Abstract

Traditional student surveys often fail to generate meaningful feedback: response rates are low, students feel disengaged, and survey formats don’t reflect how creative students think or express themselves.

This session proposes an alternative approach: the anti-survey. Through a participatory workshop, staff will explore three creative, student-tested feedback methods—collaging, emoji mapping and physical five—that replace tick boxes and Likert scales with hands-on, creative participation.

These approaches aim to engage students more authentically, spark richer conversations, and generate robust, evidence-based insights. The anti-survey reframes evaluation as an inclusive, engaging and connective process, opening up dialogue rather than shutting it down.

Session and activities

We want to collect meaningful feedback about our courses, and other aspects of the UAL experience, but often the surveys we carry out don’t work. They have notoriously low response rates, and are unsatisfying to students, who, when they do complete them, spend the minimum possible time doing so. Our students come here to study creative disciplines, and express themselves in creative languages, which surveys are ill-equipped to capture. 

What can we do instead? Join us for ‘the anti-survey’ – a whistle stop tour through three creative alternatives, all of which have been tested by or co-developed with UAL students, for gathering feedback. In this participatory workshop we will try out these approaches, seizing scissors, paper, glue and emojis rather than Likert scales and text boxes, to explore how we might engage students in ways that provoke meaningful discussions and generate quality evidence-based insights. These can become spaces for connection.  

Creative approaches are more inclusive and aligned to UAL’s ways of communicating. These are ideas that we have co-designed with students, to ensure we are speaking their creative language while developing a shared understanding of teaching and learning. 

We will open with a brief overview, conceptualising the anti-survey. Then together we will explore three creative and inclusive approaches: 

• collaging – collaborative collaging, with glue scissors. magazines and paper 

• emoji mapping – a shared discussion, mapping together to explore pain points and highlights of a learning journey 

• physical five – moving about the room into different groupings to explore scales. 

At the end we will discuss the potential in these approaches. Evaluation can be engaging and fun, while still robust and insightful. We want to open up conversations, not close them down. Join us to explore the anti-survey together.