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).