It hadn’t really occurred to me to fundamentally question my preferred metrics-based approach to both work and information until one of the lecturers on my Librarianship MA course casually dismissed some quantitative research as ‘just counting stuff’. Having spent my previous career counting stuff; reporting on numbers of customers, transactions, items, sales, profits, I was challenged to re-examine my default lens as a limiting worldview. The more time I’ve spent in the Higher Education environment, the more I’ve encountered and understood similar challenges to, and frustrations with, transactionalising and measuring. This was most impactfully articulated by Jheni Arboine listing the ways we metricise our relationship with the student body through data dashboards, in the form of an adapted sea shanty (Arboine, 2024).
Libraries continues to be somewhat (perhaps comfortably for me) reliant on stats and spreadsheets, and I still find it helpful to manage my workload using quantifiable targets and measures. One of my objectives on the PGCert course is to develop greater understanding of some of the more foundational ethos of education, as a more informed foundation for my teaching practice. The article I was assigned to read in week one was really helpful in kick-starting this rethink, in addition to giving me some really practical grounding tips in delivering Object Based Learning (OBL) which is something I am targeted to increase delivery of as the collections librarian at Camberwell.
My assigned article was a case study examining the potential for social justice elements in OBL and also the effectiveness of online OBL (Willcocks & Mahon, 2023). Both of these strands are really useful for me to reconsider. Due to cohort numbers I am reliant on online delivery for some sessions, particularly year one inductions for larger courses. I share the articles’ concerns about loss of attention and engagement, and potentially depth of understanding online. The suggested engagement strategies discussed for OBL could probably be employed in most library teaching sessions as collections are such a key part of our delivery. Open questions employed to evoke responses to the social justice aspect also looked useful and promising – enabling students to look deeper in their research and to contextualise the materials found – whereas in my current time-pressured approach I often sacrifice this kind of quality questioning for quantity of content delivered. The suggested advantages of OBL such as making ‘abstract concepts more concrete for learners’ are exactly the sort of jumps I am seeking to make, replacing endless repetition.
Following on from the reading and discussion in week one I watched an ArtStor webinar I have been meaning to get to. Here the historian Whitney Barlow Robles used the phrase ‘humanistic questions’ in the context of object and image-based teaching (2024). One of my aims in taking time out to reflect on and restructure my teaching approach is to embed my role more effectively into the BA Fine Art courses at Camberwell. I’m hoping to build research skills into the BA student journey more consistently – rather than a needs-based approach which results in a bottleneck of 1:1 tutorials in Y3. I will need more engaging teaching content to deliver this through both closer unit involvement, and the introduction of OBL where possible.
References
Arboine, J. (2024) Launch event for the publication Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks: Interpretations, Art & Pedagogy. Available at : https://decolonisingtheartscurriculum.myblog.arts.ac.uk/frantz-fanon-launch-videos/ (accessed on 11/01/2025).
Barlow Robles, W. (2024) Picture this: Unlocking the cross-disciplinary potential of Artstor on JSTOR. Available at https://youtu.be/UT9esa7nwOs?si=xs2GWg4DoWa9bnSk (accessed on 11/01/2024).
Willcocks, J. and Mahon, K. (2023) ‘The potential of online object-based learning activities to support the teaching of intersectional environmentalism in art and design higher education’, Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education, Vol.22(2), pp. 187–207. Available at: https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/eprint/23599/ (accessed on 15/03/2025).