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Tag: Participation

UUK Access, Participation and Student Success Conference 2022

Published 2nd November 2022

I was honoured to be invited to attend the UUK’s Access, Participation and Student Success Conference 2022 by colleagues at Studiosity, to present a case study on why and how we have implemented Studiosity at Sunderland over the past year. This was a variation of my presentation for InstructureCon, with the technical slides de-emphasised and new sections added about how the Studiosity project ties in with our wider personal academic tutoring project and the University’s Student Success Plan 2025. My presentation was well-attended and I got some good questions and feedback, and as an attendee at the conference I got a lot out of the other sessions I was able to attend.

Kaushika Patel, Deputy PVC Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at De Montfort University, presented on closing ethnicity awarding gaps, something which is an issue for us at our London Campus in particular which has a much more diverse student intake. Kaushika’s talk was about what progress has been made since the 2019 UUK and NUS ‘Closing the Gap‘ (PDF, 2Mb) report. My first photo above shows that there has been some progress, with the overall gap decreasing from 13.2% to 8.8%, but there is also a particular issue with 1st class awards, where the attainment gap between BAME and white students is 9.6%. Kaushika made some practical suggestions about what we can do going forwards, including signing up for the Race Equality Charter. I’ve picked that one out as I was disappointed to find that Sunderland was not a member, though I’ve spoken with our EDI lead and been assured it is on the agenda of our BAME staff group.

I also got a lot out of Nathalie Podder’s passionate talk about how the cost of living crisis is affecting students. Nathalie is the Deputy President (Welfare) at Imperial College Union and her presentation was based on consultations with students at Imperial College London. My second two photos show their ‘Findings’ and ‘Government Recommendations’ slides. Among the findings are that 95% of students are concerned about the cost of living crisis, 58% are worried about their ability to pay rent, and 20% about being able to pay utility bills. Their recommendations for the government included starting a new hardship scheme for students, reinstating maintenance grants, raising NHS bursaries and regulating landlords who own student properties.

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ArtWorks Scotland Forum for Practice Development

Published 6th March 2017

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Following on from the Interface Symposium held here at Sunderland last September, I was asked to attend the ArtWorks Scotland Forum for Practice Development at the National Theatre of Scotland to raise awareness of the pending launch of our MOOC, by networking and delivering a session on the MOOC, showing the development that has been made to date.

With the materials still being built out on the MOOC platform itself, Canvas Network, I ran my demonstration from the SunSpace development site again, after updating it with some of the latest materials, and devising an interactive activity for the attendees of the forum. Lacking time and resources to have people complete an activity within the sample MOOC itself, I embedded an automatically updating word cloud using Tagul and then, during the networking lunch before my session, I interviewed all of the participants asking them to define what participatory arts means to them in three words – this mimicked the assessment we ran at the Interface Symposium. As they gave me their answers I was inputting them into Tagul on my tablet, then during my demonstration, when I came to this page the word cloud was complete with their responses which you can see in the image above. I’m pleased to be able to note that this all went without a hitch, and there was a lot of interest in the MOOC in terms of both providing content (which was one of the aims of attending the forum), and in participating when it goes live later this year.

The rest of the forum was, for me, an opportunity to learn more about the field of participatory arts which, as someone made a point of in their presentation, is possibly the majority of art produced, in contrast to the perception of art as something produced by talented individuals for the enjoyment or consumption of others. Particularly interesting was Simon Sharkey of the National Theatre of Scotland’s presentation about their involvement with the Gulbenkian Foundation to produce Sharing the Stage and Home Away.

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Interface Symposium: Arts, Participation and Higher Education

Published 7th September 2016

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Attended a symposium for people working in participatory arts, organised by the university with attendees from ArtWorks-U, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, ArtWorks Alliance and many independent artists. It was an enlightening day and I met lots of interesting people, with discussions around challenges facing the arts and how participatory practice can interface with university research, and presentations on current good practice and reflections on the Asunder Project.

However, the main reason for my attendance was that I was facilitating one of the afternoon sessions: ‘New approaches to teaching resources’, a live demonstration of some of the content which is being developed in collaboration between the department and WaLTS for the ArtWorks MOOC. The MOOC platform will not be ready for some time yet, so what was demonstrated was a sample unit which I build out on SunSpace. This included a number of videos produced ourselves, some video and written case studies for discussion, a main presentation which I converted to Storyline, a couple of Google forms to get gather participant’s experience and reflections on the mini MOOC and a short sample assignment asking people to give their definition of participatory arts.

After some issues getting people logged on with the guest accounts, it went pretty smoothly. I deliberately kept the structure simple and the use of tools to a minimum to eliminate the need to give any kind of training on how to use SunSpace, and feedback was generally positive and useful.

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