Out of the matrix: learning outcomes in an art school context

  • Eleanor Dare: Technology Enhanced Learning Coordinator, Teaching and Learning and Student Experience LCC

Abstract

If, as Wenger (2009) states, our institutions are designs and our designs are hostage to our understanding, perspectives, and theories, how do these internalised and institutionalised models of how students learn impact upon them? In this workshop we will experientially engage with the tacit and explicit paradigms that arguably define many aspects of a student's learning experience, including the teaching materials we use, technological environments, assessment briefs and lectures. As a group we will attempt to re-envisage the most prevalent pedagogic models, such as Bloom’s Taxonomy (1956). We will ask if this model is obsolete, unable to facilitate curiosity and imaginative risk, or if it still has value in a contemporary teaching and learning context?

Bloom’s Taxonomy (1956) is underpinned by a mid twentieth century paradigm of the human mind as a kind of machine for processing information. But is this appropriate for our context - for an Arts University? Should we also ask the same question of Constructivism – the ‘leading metaphor of human learning since the 1970s’ (Liu et al, 2005) and the pedagogic model that underpins many learning technologies, including Moodle (Dougiamas, 2002). Participants in this workshop will creatively expose the kinds of models that we tacitly and explicitly draw upon when deploying the digital in our teaching. We will collaboratively explore how participants can invent, adapt, reverse engineer or explode Bloom's taxonomy, so that it can be relevant to the myriad forms of practice found at UAL.

The resulting, re-engineered taxonomies, will be made available to staff and opened up for discussion via an online presence, a community of digital practice.

Workshop

This fully participatory and experiential workshop will engage colleagues in first discussing and reflecting upon the use of digital taxonomies to support teaching and learning, in the second part we will re-conceptualise our own taxonomies.

In the first third of the session we will look at the most readily available taxonomies and rubrics for digital mediation and teaching. In pairs participants will then discuss what rubrics or taxonomies (if any) they have used (or wanted to use) and report on their experiences and responses.

The last two thirds of the workshop will involve a creative, curiosity driven exploration of alternative formats for taxonomising (or even confronting taxonomy) such as drawing, painting, recording, videoing or performing approaches to digital delivery and investigation. This will be done in groups of 3-4 (depending on the size of the whole group)

Participants will be encouraged to imagine a teaching scenario in which a digital technology will be deployed, to then list or visualise hoped-for learning processes and their goals for students; Some staff might also wish to articulate why they find this concept inappropriate/impossible. The table/rubric/explanation/should be something they would give a new lecturer to support them in delivering the session - to help in embedding learning strategies & goals in relation to digital technology. The results will be disseminated on an LCC Moodle site with scope for further online discussion and collaboration around the theme of digital taxonomies.