Interrogating Spaces

In this episode of Interrogating Spaces we explore the value of belonging in Higher Education. Compiling together interviews with education professionals from across the globe as well as staff and students from UAL, we get a rounded picture of key concepts and issues at play. Through these discussions, we establish the barriers and conditions of belonging and how staff can build greater communities of belonging with their students.

For more resources on the subject of belonging visit UAL's AEM and attainment resources page

Podcast Contributors:

Neil Currant is an Educational Developer and Senior Fellow HEA. Neil supports new lecturers and postgraduate students with their teaching practices and runs the professional recognition programme at UAL.

Hansika Jethnani graduated from London College of Communication in 2016 and went onto serve two terms as the Education Officer at UAL Students’ Union between 2016 and 2018 where she worked on a variety of campaigns.

Jess Moodyis a Senior Adviser at Advance HE, exploring diversity and inclusion across the staff and student lifecycles in higher education. She has supported a range of universities with their inclusive learning and teaching, and tackling of structural inequality in access and participation.

Dr Gurnam Singh is Associate Professor of Educational Attainment at Coventry University and Honorary Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. He is also Visiting Fellow in Race & Education at UAL and Visiting Professor of Social Work at the University of Chester.

Dr. Terrell Strayhorn is Professor of Urban Education in the Evelyn Reid Syphax School of Education at Virginia Union University, where he also serves as Associate Provost and Director of the SEF Center for the Study of HBCUs. Author of 10 books and 200+ scholarly publications, Strayhorn is an internationally-recognized expert on the social psychological determinants of student success.

David Whiteis the Head of Digital Learning at the University of the Arts London. He has worked at the intersection of teaching, research and digital for over 20 years.

Liz Thomas is Professor of Higher Education at Edge Hill University, and an independent higher education researcher and consultant. She has more than twenty years’ experience undertaking and managing research about widening participation, student engagement, belonging, retention and success.

Produced by: Liz Bunting, Vikki Hill, Gemma Riggs
Artwork by Nitya Anand

This episode of interrogating spaces brings together the organisers and student and alumni facilitators of the Creative Mindsets initiative that has been running at UAL since 2017.

Creative Mindsets works to improve attainment by developing growth mindsets to address stereotype threat and bias. It has delivered over 150 workshops with both staff and students in the last two years.

The podcast presents a focused discussion of different aspects and occurrences of bias within the UAL learning environment and beyond. The recording gave space for honest feedback and a chance to discuss real-life experiences on the phenomenon of bias at a range of levels, from the personal to the systemic. Through this, the discussion can inform a way forward for a more empathetic teaching practice that incorporates a sense of belonging within the studio environment

Podcast Contributors:

Ernestine Chua
Ernestine is a second year student studying BA Illustration & Visual Media at London College of Communication.

Humiraa Firdaws
Humiraa is a second year student studying BA Illustration & Visual Media at London College of Communication. Instagram: @whatihadinmind

Vikki Hill
Vikki Hill is Educational Developer: Attainment (Identity and Cultural Experience) and is also a Senior Fellow of the HEA. Vikki is part of the Attainment Team and works with staff and students across UAL to develop inclusive pedagogies and practices to address inequitable outcomes for students with particular focus on psycho-social phenomena such as bias, belonging and compassion. Vikki leads the Creative Mindsets initiative.

E. Okobi
E is an educator and interdisciplinary artist who works with performance, sound, video and text. She has devised and performed in social practice art staged at museums such as the British and Brooklyn Museums, and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). She has developed and facilitated educational programming for New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW), and the NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. She is also a journalist and writer.

Joel Simpson
Joel Simpson is an artist whose practice involves walking tours of London, focusing on how histories of colonisation shape the design of urban public spaces. He graduated from BA Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts in June 2018. In September 2018, Joel started co-delivering Creative Mindsets workshops, before becoming Project Assistant from July - December 2019.
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Many thanks to the technicians and staff within the Sound Design programmes at LCC for helping to make this recording happen.

More information on Creative Mindsets can be found here: https://ualcreativemindsets.myblog.arts.ac.uk/

Creative Mindsets is delivered by:
Vikki Hill, Educational Developer (Attainment), is the main contact for information.
Professor Susan Orr, UAL Dean of Learning, Teaching and Enhancement

This episode of interrogating spaces features a conversation between South African Filmmaker Rehad Desai and Sandra Janette Poulson who studies Fashion Print at Central St Martins. They come together after a screening of Rehad’s film ‘Everything Must Fall’ which charts the #feesmustfall movement that took South Africa’s Higher Education institutions by storm in 2015. They discuss the film and its implications for universities and pedagogy from a global perspective.

The film screening was programmed by Rahul Patel, Lecturer on MA MA Culture, Criticism and Curation at Central St Martins and Educational Developer at UAL’s Teaching and Learning exchange.

BIOGRAPHIES:

Rehad Desai
Rehad Desai is a documentary filmmaker and socialist activist who runs Uhuru Productions. In 2018 he released ‘Everything Must Fall’, an unflinching look at the #feesMustFall student movement that burst onto the South African political landscape in 2015. The movement started as a protest over the cost of education, and morphed into the most militant national revolt since the country’s first democratic elections in 1994.
www.everythingmustfall.co.za

Sandra Janette Poulson
Sandra Janette Poulson is a London based researcher, artist, fashion/print designer studying Fashion Print at Central Saint Martins. She was raised in Luanda-Angola and moved to Lisbon in 2013 to study Fashion Design at Faculdade de Arquitectura part of Universidade Técnica de Lisboa.
As a researcher/artist, design operates as a medium to explore and communicate her interests reflecting social/behavioural/political issues and traditional values whilst navigating her experiences from growing up in Luanda as one of her central influences.
www.sandrapoulson.com

This episode of Interrogating Spaces profiles the latest Decolonising the Arts Curriculum exhibition at Central St Martins library, curated by Rahul Patel (Lecturer on MA Culture, Criticism and Curation at Central St Martins and Educational Developer at UAL’s Teaching, Learning and Employability Exchange).

The five featured artists are Maria Bendixen, Dr Jo Shah, Tobi Alexandre Falade, Siyan Zhang and Joanna Mamede who lead us through the ideas at play in each of their artworks and their social and political resonances. They speak openly about their personal experiences and help us gain new perspectives on race, bias, identity, ‘otherness’ and decolonisation.

The feature is introduced by Rahul Patel.

Biographies:

Rahul Patel
Rahul Patel is an Educational Developer (Attainment) and lecturer on the Post Graduate Certificate in Academic Practice – Art, Design and Communications programme with University of the Arts London Teaching and Learning Exchange. He also teaches on the MA Culture, Criticism and Curation at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London (UAL).

Siyan Zhang
Siyan Zhang is a curator who is interested in cultural exchange and identity and has recently completed the MA Culture, Criticism and Curation at Central St Martins. Her research interest is focus on the issues in the city regeneration, especially how to use site-specific city-based exhibition to revive the city. She is currently working at the Freud Museum in London.
Instagram: @siyanart

Dr Jo Shah, SFHEA
Founder of the Social Performance Network, Dr Shah holds academic positions at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London as Programme Leader of Learning Skills and Course Leader for the Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. She specialises in visual and social cultures and her work is focused on the links between individual experience and social phenomenon.

Joanna Mamede
Joanna Mamede is a Brazilian born Visual Artist and Filmmaker based in London. She has currently completed the MRes Art: Moving Image Programme at Central Saint Martins. Her work explores language and discourse, and its aesthetical influence within a global context. Her research interests investigate difference and issues of translation from a critical and post-colonial stand-point. She has created together with the artist Ana Luiza Rodrigues, who also just completed her Masters in Photography at Central Saint Martins, the project Faceinthehole in order to dissociate political discourse from political image. Instagram: @faceinthehole

Tobi Alexandra Falade
Tobi Alexandra Falade is a London-based artist born in Nigeria and raised in Warri, Uyo, Eket, Port Harcourt, London, Rochdale and Liverpool. She is influenced by these several life narratives and believes that somehow her other self, her ‘shadow self’ continues to live on in Nigeria, whilst she continues life abroad, divorced from her country of origin. She graduated from Fine Art: Painting at Wimbledon College of Arts in 2019.
Website: www.tobialexandrafalade.com/
Instagram: @tobialexandrafalade

Maria Bendixen
Maria Bendixen is a Brazilian-born London-based ceramic artist. She is influenced by African, Danish and Japanese cultures and became a full time ceramic artist in 2014 after a career in contemporary dance. Maria’s inspiration comes from the process of making ceramics itself and from experimenting with the materiality of clay.
Website: ceramicslondon.wixsite.com/ceramicslondon