chronic illness. To accommodate this, I will design workshop and briefing slides with minimal text, lots of visuals, and clear signposting. This format also supports neurodiverse students and those with language barriers. 

My hope is that by being intentional with both setup and materials, I can support students with diverse needs without making them feel hyper-visible if they disclose their disability—or invisible if they do not. 

Crenshaw’s (1990) intersectionality theory reminds us that disability can’t be fully understood on its own. My student and I share several intersecting identities—whiteness, cis womanhood, Englishness, and a similar socio-economic background—which may have fostered a sense of familiarity and mutual understanding. However, despite these shared positionalities, she has only now disclosed her disability. This highlights how even apparent relational closeness does not necessarily translate into a sense of safety or trust regarding disclosure. According to UAL’s 2024/25 data, 82.1% of students have not declared a disability, suggesting this is part of a wider institutional pattern. Furthermore, UAL’s categories do not explicitly include chronic illness, which may further deter students from declaring their condition. This omission can contribute to feelings of erasure or irrelevance, reinforcing the invisibility of certain disabilities.

Visibility and emotion are deeply linked. Shame, as discussed by Adepitan (2020) and in the paper “International Students’ Feelings of Shame in Higher Education,” (Hu, 2024) can result from intersecting systemic structures. Leah Cox (2025) also emphasises this saying “emotion and discomfort helps us to see oppression and inequality – if we don’t have it, we don’t see it”. Inspired by her, I plan to explore visualisation tasks—like asking students to draw their inner critic —to make emotions visible and foster critical conversations around disability and inclusion. The visual methodolgies of Fernandez et al (2024) offer further resources for developing inclusive learning experiences.

I hope that these changes will help me better support students as they navigate the physical and emotional barriers they encounter at UAL. I also hope they will help students feel able to disclose their needs, should they choose to.

Reference List:
Art 21, Christine Sun Kim in “Friends & Strangers” – Season 11 | Art21 (2023) YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NpRaEDlLsI&t=3s (Accessed: 14 May 2025). 

Cox, L. (2025), ‘Pedagogies of Discomfort’, [Recorded lecture]. Inclusive Practices. University of the Arts London. 14 May. Available at: https://moodle.arts.ac.uk/mod/folder/view.php?id=1401553 (Accessed 15 May 2025).

Crenshaw, K. (1990) ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color, Stanford Law Review, 43(6), pp. 1241–1299.

Fernandez, D. et al (2024) ‘Gender and social class inequalities in higher education: intersectional reflections on a workshop experience’, Frontiers in Psychology, pp. 1 – 10

Hu, X. (2024) ‘International Students’ Feeling of Shame in the Higher Education: An Intersectional Analysis of Their Racialised, Gendered and Classed Experiences in the UK Universities’, Sociology Study, Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 69 – 89

Para Pride, Intersectionality in Focus: Empowering Voices during UK Disability History Month 2023 (2023) YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yID8_s5tjc&t=1s (Accessed: 14 May 2025).

ParalympicsGB (2020) Ade Adepitan gives amazing explanation of systemic racism, YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAsxndpgagU (Accessed: 14 May 2025).

University of the Arts London, The Social Model of Disability at UAL (2020) YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNdnjmcrzgw&t=1s (Accessed: 14 May 2025).

Some context/reflections before my blog post: 

Two months ago, a student stopped me in the corridor, tearfully asking if we could talk. During our conversation, she revealed that she has fibromyalgia, a chronic pain condition affecting her studies. She also disclosed that she had never informed any staff member about her condition or applied for an EC or ISA, despite being months away from graduation. She explained that her fear of being misunderstood, along with the emotional burden of explaining or justifying her condition, had prevented her from seeking support. 

Our encounter was coincidental but, to me, also serendipitous as my partner has fibromyalgia. 

Fibromyalgia is often misunderstood and, until recently, was regarded as a mental rather than a physical condition. As a result, many face delays in diagnosis and treatment (my partner waited six years). Attitudes are slowly shifting in the aftermath of the Covid-19 Pandemic as the spotlight on long-covid is also shining a brighter light on other chronic illnesses, but misunderstanding is still widespread. 

In that moment, I was in a fortunate position to relate to her experience—though, of course, my own experience doesn’t fully mirror hers. If she had confided in me about any other condition, I might not have been able to respond as meaningfully. This conversation has stayed with me, prompting reflection not only on her specific situation but on the broader challenges faced by students with chronic illnesses or ‘invisible’ disabilities. How can we meaningfully support students if they do not feel comfortable disclosing a disability and if it is not discernible? 

As these posts upload in reverse chronological order, and a lot of cumulative learning has happened across them, I recommend starting at the end with my Micro teaching Write-up and finishing with Blog Post 4. 

Happy reading and thank you for your time.

18/03/2025

This case study (Mahon and Willcocks, 2023) seeks to understand two things: 

1. How object-based and experiential learning can be translated for delivery online. 

2. How object based and experiential learning can help students understand complex issues, in this instance the intersections of colonialism and the climate crisis. 

I chose this text to learn about OBL online. However, when reading, I became more interested in the critical thinking it can enable. 

In their evaluation of delivering haptic and experiential learning online, Mahon and Willcock identify the following: 

Successes include teaching wider and larger audiences and using multimodal communication to facilitate meaningful discussion online.  

Notable challenges include unequal access to technology and networks, screen exhaustion, poor focus and difficulty communicating online.  

Overall, translation for online delivery is deemed successful, although sessions shouldn’t last longer than two hours to give “breathing space for understanding to develop” (Mahon and Willcocks, 2023, p. 201) and students must have a focal point “as it is through conversation and active engagement that learning outcomes are clarified and reinforced” (Mahon and Willcocks, 2023, p. 202). They conclude “when encountered online, objects still have the capacity to tell powerful stories and make abstract concepts more concrete for the learner” (Mahon and Willcocks, 2023, p. 202).  

The study also shows that OBL promotes critical awareness. This observation is supported by literature: 

• Chatterjee at al. argue for “the potential of object-based learning to address troublesome knowledge, make abstract concepts more concrete for learners and develop a range of transferable skills including research, analysis and critical thinking” (Chatterjee at al., 2013 cited in Mahon and Willcocks, 2023, p. 189) 

• Steele (1998) states that object-based research is “the most valuable generator of knowledge production” (Steele, 1998 cited in Mahon and Willcocks, 2023, p. 190) 

• Lange and Willcocks believe OBL has “an increasingly important role to play in contributing to the decolonial agenda” (Lange and Willcocks, 2021 cited in Mahon and Willcocks, 2023, p. 190) 

I find the workshop analysed for this case study very inspirational. “Encouraging students to explore the impact of colonialism on the current climate crisis through the lens of eighteenth- and nineteenth- century botanical drawings” offers a clever entry point for thinking about complex and challenging issues. It also includes examples of good teaching practice, including:

• Using visual analysis to build critical engagement – e.g. plants in botanical illustrations are often isolated “which encouraged them to be viewed purely in terms of potential economic exploitation rather than as parts of a symbiotic ecosystem” (Mahon and Willcocks, 2023, p. 192). 

• Scaffolding questions to support student agency – e.g. asking several questions the first being “What do you know about who produced this object” and the last “How does your understanding of global power dynamics influence your understanding of the object?” (Mahon and Willcocks, 2023, p. 193) 

• Teaching across formats to ensure diversity of learning experience – e.g. asking students to add object-based research to an interactive digital map “which inevitably evidenced the ongoing impact of environmental exploitation in previously colonized nations” (Mahon and Willcocks, 2023, p. 193) 

There is lots of food for thought here and I look forward to digesting ideas to disseminate through my own teaching practice. I have also identified further reading (see photos below). 

References

Mahon, K. and Willcocks, J. (2023) The potential of online object-based learning activities to support the teaching of intersectional environmentalism in art and design higher education in Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education, Vol 22 / Issue 2, (October 2023), pp. 187 – 207 

17/03/2025

I really enjoyed Dr Kristen Hardie’s essay Innovative pedagogies series: Wow: The power of objects in object-based learning and teaching (2015) and find OBL thought-provoking. Keen to know more, I watched the recording of How to . . . use objects to support learning and teaching originally delivered by Judy Willcocks and Georgina Orgill in January 2024. This post will focus on Judy Willcock’s presentation. 

Judy Willcocks is Head of the Museum and Study Collection at Central Saint Martins. She is also a pioneer of OBL and describes herself as an “arch collaborator”, having worked closely with leading figures researching and practicing OBL.  

To start, she contextualises OBL and traces its increasing application in classrooms.  

• 2005 – 2008, OBL becomes an academic discipline with key contributors Scott G Harris and Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, learning with and through objects in museums. Willcocks argues however, that art and design educators and practitioners have been doing OBL informally for much longer.  

• Researchers at UCL advance the use of OBL in classrooms but with a pragmatic lens. For example, considering how objects can help medical students. Willcocks suggests that few of these sessions were “critical, oblique or creative”.  

• She states that, apart from Hardie’s work, there was a void in literature about OBL in art and design. It is within this void that she situates her own practice.  

I love Willcock’s description of her relationship to the world: “I see the world as a very rich and complex landscape which is constantly morphing and changing, and in which people’s understanding of reality is co-constructed not just by their interactions with other people but by their interactions with stuff”. I share this world view.  

Later in the talk she discusses her workshop structure and key benefits of OBL. I particularly like the emphasis on getting students to spend “deep time” with objects. Furthermore, she outlines two frameworks for engaging with objects: “information sharing” and “holding back information”. 

Information sharing is the “traditional, curatorial way of working”, where someone is an expert with knowledge and “storytelling capabilities”. She warns that “the minute you start storytelling about an object, that’s your curatorial voice entering the room” and advocates avoiding this. She does however acknowledge it is useful when engaging with topics like decolonisation, where prerequisite knowledge is important.  

Holding back information foregrounds the “magical and meaningful” relationship people have with objects and holds space for diverse contexts/experiences/knowledges. She refers to this type of engagement as extra-rational or the “visceral, embodied, unconsidered response”.  

I find this lecture enormously helpful, particularly Willcock’s assertion that “objects are a good way of relating to our student population” and that an “object can be highly illustrative of a huge amount of context and information”. She underlines the versatility of OBL but stresses the importance of setting a clear framework for students. I am currently developing an OBL workshop for first year illustration students and, reflecting on this, think my scaffold may be the narrative potential of objects. I plan to set up a ‘table of curiosities’, put students in pairs and ask them to choose one material and one object to research. Then to task them with drawing a wordless story which applies their material’s properties to their object. Considering this, Willcock’s response to a question about the place of material in OBL was interesting. Her current work does not extend to natural materials as it is based off manmade objects/material, or anything where there is “intention behind the making”.  

I will read the literature shared in the session to think more about if and how natural materials can be used within OBL.  

References:  

Hardie, K. (2015) Innovative pedagogies series: Wow: The power of objects in object-based learning and teaching, Higher Education Academy. Available at: https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets.creode.advancehe-document-manager/documents/hea/private/kirsten_hardie_final_1568037367.pdf (Accessed: 10 March 2025) 

Orgill, G. and Willcocks, J. (2024), How to . . . use objects to support learning and teaching, [Recorded Lecture]. TPP. University of the Arts London. January. Available at: https://ual.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Sessions/List.aspx#folderID=%2261e304ce-5498-4672-a72b-b10600e460e4%22 (Accessed: 17 March 2024). 

Contextual Background: On the MA in Illustration and Visual Media at LCC, we use crits to formatively assess student learning and match feedback to relevant assessment criteria to help students prepare for summative assessment, in line with the view that crits are “the glue that connects learning, teaching and assessment” (Blythman et al, 2007, p. 6).   

Evaluation: This comes with a challenge. On one hand, crits help students understand and apply criteria to navigate HE assessment and “many commentators have observed that curriculum elements where students have been involved in self- and/or peer-assessment are found, through formal assessments such as exams, to have been learned much more deeply” (Race, 2001, p. 22). On the other hand, the “learning which takes place is variable” (Blair 2007: n.pag.). Consequently, only some students are benefitting from crits.   

Moving forwards, I want to ensure greater parity for students. To do this I could:  

Discuss relevant assessment criteria with students at the beginning of the session in accordance with the view that “students need to be given agreed criteria to critique against” (Blythman et al, 2007, p. 5). Furthermore, I can involve students in choosing the criteria to help them “relate much more directly to the targets they need to achieve and to be more self-aware of their progress towards achieving them” (Race, 2001, p. 19). For example, asking students to identify criteria they find challenging and using these to guide the critique. This would also help establish a shared framework and goals.

Students’ verbal participation and understanding of what has been said often varies, this can result in an unequal experience. Using a glossary could “give common sense meanings to students, including those who may not have English as their first language” (Blythman et al, 2007, p. 18). I can print words and put them up around the classroom to help students share language. I will join in as students “find it helpful when lecturers explicitly model the types of feedback and dialogue that they hope to inculcate” (Blythman et al, 2007, p. 20). There is a very good glossary in Critiquing the Crit (Blythman et al, 2007) which I can borrow from.   

I wholeheartedly agree that “the relationship between self-confidence and the quality of the student’s creative performance is critical to the quality of the learning experience of the individual student” and that “a negative experience or misunderstanding of the formative feedback . . . can result in the level of learning being affected” (Blair 2007: n.pag.). Creating a supportive environment is therefore essential. Blythman et al (2007) recommend crit pairings so students can review work together before the larger group crit. This is a clever way of building confidence and something I would like to explore (although I will need to be mindful of time).  

Finally, I can incorporate feedback from crits into written summative assessment feedback. This will promote ipsative learning which “can be very powerful”, as “students who have engaged conscientiously with self-assessment and then receive feedback from a tutor on how objectively they have self-assessed, take the feedback very seriously” (Race, 2001, p. 14).  

Taken together, these approaches can increase parity in crits – allowing more students to have a meaningful experience, prepare for assessment and “develop skills invaluable in later lifelong learning contexts, and their own ongoing continuing professional development” (Race, 2001, p. 23). 

References:  

Blair B. (2007). Perception/ Interpretation/Impact. Networks Magazine: 1:10-13. Art, Design Media Subject Centre. Brighton 

Blythman, M., Orr, S. and Blair, B. (2007) Critiquing the Crit. Project Report. Higher Education Academy. 

Race, P. (2001). A Briefing on Self, Peer and Group Assessment. LTSN Generic Centre, Assessment Series No. 9.