Use evidence-informed approaches to know and respond to your student’s diverse needs.
Background and Context
I’m a specialist technician at UAL’s Screen School, teaching camera and lighting for BA and MA courses. Every year in student feedback, they request more technical instruction, but some struggle to attend due to work commitments. UAL is an international university, so our student body is diverse, with a wide range of economic backgrounds.
Evaluation
A major issue in BA courses is the shared camera and lighting provision, limiting student access compared to other competitive programs. This restricts self-directed study, as most equipment used is confined to on-site learning. Camera and lighting equipment is generally very expensive and not something most students will have access to outside their course. Less affluent students often have to work to afford their course/rent/life in London, a city with high cost of living, while some can purchase more time and access outside our learning environment. At times lower income students cannot access these workshops due to outside commitments and jobs.
Unfortunately this disparity inside UAL is mirrored within the UK arts and creative industry sector as a whole. “The story of social class within this story is one of exclusion. Every sector… has an over-representation of those from upper middle class social origins, with those from working class origins making up far less of the workforce” Brook, Orian & O’Brien, Dave & Taylor, Mark. (2017). With this being the future for my students, I must ask how I can help ensure every student is given equity of access when studying in my classes.
Moving forwards
With my workload spread across five courses, I’ve yet to establish a consistent way for students to book one-to-one support. So far, this has been on an ad hoc basis through email or in-person requests. To improve this, I’ve set up an online booking system and added a fortnightly day for one-to-one sessions in the studio. With one-two-one sessions students can then request more specific support, if they have had to miss additional workshops due to work commitments for example. Research by Brooks and Kelly (2006) highlights the emotional and motivational benefits of one-to-one tutorials, noting that many students feel alienated during the transition to university. I believe by increasing the provision of one-two-ones I’ll be better equipped to support my students at UAL. As they can access these one-two-one sessions both in person and online.
In addition to this I have begun to enhance the current online resources available to my students. At present, there is no dedicated online content for the production side of each BA course in the Screen School. I currently rely on third-party walkthroughs, while useful they can lack the precision of in-house content, particularly since some equipment shown doesn’t match our own. I’ve created a visual guide for my MA students I work with, which have received positive feedback (see appendix A). This is at this time a basic version of what I will in time create, my aim moving forward is to produce instructional videos in the future. This means that any students who miss my workshops can still access support when they need it, inside or outside of the institution.
Refs
Brook, Orian & O’Brien, Dave & Taylor, Mark. (2017). Panic! Social Class, Taste and Inequalities in the Creative Industries.
Brooks, K. (2006) ‘Could do Better?’: students’ critique of written feedback. University of the West of England, Bristol.
Appendix A – MA Visual guide – https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1zOmHVDVzQEhCt-b1DFJ84-23N0uu6rQeIKulqX2_nNI/edit?usp=sharing