Going beyond ‘practice mirroring’ during a collective digitisation

Description

Over Lockdown the Higher Education sector was forced to instantly move online. In this session I will explore the hybridity of this moment for the University of the Arts London. This will not be specifically from a technological perspective but, rather, the hybridity which arose in ‘practice mirroring’ a predominantly face-to-face culture into online spaces. We became digitised collectives, but tensions of cultural hybridity arose as we attempted to wrestle digital culture into the shape of an art school.

I will outline my position in a video so that much of the session can be given over to discussion.

Takeaway

My hope is that I can facilitate a useful discussion as to how we might approach a highly blended future for teaching and learning. If this goes well then those involved should be able to take some thinking back to their home institutions as to how they might design curriculum which is hybrid both in mode and in context.

Abstract

One could argue that during Lockdown our working lives are the least hybrid they have been for years because almost everything must be undertaken only online. For the University of the Arts London (UAL), as with most other organisations, this was a huge shift. Nevertheless, we, and most of the rest of the Higher Education sector manged this rapid change of context and, to a greater or lesser extent, have perpetuated the institution with no shared physical space at all.

Drawing from examples arising at UAL I will argue that the hybridity many of us have been experiencing in our teaching is generated from attempting to copy-and-paste ‘face-to-face’ practices into digital spaces. This produces many tensions and false expectations as the networked culture of the Web tussles with the more hierarchical nature of in-college based curriculum. Instead of shifting our practices in the move online, we often attempted to replicate them and generated a hybridity of experience akin to expats synthesizing their homeland culture within an alien land.

I must emphasise though that this is not a negative critique of how we handled the abrupt move into online spaces as there was simply no time to adapt the underlying modes we work in. Perpetuating our teaching online in a time of crisis was impressive (and occasionally heroic), especially where disciplines are built on a fundamental materiality. My aim in this session is to explore this form of hybridity with view to developing sustainable practices that take the best from both networked and hierarchical modes of teaching, learning and creativity.