More understanding of "the crit"

A small 'aha' moment about what is happening during "the crit" I described earlier - two things:

• The teacher(s) assess the student's work, tell them what is good about it and where it can be improved. (That bit is obvious!)
• The student experiences this process for their own work and sees it happening to other students. In this way they learn about how to critique generally; the sorts of criteria their work is judged on, things which tend to be praised, things which tend to be frowned upon, different ways of solving different problems. (That was my 'aha' moment!)

In this way they both learn how to improve their current work and how to critically evaluate their future work. Individual feedback wouldn't be as effective, being part of a group is vital, but students don't seem to understand group work. There is a constant complaint from Lecturers that students do not turn up to organised teaching sessions, but are constantly clamoring for individual attention.

Again, during the H&S training session I observed, the small group of students who attended got to see a range of common problems and solutions to them which would have been much more limited if they had been alone. They clearly did not understand this and had a tendency to wander off or be looking elsewhere whilst the others had their go.

I wonder if simply making this explicit to the students would make a difference, or if something more sophisticated with group work and peer support needs to be done?

Dissecting a chicken

I have vivid memories of a first aid training video which I watched around 15 years ago. Why? Well, interspersed between the clips about how to check someone's pulse, put them in the recovery position, and so on were clips of a chef using a large meat cleaver to joint a chicken. Each time we returned to the kitchen he was using the tool calmly and skillfully, but this was a video about first aid and the suspense was dreadful ... and yes, eventually the inevitable happened!

This was brought back to me because I spent the day watching and thinking about basic Heath & Safety training. In my current research at Sheffield Hallam University I am looking at how basic skills are taught in the Design Studios and how web 2.0 technologies could be used to support independent learning. H&S training is so important, done properly it will help prevent students hurting themselves, damaging costly machinery, and ruining their creative work, but mention it and people glaze over.

The three students who did turn up this morning I think had a really engaging and useful session. The technicians showed them so many little handy hints over and above the statutory safety stuff and they gained really valuable experience using the equipment. However, it was not efficient use of staff time and the other students won't be allowed to use the workshops until they too have had their training.

This feels like a good area to tackle in my research (there's funding for it!) and I am now thinking about how I could make it appear more relevant and interesting. I'm very squeamish so I don't think I'll be shooting it as a horror movie, but it is food for thought!

Craft learning and "the crit"

"The crit" is central to traditional design education and I sat in on one this week as part of my current research at Sheffield Hallam University. It brought back memories of doing it myself, it is a fairly scary experience, and it made me think about the Japanese craftsmen's apprenticeship experiences described in Edo craftsmen : master artisans of old Tokyo.

Firstly let me describe "the crit" for the uninitiated; it's a little like X Factor or Britain's Got Talent, but the audience are also putting on the show, they are students each showing their latest work. One by one they go to the front of the room and show images of their work on PowerPoint and hand around things they have made. The 'judges' are a group of lecturers who sit around a table making notes, discussing, asking the students questions and offering advice.

It is only three weeks until the students hand in their final projects and they need help knowing what to do to get it finished satisfactorily. Quite a few haven't made good use of the Easter holidays and are going to have a busy few weeks. The atmosphere is a bit tense, the lecturers at times have to be quite blunt to the students about their work, but whilst they are tough, they are also very fair and very supportive. There feels to be a close bond between the lecturers and students. At the end of the session another student drops into the room to give a little box to one of the lecturers; it contains a cup-cake and pinned to the top is a handwritten thank-you note!

Whilst the students go through this many times during their three years at University, the old craftsmen in Toyko had often started at a very young age and continued under the critical eye of their master for many years. For some it was clearly a positive experience, but others spoke with perplexing pride of the fact that their masters never praised their work and they were reluctant to praise their own work themselves. I can't decide if it is false modesty or a genuine feeling that they ll never be as good as their masters. Either way, it doesn't strike me as healthy.

This somehow joins up with my other major project with Open University where I have been part of the team writing a new course in Design Thinking which is entirely delivered online and all the students study it remotely. I am tutoring one of the first batches of students through the course and also moderator on the student forum so party to a wide range of online interactions. In this situation it seems to be quite difficult to "crit" the students and even getting them to do critical analysis of their own work is not easy. This too is not healthy!

I feel that for online / distance learning to be successful there needs to be a way of getting the right sort of "crit" into the arena. It needs to fall into the 'tough but fair' category, which partly comes from the attitude of the teachers (those I observed clearly worked well together as a group), and partly from their relationship with the students. Fostering all this online is very different to dealing with face-to-face relationships and so much of it falls outside the scope of the sorts of learning resources I have been designing, however it is clearly vital to their success. Hmmmm ...

via my kesurokai blog

The peapod

I recently had a meeting with a small group of lecturers from some of our different design degree courses to discuss possible applications for my research to help with their teaching. Jane from our fashion design course highlighted the problem of many students lacking very basic sewing skills when they start. They struggle to undertake what should be simple making projects and there is limited time within the current curriculum for this level of teaching. John from our furniture design course said they had just the same problem.

As the discussion progressed, Jeff from metalwork & jewellery came up with "the peapod" as an analogy:


So, we have this idea that students need a repertoire of basic skills, that's the pod. We need to identify a set of key skills to teach them as a basis (the peas) and these will provide the students with a foundation from which they themselves can expand and fill out their repertoire.

It sounds like potentially a good application for a multimedia learning resource and I think it will fit in well with my next research proposal. I also very much liked Jeff's concept of "peer leakage" and will have to work that one in somewhere too!

Vacuum casting

The folding knives research project demonstrated that well motivated independent learners working in physical isolation but supported by an online community could acquire complex new skills and use them in creative ways. This project applied our existing methods of eliciting and representing skills to a process used by undergraduate design students in University workshops and resulted in the production of an online resource and a set of proposals for how such resources could be developed in a more widespread manner.

In the creative disciplines, where learning is often based on practical projects, the craft skills of each discipline are both a crucial prerequisite for successful learning, and a learning problem in themselves. This tends to create a complex situation in which teachers and technicians are supporting both skills learning and intellectual development at the same time. While this can be very productive, pressures on resources can lead to concentration on skills at the expense of advanced thinking.

The vacuum casting process was chosen as a pilot project to test the feasibility of producing multimedia learning resources to enable students to work more independently in the workshops. A series of workshop sessions were arranged to enable a technician with expertise in the process to teach an expert learner, one of the design lecturers.

These were observed and video recorded by myself working in collaboration with the expert learner to generate prototype learning materials. These were developed and tested by two further learners who had no prior knowledge of the process and ultimately made into an online resource which would allow students to preview materials supported by selected video then print out worksheets for use in the workshop.

The online resource developed during this research is available here

This research was carried out with Prof Chris Rust and funded by Shefield Hallam University.

Folding knives

This research was carried out in association with Prof Chris Rust at Sheffield Hallam University and was funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council.

This project focused on the skills of traditional folding knife makers in Sheffield, once a significant part of the cities famous metalworking industries but now declined to just a few master craftsmen. In our research we undertook case studies with two of these craftsmen, a blade grinder and a folding knife maker, to demonstrate the tacit nature of such craft skill and reveal the methods we used for elicitation and interpretation.

Traditional Sheffield folding knives

Contemporary knifemaker and co-resercher Dr Grace Horne acted as an expert learner, working alongside the craftsmen, observed by myself as designer, and then through experimental making and collaboration together prototype learning materials were generated. The materials were tested and developed into an online resource using a small group of learners who come from a new generation of creative metalworkers whose interests lie in adapting traditional skills to new craft practices.

Knives made by Grace Horne

As a result we were able to demonstrate that the principles for craft transmission developed in previous research could be applied to a specific example of craft knowledge with useful results for the learners. We also developed a more robust methodology for the elicitation and design development methods needed for this form of design practice.

Knives made by a learner using the online resource

Multimedia outputs
FoldingKnives: a public version of the learning materials developed during the project.
TransmittingCraft: online documentation of the project; its background, the work undertaken and outcomes, including video and images from the research.
YouTube channel hosting video clips used during the research.

In this video Russell White makes a folding knife at Taylor’s Eye Witness, one of the last Sheffield manufacturers to still make folding knives.