agoldberg’s blog

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I had several commitments that I wanted to adhere to in choosing a research methodology. First, in keeping with the principles of Action Research, I wanted to run a workshop for students that not only provided me with the kinds of data I was seeking, but that would be of value to the participants a a professionalization activity in and of itself. Relatedly, I wanted to draw upon the skills and creative talents of the participants as acting students. To those ends, rather than simply interview the students about their thoughts about “industry,” I created a three-part workshop whose central activity was a script-writing and performative exercise.

The first part of the workshop (“Industry Baby”) placed them in small groups to create a mind map around the word “industry” (as it relates to acting and performance as a career). Each individual student was given five post it notes to write words or phrases they connected with the concept “industry.” Then they were placed in small groups and had to place and connect their five words and add additional words prompted by their conversation. (See “Industry Mind Map” blog entry). This exercise was designed to get a general sense of the psychological and emotional terrain of the students in discussing the field of enquiry.

The second and primary activity of the workshop (“Future Nostalgia”) asked each student to write a script envisioning themselves five or ten years in the future being interview by a magazine (or newspaper or journal or blog) of their choice about their successful new project. The students were all given the same five interview questions and had to supply the dialogue for their future self. (See “ARP: Future Self Scripts”) After everyone wrote their script, we reassembled as a group and verbally shared what they had envisioned. We then had a couple of volunteers “perform” their script with another student playing the role of the interviewer and the student playing their future (successful) self.

The final activity returned to group brainstorming. I asked the students to make a list of specific skills, techniques, or experience they would need to have in order to achieve the vision outlined in their scripts. I then asked each group to circle the three things they would love to see included in their remaining time at UAL. (See “ARP: Needed Skills Brainstorm”)

Finnegan and Richard’s 2016 report, “Retention and Attainment in the Disciplines of Art and Design,” provides urgent statistical data for the need to address racial disparities in retention and attainment in art school. What I found particularly important about this report is that it thought about the challenges that relate specifically to an art school context and considered them in a multi-dimensional way; consequently, any response will need to be multi-pronged, from addressing curricular content and teaching methods, to hiring practices and support for faculty of color working in PWIs. Because art and design not only reflect but also shape culture, addressing these disparities becomes an urgent political task. 

The incredible short film, “The Room of Silence,” puts a human face to the statistics mentioned in the report, showing the emotional and psychological toll placed on students of color in a leading art school by the avoidance of directly and sensitively addressing racial issues present in student work. An absence of an actively anti-racist pedagogy only serves to reify the status quo. The flip side of this silence is painfully explored in Aisha Richard’s interview with a senior academic, “White Academia: Does this Affect You?” Looking at Richard’s interview in conjunction with the RISDI film paints a damning portrait of white ignorance and fragility amongst white faculty members who have not “done the work” to best support their students of color by educating themselves on how to lead discussions of race in the classroom. In that sense, the Shades of Noir glossary of terms serves an invaluable tool providing both a prompt for discussion in and of itself and also by providing the vocabulary and critical concepts with which to begin these necessary conversations.

“Social justice education,” a rich, theoretical, pedagogical framework for thinking about a classroom-based approach is presented through Hahn Tapper’s case study. His organization rests on three primary philosophical pillars: a Frierian experiential pedagogy, social identity theory, and intersectionality. From Paolo Friere, what I think is most pressing to remember is that education is never neutral; it can either reinforce or seek to undo forms of oppression. Social identity theory requires us as tutors to acknowledge the impossibility of relegating every conflict to the individual and interpersonal, acknowledging the social constructivist aspect of identity formation. This ultimately leads to the theory of intersectionality, which recognizes the complex interplay of different and overlapping aspects of identity, demanding of us as tutors to consider our students in all of their individual complexity while recognizing the hegemonic forms of power within which each individual is struggling. Again, I think back to both the RISDI interview and Richard’s interview and the need to hear and see students both as individual and the larger systems of oppression in which we are all enmeshed, and which privilege some students over others.

This report also encouraged me to think more specifically about acting and performance (my sub-field) and the discipline-specific challenges students from diverse backgrounds on my course may face. For example, a “crit” is not really a theatre-related term, feedback often being part of a dynamic rehearsal process as opposed to a discreet moment of evaluation looking at an object. On the other hand, personal characteristic such as appearance, speech, and accent, particularly in a globally diverse cohort of student, are highly salient personal characteristics related to student success which are irrelevant in visual art and design media but require careful thinking through on behalf of acting tutors. A whole additional set of theories and practices are necessary when students’ own bodies and voices are their artistic medium, as it is with acting. My artifact for the Inclusive Practices Unit sets out to support this development amongst the acting staff as a collaborative endeavor in an academically rigorous, yet accessible way.

As someone raised Jewish and who has lived and worked in education in New York City for the past thirty years, I have found the discourse around religion in education in the UK incredibly foreign, more so than the other readings in this unit. In the United States, a right-wing, evangelical Christian movement has captured major governmental institutions up to and including the Supreme Court (which just this year has dismantled a woman’s right to abortion and legalized anti-gay discrimination based on religious belief among other rulings), and local school boards around the country are banning books and interfering with school curricula whitewashing the teaching of US History, all predicated on a combination of white supremacy and Christian Nationalism. On the other hand, in New York City, most public institutions observe religious holidays of all major world religions, and awareness and acceptance of different faiths in most social contexts is a cultural norm. So on the one hand, unlike in the UK, on a national level in the US, a political battle is raging trying to keep religious matters firmly outside of educational policy in order to protect the rights of religious minorities and atheists from an emboldened and activist reactionary Christian movement. On the other, coming from cosmopolitan New York, I have found London to be a city with far less cultural sensitivity, knowledge, and understanding of different faiths. All of which is preface to say that I appreciate how much work I still need to do to understand the new cultural context in which I am teaching.  I found it striking that the two required readings chosen for this blog in a sense both advocated for embracing religion and centering it more within higher education (as opposed to focusing on Islamophobia or antisemitism, say). This is not a critique, just an observation of a major difference between the cultural contexts between teaching in New York City and London. 

I found the ideological steer of Craig Calhoun’s “Religion, the public sphere and higher education” to be quite off-putting and ahistorical. Most problematic is his lack of theorization of the “public sphere” as “defined by its openness and participation, inclusivity and reach of connections” (18). The lack of reference to Habermas, the theorist most associated with the concept of the public sphere, and its emergence in European history as a site of exclusion as a bourgeois field enforcing white, male, Christian, hegemonic power is emblematic of the ahistorical nature of his argument. That said, I strongly endorse Calhoun’s plea for greater understanding of world religions as an urgent necessity amongst staff and a greater consideration for the role of religion may play in our students’ world view. 

I have enjoyed Kwame Anthony Appiah’s writings on Cosmopolitanism elsewhere, but personally found this lecture, perhaps because of its brevity and extremely wide and public-facing nature, to be a vague and rather toothless Enlightenment-based, rationalist appeal for tolerance and understanding. I found it revealing in the question-and-answer section when asked about religious fundamentalism that his response was basically to say that he was open and willing for conversation. While this sort of approach should be our ideal within an educational environment, as a basis for a geo-politics given the current state of world politics, I find Appiah’s views increasingly inadequate as a response. Appiah himself is so charming and appealing and his life story embodies the values he espouses, so this is quite an accessible and useful artefact to bring directly into the classroom as the basis for starting a discussion about faith with students. 

The complexity and intersectional nature of these issues is apparent in the “Interview with Rahul Patel” in the Shades of Noir text Higher Power: Religion, Faith, Spirituality & Belief. Patel’s description of his own relationship to his Hindu faith resonated with my own experience, being raised what I would call “culturally Jewish,” connecting with the social and community-based aspects of faith without adopting the religious beliefs (which also resonates with Appiah’s lecture as creed as a doing, as opposed to a set of beliefs). As Patel continues to reflect on religion in the context of UAL, he often conflates racial representation, Islamophobia, lack of diversity in staff, a lack of knowledge of world religions, and a feeling that UAL has not created an inclusive environment for non-Christian staff (particularly Muslims). This perception sadly reflects a conversation I had just last month with a Muslim student on my course who felt alienated by our department’s decision to have all three third year productions derive from Dante’s Human Comedy, imposing a Judeo-Christian framework for their public showcase. Clearly, the issues Patel raised need to be more urgently addressed at the programme level.

Inclusive Practices: Blog 1 – Disability

Collectively, the assemblage of articles, resources, and films around disability for this blogging task, speak to the wide range of experiences of disabled students, and consequently some of the challenges and opportunities of thinking through inclusive practices in relation to disability.

As a teacher of performance, I found the two artist portraits – the film portrayal of deaf sound artist Christine Sin Kim and the personal reflection by performance artist Khairani Barokka — inspiring and frustrating in different ways. The visual presentation of Kim’s visual experiments related to the materiality of sound and Kim’s own autobiographical reflection on the relation between sound, image, and language growing up as the immigrant daughter of Chinese-speaking parents captured the possibilities for performance to produce rich, multi-valent experiences and how artists from the “margins” a deaf artist, can reveal sound in new ways. (I am left questioning the heavy reliance on sound and underscoring in the film about a deaf artist however). Barokka’s description of her extreme physical pain is very poignant and a valuable model for students seeking to combine their activism with their art, as well as brining awareness to the invisibility of certain forms of disability, of “spoonies.” Nevertheless, I remain slightly hesitant about bringing an article such as this into the classroom; this is of course a subjective opinion, but my experience in the classroom is that while some students respond to this kind of autobiographical unburdening, the article is too easily dismissed as too self-involved and does not generate the feelings of solidarity and allyship that I assume is its political aim.

Likewise, while I find the subject matter of the interview with Vilissa Thompson to be an important conversation to bring into the classroom, I found the content of the article to be too narrowly focused on issues of representation. This speaks to my own politics, but I find an emphasis on issues of cultural representation has led to a severely limited form of politics, emblematic of one in which the primary members of a Tory cabinet can be identified as “representatives” of the Global Majority while enacting racist, anti-immigrant, reactionary politics. Perhaps that article could be supplemented with another text which presents a structural analysis of the ways in which disability services are underserving specific communities, highlighting the material stakes of not considering disability and race in an intersectional manner. (I am also wary of hashtag activism as effective model for social transformation).

In her article “The Erasure of Blacks from the History of Autism” in the Shades of Noir journal on Disability, Kerima Çevik provides a necessary lesson of why representation in the construction of the historical record of our understanding of autism matters for today’s policies. In what she calls the “eight minute” research challenge, she presents a panoply of African American autistic savants from the last two hundred year, showing that this information is readily and easily accessible on the internet, but ignored in contemporary conceptualizations of autism which center white subjects in both research and policy. The SoN key terms is an exhaustive but helpful glossary of sometimes confusing terminology; I could imagine using this as part of an in-class exercise into understanding the importance of knowing and employing current (and often quickly changing!) best language practices. Likewise, the UAL Disability Service webpages are an important resource for letting students know about the different forms of support available for them. Particularly helpful for me (as someone coming from the US), was the page which outlined the difference in language and procedures between Schools and University in helping newly arrived students understand that the responsibility as adults now lies with them to initiate any process for support.