Category Archives: 4posts

Compassionate Assessment

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Since I listened to Neil Currant, researcher and educator, talking about his Compassionate Assessment Project, this idea has resonated with me for the past few weeks.

Compassionate Assessment is not just kindness, it is not about lowering the standards or making things easy. It is about being rigorous, being challenging but doing in a way that reduces suffering, trauma and emotional difficulties.

The question about “Why we assess?” is raised two main reasons arise:

  • For Credit/To Award: Assessment of learning, Quality Assurance, Reliability, Validity, Standards
  • Learning: Assessment for learning, Assessment as learning, feedforward, formative assessment

From my perspective, I also see the parallel with the professional world, where the students will be future professionals and will be assessed on a regular and frequent schedule. As educators we assess the Learning Outcomes and we can see the correlation with industry KPI, and how the grading correlates to the level of KPI achievement. Grading, of course, favours a competitive culture rather than a collaborative one. 

Neil Currant also highlights the importance of what the student learns vs. the race to get the best grade. It appears the previous Pass & Fail approach favoured enjoyment of the learning journey and reduces the pressure/tension associated with the assessment practice and the final grade. 

From my perspective, it is beneficial for the students to get familiar with competitiveness and results achievement as this is the real world of the fashion industry. Even in designer roles they will take a share of responsibility for the sales results too. However, I believe we should assess in a holistic and compassionate manner to stimulate the learning process and not only the final outcome.

Diversity & Inclusion

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When I joined the LCF as an HPL I had to undertake the training in Equality, Diversity and Inclusion.

I believe these are fundamental and relevant topics which I’ve always tried my best to embrace, and to which I can personally relate because I am Spanish and I have lived abroad for few years.

Inclusion comes from many sources including culture, ethnicity, gender, and different learning abilities. My aim is to feel everyone welcome, a part of the group and in a safe space for sharing their thoughts and doubts. During my lectures, seminars and tutorials I seek to create an inclusive space where all the voices are heard.

My approach has had a number of elements:

  • Group Sharing: Students introducing themselves verbally to the group when we meet for the first time, including the reasons behind their academic choice and their future goals. I realise not everyone is comfortable in introducing themselves verbally and I have given them the option of writing their introduction in Padlet. 
  • Learning the names of the students and naming them/asking them directly during the sessions.
  • Knowing where they are coming from. I have had the opportunity of travelling a lot due to my corporate job and can often share stories related with their country of origin.
  • Asking them for examples of their own relevant industry experience. Few of them have had the opportunity of working as design intern and their knowledge of sampling development is very valuable when we cover this topic during the unit.
  • Creating small group activities where each student can participate in role playing.

Thanks to the PG Cert, I also incorporate the following ideas into my practice to increase the student’s inclusion and interaction:

Learning Outcomes & Assessment Criteria in Art and Design

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The article from Allan Davies has helped me to understand better the background behind Learning Outcomes and Assessment criteria. How the learning outcomes and assessment criteria should be related to the student experience. Or opposite, considering a student-centered learning, how the desired student experience should have relevant. LO and an Assessment criteria 

According to Allan Davies, there is consensus on the value of learning outcomes and how they should be articulated. The concern is to avoid ambiguity in the writing and presentation of the learning outcomes for art and design. 

Allan Davies highlights that the Learning Outcomes and Assessment Criteria development was quite different across institutions. Different scenarios can be found, being the best, the one with unambiguous LO, where students understand them and the worst scenario, the one where LO are ambiguous and students don’t understand (something went wrong) or where LO are unambiguous and students also don’t understand.

The author highlights the scenario where LO are unclear, but the students have clarity. As it doesn’t mean there are no other support systems that help students to understand what they have to do to successfully overcome their program of work.

Another area of consideration is how to express LO relevant for the skills that should be developed by art and design students, related with the use of imagination, visualization, intuition, inventiveness, risk-taking, etc. How to capture these concepts in LO form? These are terms that can’t be so easily measured.

If we are too specific with LO, we create a big constraint on the quarry to the students and that is not aligned with creative subjects. For art and design students, finding their own quarry is an essential part of their discovery/creative process. However, they need to know the ‘landscape’ and the ‘boundaries’. It might be that these are better articulated in the form of a discourse than in specific outcome form and more usefully manifested in project briefings, team meetings, etc. as the author mentions.  I believe a holistic assessment is more relevant for art and design students.

There is one paragraph that really resonates with my personal experience as HPL:

 “Unless a teacher has been party to the design and development of a programme, he or she will not necessarily understand how what they are expected to do fits into the whole. Programme design in such a complex landscape is often a negotiation of the language that embraces it. Only the course designers have a real understanding of how things fit together. New or part-time teachers, for instance, have to take the module outlines at face value and make sense of them in terms of their own professional experience. The greater the number of outcomes and the more elaborate the assessment scheme the more likely the whole thing will be sidestepped. Common sense often prevails in these circumstances. “

  When the teacher is not part of the creation of the course/unit brief, it is a task to embrace them and deliver them up to the standard. 

How the brief creation process is as important as the brief itself, as well as the feedback we get on the way. I also believe on the practice of revaluating the brief and update it on the way to deliver the best learning experience.

Pedagogy & Empathy

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Pedagogy is understood as “the method and practice of teaching, especially as an academic subject or theoretical concept”.

Discussing what we understand as pedagogy and which concepts and methods come to our minds, questions are raised about empathy, ludic practices, ipsative teaching, VARK model, digital tools, physical space, experimental learning activities, risk taking stimulation, freedom of expression and so on.

I have been wondering how one would start to teach Empathy. It’s such an important skill for everyone including teachers and students.

I got greater clarity after a discussion with my colleagues from the PG Cert. First of all, can empathy be taught? I am not sure about that as from my perspective empathy is an inner value. Although, in any case, empathy could be encouraged with listening, respect and allowing to each of us to explain our story, where are we coming from and our background. Active listening is key as well as the creation of a safe space where everyone feels comfortable and can share their thoughts freely. Physical space is something I had never considered before James Carazzo’s session, but after reflecting on it, I believe is an essential part of creating an environment of trust.  I am also curious how we can extrapolate this concept to on-line teaching where the physical space is substituted by a cold screen. How can empathy be delivered in a digital world? 

In addition, other thoughts come to my mind. Is the size of the students group relevant when we want to encourage values like empathy? From my experience, it is more challenging to have meaningful conversations across all the students when the group is larger than 25-30 people.