Abstract

Often students have difficulties accessing the UAL ecosystem of support services. Students are either not aware of or reluctant to access these services as they are perceived as ‘outside the course’. This case study proposes a workshop co-designing a course community map where students collectively identify issues they are experiencing and map these against UAL (support) teams who can help. This increases students’ recognition of UAL support as part of their learning and increases their agency.

Session and activities

This case study traces the findings of a PgCert Action Research Project, its impact and the follow-up developments over the past year. It outlines students’ difficulties to access support services, current institutional responses and concludes that these responses do not reach enough students in an effective way. In response, the case study charts the development of a workshop in which MA Design; Ceramic, Furniture, Jewellery students collectively identified issues they were experiencing and co-designed a course community map including support services against these issues. After analysing the impact and the limitations of this workshop, the case study tracks developments based on this analysis over the past year, for example a cross-course ‘Support Teams Event’ in the autumn term and an improved facilitation framework for the latest version of the co-design workshop. The case study concludes by tracking the impact of the findings beyond the MA Design; CFJ course, for example in PhD supervision and in Academic Support for the PCID Product, Ceramic and Industrial Design Programme at Central Saint Martins, and outlines future developments.