As part of the Digital Learning season, I met online with Jonathan Kearney in celebration of his Outstanding Teaching Award this year again. We talked about the course he runs at CSM and what makes it so successful.
Can you explain your course?
In its current form, it is a Masters of Fine Art delivered fully online at CSM. It started in 2004 at Camberwell with both face to face and online provisions, and it was migrated to CSM, to be delivered fully online. It is a 2 years part-time fine art course with cohorts of about 20 to 25 students per year. The students spread right across the world but also based in London due to care or work commitments.
What do your students particularly like about the course?
The last few times I received the students awards I get to see what the students write as well, which is slightly embarrassing to read because it is not the kind of thing you normally see. Students are very positive about their experience. I think it is a combination of the sense of community we build together, the sense of openness, and the sense of challenge but support at the same time. It is about them developing as people, and in that process they develop as artists as well.
We focus on process, not the finished work. We don’t actually assess the end of year shows for example. By focusing on the process you end up with some really good work and kind of give a sense of freedom and students seem to really appreciate that there there is a space for them develop and get a better understanding not just of the work they are making, but who they are when they are making it.
We make a big deal of reflective learning on the course. It is a fundamental process. There is nothing particularly clever about what we do. It is very simple and many other courses do this as well, but it is very significant when you are looking at yourself and recognising what it is that you’re doing. Students seem to really thrive on that and find it very enjoyable.
It gets quite embarrassing because you generally get a lot of comments about how this course has changed their life, really quite deep and significant, powerful things.
How do you create the sense of belonging?
For me its not about technique. Parker Palmer talks about ‘teaching from your undivided self’. It is teaching from who you are. You need to bring honesty, integrity and authenticity in your teaching. When one think about online teaching and learning, it usually evokes the sense of being disconnected, a disembodied experience. I disagree in so far as one can have a very powerful and embodied connection to an online experience. Both physical and online spaces have their strength and weaknesses, and it just a question of being aware of that.
Therefore one of thing you focus on regardless of having a group of people in a room or a group of people online it is really important to create an atmosphere very early on very quickly, where people recognise that they advice a contribution to make, that the richness of the experience is dependent on everybody making a contribution. Within the first few minutes of the first session of the first year I make sure that we are broken down into small groups of twos and threes as fast as possible because it brakes the dynamic of the lecture and focuses of the presence of each individual, where all of us together make this community, and the more we give into that the more we gain. (The gift, Lewis Hyde)
The way we organise the sessions is based on that.
One of the fundamental principle on the course is that ‘we will try very hard never to tell you what to do, but instead we will ask you questions, so that you can hear your own wisdom better’. If someone grasp this for themselves they then gain an understanding that will carry through for the rest of them life.
What are the main challenges of the course?
I am currently doing a PhD in Education and Arts at the moment, reflecting on what I’ve been doing as well as trying to understand what’s happening in terms of the educational space and how art making happens in that space and what happens in terms of art as education and art in education.
Although I have been teaching for 18 year I sometimes feel feel it is hardly anything. If you want to see the students grow, it appears that connecting to what is the motivation that will trigger things for them seems to be very, very important. The writer Phil Race suggests an alternative to Kolb’s learning cycles, taking the metaphor of a stone dropped in a pond that creates ripples, those ripples being the different learning spaces such as reflection, feedback and so on. And the trigger that makes the stone drop is the student motivation. You can have the best course structure and infrastructure but if the student lacks this motivation, the stone doesn’t drop and nothing exists. It can be quite a challenge to help someone find their motivation.
Another big challenge is the cost of education. To do a masters course is ridiculously expensive and I am not quite sure why. Just a couple fo weeks ago I interviewed a prospective student from the Philippines who has really interesting way of interrogating his practice. Their participation in the course would be very rich at all levels, but we have yet to find a way to sponsorship for them. We could do so much more in terms of decolonisation and being more inclusive.
Lastly, there are expectations to use the tools that the university offers. I use a range of different tools for various reasons because I have enough freedom to do that. I think the idea of locking things down into very tight particular ways is great in the majority circumstances, but I think there needs to be room for more flexibility around the edges of that where we can experiment more with potential tools and fundamentally raise questions. For example, if we are looking from an environmental point of view, Microsoft is a lot worse than many of the other companies out there. They’re offering the tools that we are using at UAL but they are part of the major oil lobby group in America, which are fighting against carbon taxes in America, and their servers and services still use coal to be powered. I am not saying that Zoom is massively better, but most research show it is significantly better. The best option would be to run our own servers actually, we would have a lot more control over that and be able to make decisions for ourselves and what we think is right. I know that there’s no simple answers in in those kind of things. A lot of care and consideration are needed, but I think that is a challenge if we assume that we have to fit one particular model. I am also aware that the way that I do things isn’t necessarily the right for everybody else and it is just my approach as a teacher, but I think that’s a technological challenge as well as a teaching challenge to have the kind of flexibility for other people to express where they’re coming from.
How have you adapted your teaching over the years – taking into account changes in technology and pedagogic approaches?
The course is not a complete open free flow where it’s complete chaos. Very practically we have a 2 hour session every week where we’re all together and that’s absolutely vital. I call it the rhythm. It’s the regular beat. It’s the place where we all meet and everyone knows they feel safe. They know that’s going to be there. They also know that I will e-mail them on a regular basis, and beyond that we can play with all kinds of stuff.
Students have to have a reflective journal. We say it has to be in the form of a blog because it needs to be accessible to staff and fellow students because again, that’s a kind of a generous thing to the community and it is really important that we’re sharing that. In terms of categories and tags blogs are just very, very powerful and it can be really powerful for them.
In terms of discursive space, we have tried lots of difference things and that’s one area where things change a lot year by year. There’s a difference between communication from me as course leader and communication between us as a community of learning. And I think those are different things. It’s interesting how younger students coming in see e-mail as a professional tool. Therefore that can be quite useful so that they see the emails coming from me as something that is worth reading. Each group of students would also be encouraged to set up something for themselves to talk without the presence of course staff, whether it is WhatsApp, Telegram or Signal.
Obviously when we started in 2004 YouTube didn’t exist, but Skype did. So you could do voice and video like this, but really it was one to one would be the absolute best and you needed a pretty decent connection to make that work. You definitely couldn’t do group stuff. So very quickly we got into synchronous type chat and that was really powerful, and we still use it now. So all we literally did some experiments with group video but actually everyone quite like the type chat.
I think we’re in a different place now particularly post pandemic. I think people are a lot more confident with this type of space, and therefore you know it makes more sense and generally better connections.
So chat forum become have have worked quite well. Completely open editable wikis have worked really well in the past, but less so now. We’ve done some experiment with discord. In some ways Teams can be quite effective where channels act as asynchronous chat in that space.
The traditional way of doing online courses was this asynchronous chat forum. That’s how most courses will run, built on the old kind of chain letter correspondence which goes back to the 1700s actually, which is quite interesting in some respect. But what we’ve found is that by having a synchronous moment every week we provided a really powerful, effective and efficient space because a lot of stuff gets dealt with in that moment; stuff gets held off until then because that’s the point where everybody has a voice and can be heard. You know, you’ve got a question, you throw it in there. If you have a problem, you throw it in there and lots of stuff happens in that space. And therefore by introducing that which we did right at the very beginning in 2004, we noticed that was more effective.
So even though we had asynchronous, discursive spaces alongside it. Those 2 hour sessions together became the more powerful and more effective spaces. So never has the asynchronous chat space been as useful as maybe would be expected with an online course.
One of the things I’m currently intrigued by, and I know this can work in Teams and Discord, is the incidental, accidental kind of bumping into somebody while you’re typing away. You’re chatting and you’ll notice someone else is online as well. Those kind of moments are the closest to being in the studio. Someone walks in and you can just have an incidental conversation with somebody. Now there’s a danger there however; One should not be saying that ‘in person’ is the model which works, and therefore we must replicate that in an online space. Let’s see online space as something unique and special for itself, and let’s use the strengths of that, not necessarily just replicate the in person, in real life model. One is not better than the other, they’re both equal.
How do you create a sense of identity in online learning spaces?
It’s something that we are constantly grappling with and trying to define the right ways of doing it. We don’t have anything as formal as a code of conduct.
In terms the group themselves, the natural sense of respect and care for each other is probably due to the size of the group, which I think is significant. Generally within education, there is a push for bigger and bigger courses all the time. But actually I think I make it work at 23 students in first year. I think if you push it too much beyond that then it really starts to struggle to create a group, it’s just a bit too big. So I think the size of a group is actually quite important. It’s not to say you can’t have big courses, but I think a way to manage that would it be to break it down into groups and then those groups stick together right through because it’s that commitment to each other that makes it work and embody their experience. I’m a learner alongside them and I’m enjoying this experience. People remember a bit of what you say but what they really remember is how you make them feel, so we create a space when one feels they are heard and that their contribution is valuable. The size of the group makes it more personal, it’s not anonymous and one does not feel removed or just shouting into the void.
One student said to me the other week that to have 25 of us in a room, you would need a pretty big room to sit in a circle to see everybody’s eyes; that’s one of my principles. I want everybody feel each other presence, and this is the only reason I like Zoom because it’s very fixed. The fixed grid, everyone’s there. It’s not changing all the time. So I can see everybody’s eyes. I can see everybody’s reactions and that’s a powerful thing. This is a great strength that synchronous online space can give us. You’re looking in the eyes of other people, it is not an anonymous space.
In terms of safety and identity in a wide online space, we will talk about what it means to leave a digital footprint, which happens whether you like it or not. It’s not a case of not avoiding it, it’s a case of being aware of what that footprint is, noticing that and then be able to shape and curate your learning, your experience and so on. One of the reasons why I argue for the blog as reflected journal beyond just how it can connect things together, is what people are doing in that space as well. Not specifically just related to art, but more generally learning about themselves and understand themselves as a public entity and that having a voice is really powerful. One of my student was telling me that after six months of keeping a blog, two things really happen. The first one is that she thought she was interested in XY and Z. And when she looked back, she realised that she actually was are much more into these things. This is quite powerful. But the second aspect is even more powerful than that; each day she carefully composed what she’s writing, she realised that she had a voice, that through her voice she had something to contribute to the world, that it was something valid and prior to that she felt she didn’t have. She wasn’t really aware that she had that voice, and I talked about that said, if you’re going to be an artist, there’s a sensor. Yes of course, you can just make work and just have it on your own wall and never share it. But probably you want to be in a place where the people are seeing your work and therefore you’re beginning to see yourself and your work as as a public thing, and therefore having this public space is actually quite a valuable thing to do.
Now, having a WordPress blog, which you, a few of your fellow students and some of the staff look at is not going to rock the world. It’s unlikely to get a lot of traffic, but what you’re doing is you’re gradually building up the realisation of having a voice. One student few years ago was all about online stuff, but absolutely insisted he didn’t want to have an online identity. Any online presence of any sort. Even now, if you look for his name, you won’t find it. He has been absolutely fastidious about this, keeping this thing even though hiss work is all about online spaces and how people create them.
Safety is also about using tools and the fact that tools might disappear, might close down or get bought, or there’s a hack on them or something similar. There is an argument for the university to provide those things because then it’s safe and it’s reliable. But actually dealing with that, dealing with the reality of that aspect of online activity is part of education. It is part of growing and understanding the fact that all my stuff is on this particular space and maybe it’s all gonna change. Gain an understanding of what it means to put your images on Instagram, what is actually going on there legally and and what it is doing to you as an artist when that pretty much is just about getting thumbs up and that’s it. How is that actually a positive thing for you as an artist? But then if you, if you’re trying to get an exhibition in a gallery, you know that probably 90% of the time, the first thing they do is search on Instagram to see what your work is like. So it’s a weird thing, but you’ve got to kind of deal with these things.
You can see it an online presence as vulnerability or you can see it has generosity and maybe it is a bit of both at the same time. I remember a student who had their work stolen by somebody. There’s no easy resolution to that. There’s no nice, kind of wonderful story to conclude that, it actually was pretty horrible and pretty grim. But ultimately there was a record of their presence online proving they were doing this a few years before. It is there. The evidence is there. But equally, I remember the story of another student, a photographer in the days of flicker being a big thing. Flickr had social network before Facebook existed, which is really quite intriguing. But that’s a whole separate story. How Yahoo just mess up everything they touch! Anyway, this student was sharing his images on Flickr and he got a message from somebody congratulating him for having his work used in adverts in Brazil. They’ve just stole the who, so he contacted the advertising company, they apologised and payed him a large fee in the end. So the very fact that he’d been generous with sharing is online vulnerability, but a generosity too that other eyes were looking out for him. There’s no easy answer to that, but it can work negatively, and can also work very positively. So exploring those things and helping people kind of engage and understand where those risks are, where those vulnerabilities are, but where the potential benefits of being generous into those spaces may pay back. And therefore there’s no one size fits all. Everyone has to make those judgments themselves, but I think that part of education is learning and understanding those things.
If you had to give one piece of advice to someone who is starting to teach in an online learning space, what would it be??
Ha ha ha. A bombshell of a question (Pause). I think from a practical point of view what I would say, Don’t do it on your own.
Classically, someone will be given the job to be the course leader for a new online course, and therefore it is small to start with and won’t have much resources allocated. You are literally going to be on your own doing that, but find other people to share, to talk with and bounce ideas around.
It is actually a weird thing that the teaching community can be isolated; if you’re a doctor, as it were you perform your practice in public amongst other doctors and medical professionals, as you’re working in that particular context. If you’re a lawyer, you do the same thing. But as a teacher when you teach you literally close the door, metaphorically close the door. We have observations every three years or so. I think that’s rather unfortunate. We need to be sharing this a lot more. So I think that would be the one piece of advice, you know, just find other people, talk to other people and see what’s going on.
If it was one sentence, it probably would be the sentence that I share with students as well:
Try not to tell the students what to do.
It needs to come from who you are. Instead, ask them questions so they hear their own wisdom better. Have you thought about that? What happened when you did that? How did that work? How did you feel about that? What do you think was happening there? If you could do that again, how would you proceed? Find other people who are going to ask you these kind of classic reflective questions and then you ask those of them as well and it becomes something which is collaborative and effective. Teachers need more of that.