Work with archives is an integral part of my practice as both an artist and educator, although I’m yet to find a methodology to apply it within my role at CSM. Both the texts I read ahead of the first session bought together new perspectives on how I might be able to approach this.
In ‘Archiving Critically: Exploring The Communication of Cultural Biases’ UAL archivist Hannah Grout explores the relationship between archives and teaching, and the potential for pedagogy to address cultural bias and activate the archive for critical thinking.
Archives have become central spaces in visual culture’s investigations of history, memory and identity. Textual or cultural artefacts are institutionalised when preserved in archives. Although archives are considered neutral spaces, the article brings into question their ‘inherent bias’. Who decides what goes in the archive? As the ‘archivist brings their own experiences into this process, the supposed passivity of this practice is undermined’, meaning cultural bias is inevitable.
Notable absences in the archive reflect this bias. Historically, patriarchal structures mean women are often recorded only by their relation to ‘important men’. For example, The National Archives (UK) have a ratio of 5:1 in favour of records relating to men over women, ‘archival holdings almost never provide a representative account of the subject they are recording, due to the many groups whose stories have been excluded.’
Alongside gender identity, others under documented in archival holdings often relate to: socio-economic class; Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds; disability; neurodiversity; sexual orientation; religion, belief and faith.
But rather than focus on the shortcomings of the archive, Grout questions how archives can be used in combination with pedagogies to open up critical conversations. There has been a growth of archive object-based learning activities, both within the Museum and HE sector, promoting student-centred experience with skills based teaching, which opens up a s a space to ‘critique collections and the attitudes of the archive.’
“Pedagogical practice could therefore be seen as a method through which archives and collections can confront issues surrounding social inclusion”
This links back to Willcocks & Mahons ‘Online object-based learning activities’. Here the duo discuss Creative Unions: Design for Intersectional Environmentalism, a project they lead which serves as a Case Study on decolonising the curriculum via online object based learning. Botanical drawings from the CSM archive were used as a starting point to explore how the global impetus to investigate and record the natural world was closely linked to colonial models of invasion and extraction.
“When encountered online, objects still have the capacity to tell powerful stories and make abstract concepts more concrete for the learner.“
Bowers outlines a Typology of Education Technology Tools (2020) which can be used to enhance learning in the classroom, including ‘Synchronous collaboration tools’, ‘Multimodal production tools’, ‘Text-based tools’.
Working post-pandemic with a large cohort of students to deliver the brief fully online, they created pre learning tasks based around the objects, asking the students to generate collaborative mapping tools used via Padlet. The user generated map was particularly interesting.
They also used the Gillian Rose Visual Methodologies (2012) as a guideline for developing a set of questions around the objects which students were asked to respond to. The Four Stage guidelines for analysis are the site of production, the site of the object, the site of audiencing and the site of circulation.’
“Paintings, drawings, photographs and films offer a view of the world that cannot be transparent or innocent and suggests a four-staged approach to analysing visual objects in a way that encourages careful consideration of how, when and where those objects are made or consumed.”
There are several ways these approaches could be applied to my own teaching context. Firstly, the potential to use synchronous collaboration tools within FCP, which I’m yet to explore. With a large cohort of 48 I would like to try to integrate tools like Padlet and Miro into the physical classroom too.
Secondly, thinking about where and how within a brief critical thinking can be activated and through what kinds of activities?
“The project gave students a greater understanding of the power of their position as designers and the potential for their work to address historic climate injustices.”
My practice work addresses omissions from the archives through the generation of new collections. What scope is there to use existing UAL archives when working with FCP students to open up critical conversations about fashion and social justice? Is there also potential to work with brand archives? And if so, how feasible is criticality when working with commercial partners?
FCP often students don’t understand how values of social justice are embedded in the curriculum. There is a sense that these are at odds with the fashion industry, and that this is ‘not real fashion’. A more focused use of reflective journals could also be helpful here for developing critical thinking.
Gebrial argues that the university is a site of knowledge production which has the power to decide which histories and knowledge are valued or considered ‘worthy of further critical attention’, in the same way that archives are.
I am developing a curated project, Landscapes Of Youth, which explores the shifting relationship between fashion and the natural landscape. I would like to connect my curation with my teaching, Willcocks & Mahons approaches seem particularly relevant to experiment with.
References
Willcocks, J & Mahon, K (2023) The potential of online object-based learning activities to support the teaching of intersectional environmentalism in art and design higher education Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education Volume 22 Number 2
Grout, H (2019) UAL) Archiving critically: exploring the communication of cultural biases Spark Vol 4 / Issue 1 pp.71-75
Bhambra, G K, Dalia, G, Nişancioğlu, K (2018 ) Decolonising the University, Pluto.
Bower, M. and Torrington, J. (2020), ‘Typology of free web-based learning technologies’ https://library.educause.edu/-/media/files/library/2020/4/freewebbasedlearntech2020.pdf. Accessed 23rd February 2024.