Contextual Background
In my role as the CSM Museum & Study Collection’s Curriculum Development Curator, it is both an opportunity and challenge to teach object-based learning workshops for such a broad range of students of varying ages and disciplinary backgrounds. In the first half of my year-long maternity cover contract, I have already taught foundation, undergraduate and postgraduate students across the majority of courses at CSM and other UAL colleges. As the primary educator in the team working 4 days a week, coupled with the increasing appetite for object-based learning, this means I have very limited time to develop and satisfy a lot of learning outcomes.
Evaluation
Most of the time, course leaders approach me to deliver 1 hour object-based learning workshops with a specific learning outcome in mind. When planning these workshops, I usually curate my object selection according to the brief and choose the most appropriate methodology to achieve the learning outcomes (Chatterjee, H. and Hannan, L, 2015), which is usually by Jules Prown or Gillian Rose. In some instances, course leaders want to collaborate with me for the entire duration of a project, such as Foundation’s Heterotopias project and MA Culture, Criticism, and Curation’s archive unit. These requests are much more time-consuming as they have higher stakes and require a greater level of attention to detail and careful planning. Given that the Heterotopias project was my first experience of this request, it was a significant learning curve that required an experimental and reflective planning approach.
To begin with, I had a couple of meetings with the project lead, Gabriel Birch, to understand the brief and intended learning outcomes from my object-based learning workshops. Together, we reflected on the effectiveness of the pilot that ran last year and identified areas of improvement for this iteration. We decided to drop 1 theme (gender) and update the object curation for the remaining 4 themes with new items acquired through the Graduate Award 2023. Overall, this was a successful strategy as it led piques students’ interest and led to them creating diorama models inspired by new objects for the subsequent window display. However, the drawback was that the planning took considerably more time which was sometimes stressful to manage with my other teaching and curatorial commitments.
Moving forwards
Since being introduced to constructive alignment theory by my PgCert tutor, Dr Kwame Baah, and after doing further reading on the subject (Biggs and Tang, 2011), I would like to use the upcoming MA CCC archive unit as an opportunity to formally implement this approach in the planning and delivery of my teaching. This will require me to read the unit brief carefully and holistically plan each session to ensure that my teaching aligns with the unit’s learning outcomes and assessment methods. For example, as my group will focus on the museum’s jewellery collection and have been allocated the 3D scanning digital outcome, I ran my object shortlist past my senior colleague, Judy Willcocks, to ensure the pieces are suitable for 3D scanning. Willcocks approved most of the objects, but flagged a couple that were too fragile or reflective to achieve the desired outcome. Moreover, like with the Heterotopias project, I created a comprehensive object fact sheet document for my students to facilitate their independent research which will later be integrated to produce the group curatorial intervention.
References
Biggs, J. and Tang, C. (2011) Teaching for Quality Learning at University. 4th edition. Maidenhead: Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press. [e-book in library]
Chatterjee, H. and Hannan, L. (2015), Engaging the Senses: Object-based Learning in Higher Education, London: Routledge.
Paris, S. G. (2002), Perspectives on Object-Centred Learning in Museums, New York: Routledge.