I am a mixed race woman of British and Nepalese heritage, born into a lower middle class family. I attended primary and secondary comprehensive schools in inner London, before going onto study Fine Art at Chelsea. During my BA, I was one of very few students of colour, a stark contrast to my experience of school, consequently I often had a feeling of being ‘out of place’ in the Arts University environment.
I am now one of UALs 21.3% BAME staff in Academic positions.1 My own experience has informed my drive to address ways in which the cultural capital of marginalised groups is devalued (Burke and McManus, 2011)2 and find ways to challenge this. I believe this is at the core of moving beyond the deficit model and will in turn contribute to closing the attainment gap.
The focus for my intervention will be curriculum based, honing in on Collectives, a project I developed and have delivered since 2021. I would like to adapt the brief to consolidate the project’s Social Justice lens within the classroom and explore its potential to inform structural changes in the longer term.
The brief asks Stage 2 Fashion Communication students to work in self- assigned Collectives to host a public facing event outside of CSM, encouraging students to recognise and centre the value of their own lived experience and tacit knowledge in relation to fashion through building communities of shared interest.
With the view that action is at the centre of critical pedagogy (Friere, 1968)3 one thing that struck me was the role of collective self-organising in challenging inequity. As Stage 2 students prepare to enter industry, how can exploring collective models of production enable them to have agency, rather than falling into its shape?
As part of previous briefings, I have hosted talks from London based Collectives, many of these working at the intersection of art, fashion and social justice to centre the experience of marginalised communities, promoting an engagement with theories of ‘speaking nearby’ (Minh-Ha, 1983)4 and coloniality of knowledge (Mignolo, 2007)5
While the project has been successful in generating peer-led spaces for students beyond the University, in its third year of running, it has become clear that the brief needs to be adapted to encourage more critical engagement with Collective working models for an FCP context.
Groups have increasingly elected to run club nights, which was proving to be limiting. To cover costs, club nights made sense economically to secure external venues, but were financially prohibitive to some students who couldn’t front deposits. Crucially, it shifted the project focus on tickets sales, event planning and logistics, without affording students the space to think critically about what kind of events/activities would best foster public engagement with their overarching aims, which they were often unclear on.
On reflection, I wonder if this is in part down to a lack of space for critical dialogue in the classroom? So far, the project focus has been on spaces for social justice outside the classroom, without addressing what happens within it. Freire describes a horizontal approach to education, generated through dialectical engagement of teacher and students, which is fundamental to generating authentic thinking – in opposition to the ‘banking’ model of education, where students are treated as passive ‘deposits to be filled’.
Through dialogue, a problem posing pedagogy creates the conditions for new pedagogical relationships to emerge, where teachers are also students and students are also teachers” 6
For the past 2 years, I have led the project alone. Next year, Berni Yates, Fashion Knowledge Exchange lead will join me on this brief, co-teaching, opening up space for peer dialogue, decentering a singular tutor voice within the group. Together we reflected on ways to reformat the course content.Adapting the briefing format from 3 speaker sessions will be crucial, replacing these with discussion sessions or workshops facilitated by Guest Collectives. Berni suggested shifting the briefing away from the traditional classroom space to Calthorpe Community Gardens, highlighting the significance of partnerships to the ethos of this project.
Students need to be engaged in an active process of meaning making if they are to retain and ‘understand’ what they are being taught” 7
A Social Justice Project?
The FCP Course is currently undergoing re-approval, with Social Justice objectives having been embedded into the Learning Outcomes. I spoke with the BA Fashion Course Leader Philip Clarke, he flagged up challenges which might inform the framing and LOs.
“The feedback from students is that there were too many ‘social justice’ projects – they wanted to do something that was more ‘fashion’, so perhaps consider whether you need to have a fashion element, incorporate fashion elements or give them fashion reference points”
I am mindful of labelling Collectives as a Social Justice project, or defining issues for students to engage with, it will be essential to arm them with agency to define what is meaningful to them. However I have included a Learning Outcomes that relates to Social Justice, informed by the New Course Handbook.
In dialogic pedagogy, the role shifts from the teachers as ‘knowing’ authority to critical facilitator; therefore, our critical questions will be paramount.
Key questions could centre on fashion in relation to social space, and to explore notions of inclusivity/ exclusivity within this.
- Unpack the concept of what ‘fashion orientated social space’ can be?
- Broaden definitions of ‘fashion’ centred activities
- Challenge the notion that fashion and social justice are oppositional – providing examples where they converge.
- Questioning who is included and excluded from certain spaces?
- Explore what kinds of social spaces are missing in London in 2025?
Please find the previous and updated briefs.
What scaffolding can be put in place to support the dialogical classroom?
Teacher’s voices tend to have authority within dialogic spaces but they can use that authority to open up possibilities for learners to speak”8
We will need to think about ways to structure ‘talking’. Wegerif and Mercer explore the types of ‘talk’ that can be generated; ‘Disputational Talk’, ‘Exploratory Talk’, ‘Cumulative Talk’,and techniques for producing ‘Thinking Together’ (Wegerif and Mercer, 1997) whereby opening of a communal space of possibilities in which the dialogue is more important than ownership of ideas.
Creating a dialogical space with a class of 48 students can be challenging. Integrating web based multimodal production tools (Bower, 2016)9 like Miro will be essential. Pre-session reading tasks could also be used to prompt discussion, and create a sense of cohesion amongst the large group.
In previous years, weekly Group tutorials did offer dialogical space, perhaps I lacked confidence in my approach. At times, I grapple with ways to foster criticality as a teacher, too focussed on drawing out authentic voices. How can I show faith in students, but still challenge them?
I have noticed a resistance to this style of teaching for some students who perhaps want to know what I think more, and may have come away feeling initially more confused than resolved.
While I can provide critical questioning from an industry standpoint, and from my own experience working in the field, I can’t provide expertise on their intuition. But in moving from listening and affirming to questioning, what techniques can be used? Perhaps more meta-communication with students about this approach will be helpful.
“It sounds like you want students to engage with the project in a slightly different way, but the only way they can do that, is to be let into your knowledge pool” Anna Reading, PGCert Peer
Another challenge is positionality, and to what extent I should make mine apparent. I am interested in how it is becoming increasingly difficult to carve cultural space in London, and in centering marginalised voices. Practical changes will also be made, including adjusting the timing of the project, now scheduled for Summer Term, which will allow for use of outdoors space to convene in and lessen the need for pay venues. I do want to impart my critical agenda in the framework of the project.
In the longer term, contextual curriculum content will also be addressed, with the potential to involve the Cultural Studies team. Grounding the project in theories of collective working models will be important, alongside the inclusion of fashion focused examples beyond my own knowledge pool from the wider FCP team. There is potential to create an online audio archive of previous talks which is available internally to UAL staff and students featuring Baesianz, Muslim Sisterhood, Flock Together, New Currency, Diasporas Now, Sportsbanger, Tape Collective, ESEA Sisters.
Next Steps: How do your strategies for embedding equality and diversity relate to larger discussions and initiatives?
“ It is about acknowledging the ways in which our institutions reproduce unequal social structures – so it is a larger project than simply the diversification of courses, for example. Therefore, meaningful engagement with decolonisation requires reassessing curricula, attainment and representation concurrently”10
Collectives is a springboard for addressing inequities within and beyond the academy. In 2023 the project generated an event called the What What Reading Room, founded by a group of 6 International students, all of South East and East-Asian heritage. They hosted a reading room with books and magazines curated from personal collections, alongside a screening event. The event was largely promoted on Chinese social media site WeChat, and while the material was not solely drawn from their cultural heritage, it was clear that the shared cultural identity and status as International students informed their project.
My observation is that East Asian students can experience an ‘othering’, perceived as wealthy interlopers, who despite their privileged economic status, often feel both marginalised and homogenised within UAL. In anonymous feedback, one student commented, ‘On multiple occasions, tutors and staff have incorrectly addressed Asian students without attempting to learn or acknowledge their names’.
Going forward there is scope for UAL to engage with student-led communities to address de-colonisation and embed a meta-cultural mindset. In her HEPA report into decolonising curricula, culture and pedagogy in UK universities, Mia Liyanage calls for Universities to institutionalise engagement with students as part of this drive. I would argue that the What What initiative project subtly explored both of these issues. Perhaps a Reading Room workshop co-devised with the group could be explored?
The idea of ‘Thinking Together’ (Wegerif, Mercer, 1997) will be central to these conversations. My experimentation with the dialogic spaces in the classroom will be key to developing this approach, which will likely feed into my ARP.
Bibliography
- UAL Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Annual report 2021/22 ↩︎
- Burke, P.J. and McManus, J. (2011) ‘Art for a few: Exclusions and misrecognitions in Higher Education Admissions Practices’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 32(5), pp. 699–712. doi:10.1080/01596306.2011.620753. ↩︎
- Darder, A. (2024) The Student Guide to Freire’s ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. ↩︎
- ‘speaking nearby:’ a conversation with Trinh T. Minh–ha – chen – 1992 – visual anthropology review – wiley online library. Available at: https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/var.1992.8.1.82 (Accessed: 28 May 2024). ↩︎
- Coloniality is far from over, and so must be decoloniality: Afterall: A journal of art, context and enquiry: Vol 43. Available at: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/692552 (Accessed: 28 May 2024).
↩︎ - Darder, A. (2024) The Student Guide to Freire’s ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. ↩︎
- Thinking together – learning through and for dialogue (2023) 21st Century Learners. Available at: http://21stcenturylearners.org.uk/?page_id=1228 (Accessed: 13 July 2024). ↩︎
- What is ‘Dialogic space’? (no date a) Rupert Wegerif. Available at: https://www.rupertwegerif.name/blog/what-is-dialogic-space (Accessed: 10 July 2024).
↩︎ - Bower, M. (2016). Deriving a typology of Web 2.0 learning technologies. British Journal of Educational Technology, 47(4), 763–777. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12344 ↩︎
- Liyanage, M (2020) Miseducation: decolonising curricula, culture and pedagogy in UK universities. By; HEPI number Debate Paper 23. ↩︎