Month: February 2023

Introductory presentations and first PgCert online seminar

I felt a bit nervous about this first workshop. I thought that as a librarian I may not (and most probably do not) have as many teaching hours as other students on the course. It is because teaching is only a part (however I think that it has become much more pronounced in recent years) of my job. At the same time, I run several events, workshops, online and in person information skills sessions and library induction every year. I also support students with their research daily, whenever they come to the library and ask questions or in one to one tutorials. Thinking about this has helped me to stay positive and deliver my presentation with relative ease. I kept it quite short concentrating on my main interests within librarianship and teaching. 

Kasia-Session-1-presentation

I left the session very inspired by the other participants’ presentations that were followed by questions and discussions. I found sharing our experiences of teaching and our professional identities thought provoking. It has been great to meet everyone and hear about our roles within UAL and where our focus for this course lies. I found that despite coming from different occupations, we have a lot of shared interests. It is amazing how much we could learn from each other during this first (and short) workshop. I cannot wait for our in-person sessions.  

Key words and themes that stuck with me: object-based learning, learning through play, not knowing in creativity, empathy, pedagogy, trust, online vs face to face, overwhelming, practice as research.  

This coming week I plan to come back to some basic theory of pedagogy and watch a video that fellow student had shared in the workshop.  

Starting my journey on the PgCert Academic Practice

Preparing for the first online seminar

Creator: Ley, Macey, book artist.

I read two articles on object-based learning (OBL) using special collections. It was inspired by my interest in special collections librarianship and experience I have in running zine and artists books sessions from when I worked at LCC Library. I am based at WCA Library now and thought that looking into OBL would give me an opportunity to get to know our special collections here, especially that it has just become available after being for months and months in the storage, while the library was undergoing a major renovation. Our special collection at Wimbledon is quite small in comparison to the other bigger UAL libraries’ collections and I am a bit concerned about how I can use it for my research on the PgCert. However, I would like to prepare at least one OBL session for my students while on the course using the WCA special collections. Not committing to anything yet but would like to explore the collection to see where it will take me.  

Articles that I read for the workshop have provided me with some ideas on the session itself – how I could design the questions to make the session more inclusive and which key words I can use to provoke students’ engagement and response. I was especially drawn to what Lelkes wrote on formulating the questions that can make the OBL relevant to the participants’ lived experience. We can increase the session’s meaningfulness to students and their socio-cultural awareness by considering “what the objects says about gender expression, heteronormativity, racism, ableism, social class, faith, and LGBTQIA+ inclusion, homophobia, biphobia and transphobia.” (Lelkes, p. 80) 

Articles I read on OBL for the first week workshop:

Lelkes, J. (2019) ‘How inclusive is object-based learning?’, Spark, 4(1), pp. 76-82. Available at: https://sparkjournal.arts.ac.uk/index.php/spark/article/view/110/196 (Accessed: 12 January 2023). 

Winston-Silk, J. (2019) ‘Deaccessioning and reimagining: a novel approach to object-based learning’, Spark, 4(1), pp. 51-57. Available at:  https://sparkjournal.arts.ac.uk/index.php/spark/article/view/130/211 (Accessed: 12 January 2023).