July 2022
My positionality
As a mixed-race half English, half Indian woman who grew up in an all-white family I am particularly interested in intersectionality. I have been the recipient of racism and conversely, I have benefitted from white privilege due to the Whiteliness conferred on me by my upbringing. Watching Shirley Anne Tate speak about conscious bias helped me confront this duality in my positionality. I understood that I have been guilty of (un)conscious bias because I absorbed a world view based on a white dominant narrative.
The learnings that I’ve gained on IPU have helped me pick out these contrasting strands in my identity and focus on how my professional positionality and the intersectionality of my racial identity connects to that of my students. My desire to advocate for students of colour connects to this learning and as a staff member of colour I see how important this intersectional representation is.
I am Year One lead on BA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography and my artefact is designed specifically for first year students. There are many complex, intersectional social identities that present themselves in first years on this course; a high percentage have disabilities ranging from dyslexia to ADHD.
“Within the area of disability, the discipline has higher numbers of students with a declared disability, a specific learning disability: dyslexic students represent 11% of the cohort, higher than the sector average, which is 4%.”
(Finnigan and Richards, 2016)
There is a majority of British female, white students from middle class backgrounds. This majority sits alongside smaller groups of Chinese international students, Black and Asian British students and European students. Many of the students openly present as LGBTQ+, other students may be at the beginning of a journey towards embracing new identities. My artefact is designed to open conversations around intersectionality and allow students who come from groups that are minoritised or marginalised to be represented, acknowledged and supported. My aim is to help students acknowledge their different and shared social identities and facilitate discussions about representation, working towards creating a shared community amongst a diverse group of students and to create a supportive environment where shared social identities are acknowledged, and individuals are encouraged to flourish.
“The teacher is of course an artist but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the profile, can shape the students. What an educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves.” (Freire, 1972)
The retention, progression and attainment gap amongst BME students also feeds into why it’s important to create interventions that support minority and socially disadvantaged groups. The Student Equality Diversity Inclusion report 2021 contains some shocking statistics – just 32% of first year home undergraduates are from BME groups. Attainment rates at LCC in 2019/20 were 90.7% White and 73.4% BME.
Evolution of artefact
The initial idea came from an exercise set by Terry Finnegan in the first seminar session. In it, we were asked to assign perceived intersectional identities to people from looking at their portraits. Many students, myself included, found this extremely uncomfortable, however I understood the merit in how it made us confront the idea of conscious or unconscious bias and expanded our view of people’s social identities and where intersection might play a role. Whilst this exercise is not appropriate for first year students, it led me to thinking about how I could create an opportunity for students to get to know each and find other students from their own social groups.
A resource that informed my thinking on this subject was Tapper, A (2013) A Pedagogy of Social Justice Education: Social Identity Theory, Intersectionality, and Empowerment.
{…} Freire explains the role that identity plays in the shaping and implementation of education. One of his most important arguments is that students’ identities need to be taken into account in all educational settings. They should not be approached as if everyone in the classroom, including the teacher, is starting from the same place in terms of social status and identity. Although virtually no one discounts the central role that teachers play in a given classroom, Freire extends this point, expounding on how a teacher’s social identities play as much of a role in a classroom environment as anything else. {…} A teacher needs to create experiences with, and not for, students, integrating their experiences and voices into the educational experience itself (Freire 2006). (Tapper 2013)
The artefact has gone through several iterations, I began by designing a workshop where, in pairs, students take each other’s portraits and then have a conversation where they share their background, they are then asked to fill in questions about each other’s social identities based on that interaction. After receiving feedback from Danielle, I reworked it so that students fill in the questions themselves and I added more general ice-breaker questions so that student had more options in what details they choose to reveal. I added a final element where the students talk about the importance of representation in relation to choosing a course rep based on the intersectional identities present in the group.
I then ran the idea by a group of first year students whose feedback has led to the progression of the artefact into an expanded brief. The three students that I spoke with self-identify as:
Student A – female, black, British, gay
Student B – male, Chinese-born, now living in Canada
Student C – male, black, American
We talked about whether first year students in Block 1 would feel comfortable about sharing personal details with a group of peers that there were still getting to know.
Student C: “I feel it will equally make some people feel comfortable and equally make other people feel uncomfortable to start talking about themselves to that extent to a group of new people, but I feel like it could also be a solid possibility for them to make friends and kind of start to feel more like they know each other.”
They were also keen to see the impact of sharing personal information being fed into tutors sharing visual and theoretical references that linked to their identities.
Student A: “If they know it’s for a reason, if they know they are going to get certain support that might help (them share personal details).”
They all talked enthusiastically about the ice-breaker sessions they’d taken part in during the Intro To unit and how they would like to have done more of them.
They then talked about how showing their own work in relation to questions of identity would not only feel more comfortable but would connect the conversation to their practice.
Student B: “I think the workshop should be a long-term workshop and shouldn’t just be about portrait, I think using their own pictures that students have taken through their lifetime … People sharing their pictures that they took and explaining to all the other students you know, find the connection … People just sharing their work and sharing their life, I think it’s more comfortable, for me personally.”
From this discussion I’ve expanded the scope of the artefact to include:
- Initial conversations exploring social identity will be done using Mentimeter. Students will share their positionality around race, gender, sexuality and disability in Word Clouds. The cohort can then see the different identities that sit within their cohort whilst remaining anonymous. This will take place during Intro To.
- Ice breaker and community building exercises will take place throughout the Intro To unit.
- Over a series of scaffolded sessions with accompanying briefs students will be invited to make personal work as a route into exploring and sharing their identities.
- The discussion about Course Reps will come at the end of these sessions.
- The final output will be a student-led exhibition
Conclusion
Talking to my first-year students about these issues revealed some important learnings around their understanding of representation and identity. Students of colour seek each other out and when seminar groups are made they want to be put together. They want to represent themselves through their work and be given opportunities to explore their identity within the curriculum. They need to be given visual references that reflect their diverse identities, and they want help early on in Block 1 in forming communities and getting to know each other.
For me personally, this unit has given me access to theories ranging from Critical Race Theory, Whiteliness and Social Justice Education with which to understand my positionality and the struggles that students of colour and students with disabilities face. My intrinsic drive towards creating an inclusive classroom now has a framework based on key theoretical texts. I believe that active interventions need to be worked into the curriculum to affect change.
On a less positive note, I’ve been shocked by the white fragility that has been displayed by some colleagues who have felt challenged by this unit. This, along with case studies shared in seminar pre-tasks, has been a wake-up call to me to not assume that we are all on the same page, fighting the same fight.
Bibliography
Finnigan, T, Richards, A. (2016) ‘Retention and attainment in the disciplines: Art and Design’. [Online] Available at: https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets.creode.advancehe-document-manager/documents/hea/private/ug_retention_and_attainment_in_art_and_design2_1568037344.pdf [Accessed June 2022]
Eddo-Lodge, R. (2017) Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race. Bloomsbury Publishing
Suka-Bill, Z and Clay, S. (Undated), AEM Toolbox, University of the Arts London. Available at: https://www.arts.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0020/201935/Teaching-for-Retention-PDF-489KB.pdf (Accessed March 2022)
Freire, P. (1972), Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York, Herder and Herder
Burke, P, McManus J. (2011) Art for a few: exclusions and misrecognitions in higher education admissions practices, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 32:5, 699-712, DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2011.620753
Richards, A, Finnigan, T (2015) Embedding equality and diversity in the curriculum: an art and design practitioner’s guide [Online] Available at: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/embedding-equality-and-diversity-curriculum-discipline-specific-guides [Accessed July 2022]
Tapper, A (2013) A Pedagogy of Social Justice Education: Social Identity Theory, Intersectionality, and Empowerment. [Online] Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264611824_A_Pedagogy_of_Social_Justice_Education_Social_Identity_Theory_Intersectionality_and_Empowerment [Accessed on: 16/07/22]
Tate, S (2018) Whiteliness and institutional racism: Hiding behind (un)conscious bias. [Online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lur3hjEHCsE [Accessed on: 12/07/22]
University of the Arts London – Teaching for retention. [Online] Available at: https://www.arts.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0024/144474/190206_EDI-Report-2018.pdf [Accessed on 20/07/22]
University of the Arts London (2021) Student Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Report. [Online] Available at: https://www.arts.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0014/306014/Student-Equality-Diversity-and-Inclusion-Report-2021-310121.pdf [Accessed on 20/07/22]