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.
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:
I used the pedagogical approach object-based learning to develop and deliver my microteaching session. For that purpose, it has been very useful to read Dr. Kirsten Hardie’s case studies, as they helped me to understand all the approaches and benefits of object-based learning. I wish I had known about object-based learning before!
At the beginning of the session I was kind of nervous by being observed and analysed, however, the “objects” helped me to alleviate this feeling together with my colleagues genuine interest in the activity.
For this microteaching session, my aim was to create a student-centered session, where the object is the catalyst of learning together with my guided questions. I wanted to encourage the students to learn by doing.
The learning outcome was for my colleagues to learn about the Fashion Pyramid, a framework commonly applied in any Fashion Buying Business which will offer knowledge of the principles of fashion buying and merchandising.
I brought to the session three jumpers from Zara that could represent each tier of the Fashion Pyramid.
I started the session by showing the three products and allowing them to work in pairs to observe, analyse and touch them for 10 minutes.
They had to individually reflect in different aspects: material, trimmings, details, colour, size range, price, made in, wearing occasion, store display and connection between them.
My aim was to guide them to get the desirable outcome and afterwards, connect it with the Learning Objectives of the session.
Whilst they were discussing their observations, I took note of key words for the exercise that they were mentioning.
Following this exercise, we discussed these key words.
I connected the outcome with the theory of the Fashion Pyramid supported by few slides.
The feedback given by my colleagues was very insightful and reinforced areas of strength:
They believed the session was delivered with passion and confidence.
They felt the atmosphere was inclusive, eye contact between us was maintained and they appreciated me calling them by their names.
They felt engaged and they learnt something new.
At the same time, I had some valuable comments about areas of improvement:
I can be quite intense at times and maybe some students could feel overwhelmed.
If there is a “key question” I want them to consider, it would be better to write it down and show it in a slide, so it’s clear and avoids confusion or misunderstanding.
It was suggested that it would be beneficial to finalise the session with some reflections about the learning experience.
Personally, I also believe I could have kept on the screen a brief glossary of the areas I told them to focus on. Not everybody was clear about the meaning of, for example, size range or store display.
I also want to consider my approach to the introduction to the session, including Learning Outcomes and Context.
Going forward
With respect to the feedback about possibly overwhelming my students by being intense during my lectures. I will seek to make the content more easily understood and allow enough time for them to digest the new concepts and ideas.
The other suggestions are easier to implement. Indeed, I’ve already taken action and I’ve clarified some written concepts within my slides and I’ve invited my students to share their learnings/reflections/questions at the end of the session. Nevertheless, I believe I could improve the teaching experience by creating an even more interactive session. In this respect, the students could identify and write by themselves their final outcomes and afterwards compare them with the theory.
The overall experience has been very positive, and it was also good to observe my colleagues’ perspective to Object Base Learning, all of them valid and diverse as Dr. Kirsten Hardie’s three different case studies.
To conclude, I believe the Object Base Learning approach creates a more dynamic and meaningful learning experience which hopefully helps the students to increase their knowledge and research skills.
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.
