CELT | Good Practice Exchange
Transcript for Testing the Field:Transdisciplinary Learning in an Unfamiliar Environment
Annie Carpenter: I'm Annie Carpenter, I've been an associate lecturer, mainly on the Art and Design Foundation Diploma and I've been doing that and other bits of associate lecturing work for the last five years. So, for Testing the Field I put in an application for the CELT Scholarship of Learning and Teaching. Basically, the idea was again, bringing science students and art students together so that they're able to be sort of exposed to each other’s curiosities. It was essentially a field trip. We went off into the woods and we stayed for two nights at MiddlewoodTrust which is this sort of ecological study centre which does permaculture and living off-grid. So we got the students together and then we ran a series of inter-disciplinary workshops.
Rachel Kelly: Sam went straight off on doing his poetry.
Dr.Sam Illingworth: Poetry for me, the most amazing thing about poetry is trying to capture a moment and tonight particularly we're going to write some haiku. Haiku is a form of Japanese poetry that is all about capturing a moment, like a photograph with words.
AC: So we wrote a collaborative poem. He led us through the process of, each person wrote a few words and they got combined and it got bigger and bigger and bigger until we had one big collaborative poem.
SI: ... poetry and science started at the same place and hopefully when things come together on a higher level they can join together as friends....
AC: I invited Antony Hall who is an artist based in Manchester. He worked with us on the Spectrum project as well. He had us doing really fun stuff, both staff and students completely together.
Antony Hall: There was this experiment called the ganzfeld experiment which I was really in to which is the idea of experiencing a total field of... a total visual field with no other visual input other than pure light.
AC: A lot of it was to do with altering our senses so we made devices to change our sight.
Student: There are a lot of purples, and they're kind of like blotching out as if there's ink being spilled on the paper and it's sort of like when you look in a microscope and you see them squiggly bits.
AC: There were students with ping-pong balls over their eyes to experience the light...
RK: …and then the bat reader: so you put the earphones on and then you can hear bat sonic sounds.
Student: I can hear the plants speaking to me.
AC: But then also we were collecting... so you can use magnets to collect micrometeorites so we were collecting micrometeorites from the water and also tardigrades which are little bacteria…
RK: The moss? Yeah you squeeze out these bacteria that live in the moss
AC: Yeah so I guess we sort of took the tools from science but explored them quite artistically so just explored them for the sake of playing.
RK: But the students just really engaged and just took it so seriously, the opportunity, and we did too. It was just a really unique experience. I do think we could have done the same with different groups of students and it would have just been as valuable because it was about learning and discovery. We were able to focus it on the science because of the science because o the environment but I do think there was something special about undergraduate students.
AC: The idea I guess is that it was almost like a bit of a test for potential future collaborations amongst whatever faculties so it’d be interesting to find out, it would be nice to try it.
Ikebana: Encouraging Students to Model Learning Experiences
RK: I'm Rachel Kelly, I'm a 0.5 senior lecturer on the Textiles in Practice programme in the School of Art, department of design and I’ve worked here for about 5 years. My idea was basically to find a way to get students to be able to visualise, to make images of their learning of their projects. I developed a workshop where students would use the Japanese art of Ikebana flower arranging, to create models of their projects.
... so the subject is the biggest part of the arrangement...
So what I would do is give them branches, flowers, leaves and ask them to put them in a position to show how they were working together. What happened was when they started placing the branches and the flowers and the leaves as representations of them and parts of the project they just started talking more openly. So that workshop was the one that I brought to Middlewood but the main opportunity was that it was in this amazing landscape and that the students could go and collect and the fact that they didn't know each other at all this was a really good opportunity to test Ikebana.
Annie emailed at almost the right time. I'd actually had the prototype workshop ready and she said 'oh we’re doing this residency, I'm just wondering if you'd like to come and do a workshop to test your idea'.
AC: Yeah, it was really nice way of gathering their thoughts about the project because it created this dialogue between them and us and we got lots of nice sort of data from that workshop.