Author: Lucy Panesar

Book Now: Anti-Racism Staff Development Activities
Throughout July, colleagues at LCC can develop their knowledge and skills in anti-racist practices through a range of synchronous and asynchronous activities happening as part of the expanded staff development month.

As part of LCC’s ongoing efforts to create an equitable and inclusive experience for all of its community, a series of new activities are on offer to staff through July. These are specifically aimed at developing anti-racist cultures and practices, in relation to creative practice, curricula and pedagogy, as well as leadership and management.

The programme includes synchronous events for colleagues to join in real-time and a range of asynchronous activities and resources that can be engaged with off-line, at times that suit, including an evolving anti-racism resource list.

Activities will be running through a dedicated LCC Anti-racism Teams site. Colleagues can book onto the synchronous events through ESS and gain access to asynchronous activities by emailing staff development coordinator, Gifty Tingle: g.tingle@arts.ac.uk

Synchronous events

Book onto these through ESS:

Reading group on Cultural Awareness and Online Learning 8 July 3-4pm with Matt Lingard, Mark Ingham and Emily Salines. See Digital Pedagogy Reading Group for the Readings.

Webinar for College Executive on Developing an Anti-Racist Institution 14 July 11.30-1pm with Gurnam Singh

Panel Discussion on Developing Decolonised Curricula 14 July 2-3.30pm chaired by Vikki Hill and including:
- Lee Mackinnon and Jennifer Good on decolonising the lens
- Jess Baines and Amanda Jenkins on decolonising design
- Milo Taylor and Roddy Gibson on decolonising sound and screen
Discussion on Students’ Race-Related Complaints 15 July 11-12.30pm with Maitrayee Basu and Berfin Emre Cetin

Webinar on the Role of White Academics in Promoting Anti-Racist Pedagogy 15 July 3-5pm with Terry Finnigan and Siobhan Clay

Exchange event on Culture Jamming Media Representation of #BLM 16 July 10 –11am with Alejandro Abraham Hamanoiel

Webinar on Transnational Indigenous solidarity and antiracism 20 July 10-11.30am chaired by Chiara Minestrelli

Discussion on Positionality and Making and Discussing Work About Race 21 July 3-4.30pm with Jonathan Wright

Webinar on the Ethical Representations of the ‘Other’ 22 July 11-12pm with Jess Crombie

Asynchronous activities

Gain access to these by emailing g.tingle@arts.ac.uk

Culture Jamming Media Representation of #BLM – Activity designed and facilitated by Alejandro Abraham Hamanoiel

Decolonising curricula – Self-directed activity designed by Lucy Panesar

Safe Spaces and Freedom of Expression – Asynchronous reading group facilitated by Lucy Panesar and Pratap Rughani

Beyond Breaking Bias – Activity designed and facilitated by Vikki Hill

Positive Action – Information and discussion forum facilitated by Lucy Panesar
1st July 2020
Supporting our new students
Whether online, blended or on campus, new students starting this autumn will need more support than ever to survive and thrive in their first year. This will require us to work effectively together to ensure no student is left behind. Here’s an update on how LCC’s Academic Progression Tool and Team can help.

The Academic Progression Tool (APT) is a collaborative monitoring and communication aide for prioritising support to students, providing course teams with a unique combination of information about their students in a secure and interactive workbook, plus assistance with reaching out to students who are struggling to engage. APT was introduced to help reduce year 1 withdrawal rates, and LCC’s Executive Board have asked for it to be implemented across all undergraduate courses as a matter of urgency, following the latest sector recommendations (Advance HE 2020).

During the Covid-19 lockdown an increasing number of courses have been working with the APT Team to reach out to students and offer them the support they need to progress with their studies. APT Administrator Veronica Otero has been continuing to work remotely with course tutors and administrators to update workbooks and adapt them to include new information, including data from weekly Moodle check-ins, introduced as part of UAL’s student online engagement policy, and details of students with Extenuating Circumstances. Courses have also been working with Student Experience Officer, Chris Bryant, to reach out to students who have not been engaging with them. This additional outreach effort has been prompting students to reconnect and to get some of the support they need to keep going, whether that be academic or technical, financial or pastoral.

New APT workbooks will be created towards the end of the summer. These will be for courses to start supporting new Year 1 student engagement from the moment they start in October, whether that’s on-campus or on-line. Whilst the APT Team remain focussed on assisting with outreach support for Year 1 students, course and admin teams are encouraged to keep using their existing APT workbooks to track students as they go through Year 2 and 3 – with the same aim of identifying and noting which students to prioritise support to. After the summer break, courses will be provided with secure links to the new Year 1 workbooks along with a copy of the new 2020-21 APT User Guide.

In the meantime, please contact us with any questions and feedback on your experience of using APT this past year and let us know of any improvement needed to develop APT in a way that best suits your course needs.

APT Team:
- Lucy Panesar (Project Manager): l.panesar@lcc.arts.ac.uk
- Veronica Otero (Administrator): v.otero@arts.ac.uk
- Chris Bryant (Student Experience Officer): c.bryant@lcc.arts.ac.uk
16th June 2020
LCC Wikipedia Edit-a-thon 2020

Through May-June, LCC is hosting an online Wikipedia edit-a-thon to increase the visibility and credibility of under-represented creative practitioners. LCC staff and students are invited to participate in this collaborative endeavour, which will take place through three online, real-time events late afternoon on 27 May, 3 June and 10 June.

© @Visualthinkery @BryanMMathers #WikiEdu20

The edit-a-thon involves LCC Student Changemakers, builds on the work of LCC’s Liberate the Curriculum Project, and on LCC’s growing involvement with WikimediaUK, which included a keynote talk by Lucy Crompton-Reid last summer and a staff workshop in December.

Wikipedia is the world’s fifth most visited website. It is used by 87.5% students in their academic work but many (most?) don’t know they could also be editing it.

LCC staff and students can register as a participant using this Registration Form before 20th May. Participants will be contacted via UAL email with more details before the first event.

This Hub page will be used to share updates as the edit-a-thon progresses, so watch this space!

Student Perspective

Listen to Tomas Sanders, a student, talk about his experience of editing Wikipedia

3 students and 3 staff discuss editing Wikipedia

14th May 2020
Supporting Students of Colour

UAL’s Fellow in Race and Education, Dr Gurnam Singh has produced a 6-point guide to help us understand more about the disproportionate impact the Covid-19 crisis is having on Black, Asian and other Minority Ethnic students.

The guide goes into detail on issues of financial hardship, health inequality, the digital divide, racial harassment and hate, unconscious bias and sense of belonging, and includes helpful advice on supporting students regarding each issue.

You can read the guide on Shades of Noir, and you can also hear Gurnam talking about this as part of a Coventry University podcast on Supporting BAME Students.

Links:

Article on Shades of Noir: https://shadesofnoir.org.uk/supporting-black-asian-minority-ethnic-bame-students-during-the-covid-19-crisis/

Coventry Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89NmCn4ImGk&feature=youtu.be

6th May 2020
Make the Grade – Fit to Submit

UAL’s new Online Student Engagement Policy for Course Teams recommends ‘having a discussion of assessment criteria and near-completed work as “fit to submit”’ (2020, p. 4). This refers to a practice introduced and subsequently developed as ‘Make the Grade’ by Terry Finnigan, Head of Student Attainment at LCF (more background in this case study).

Make the Grade has since been promoted widely through UAL’s Blueprint initiative as an example formative assessment intervention, and through the Academic Enhancement Model (AEM) team, who include Make the Grade in their guide to Reducing Referrals and Resubmissions.

There has been much appetite from LCC course teams for Make the Grade, and the approach is recognised as a valuable way of supporting student progress and attainment with current teaching and assessment adaptations.

The AEM guide outlines the three ‘Make the Grade’ steps to 1) Unpack the assignment, 2) Build a checklist and 3) Run a Make the Grade workshop, which can all be done remotely, synchronously or asynchronously.

Course teams can use the guide as a model for devising appropriate interventions to ensure their students are ‘fit to submit’. And any course adopting AEM can get assistance from Academic Support in co-facilitating the process. Read more about this here and to arrange contact LCC’s Head of Academic Support Christie Johnson (christie.johnson@lcc.arts.ac.uk), or AEM Lead Emily Salines (e.salines@arts.ac.uk).

Useful links

UAL Online Student Engagement Policy (2020):

Online student engagement policy

Inclusive Attainment Case Study: Make the Grade (2017):

Case study

Examples of aims and interventions: Blueprint 2019-20:

https://artslondon.sharepoint.https://artslondon.sharepoint.com/sites/CanvasContent/Documents/Academic%20Development%20and%20Services/ADF/Examples%20of%20Aims%20and%20Interventions%20.pdfcom/sites/CanvasContent/Documents/Academic%20Development%20and%20Services/ADF/Examples%20of%20Aims%20and%20Interventions%20.pdf

UAL AEM guide to Reducing Referrals and Resubmissions:

Referrals and Resubmissions

Make the Grade Student Workshops – Guidance for Course Teams and Academic Support staff :

http://lccteaching.myblog.arts.ac.uk/files/2020/04/Make-the-Grade-Guidance-for-Course-Teams-and-Academic-Support-April-2020-2.pdf

1st May 2020
APT for supporting student progress
At the start of the year I wrote a Hub post introducing course teams to the Academic Progression Tool, a digital, collaborative, monitoring and communication aide for prioritising support to Year 1 students.

LCC

When we went into lock-down I directly contacted course teams to suggest they work with their APT workbooks and the APT team as they go about identifying the support needs of their students in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis.

An increasing number of undergraduate courses are now using APT for this purpose, working with the APT Administrator Veronica Otero and Student Experience Officer Chris Bryant to keep track of communications with and information from students regarding their current circumstances and needs, and directing students to the most appropriate support and resources.

The APT workbooks are in UAL SharePoint so are more secure than using Google or other third-party platforms and are updated with the latest data on student enrolment and assessment status. Course Teams, Veronica and Chris have also been working with Programme Administrators to adapt APT workbooks for monitoring student’s online engagement, in line with the existing attendance policy and new student guidance on online engagement.

As well as helping course teams to prioritise support to students in most need right now, APT also collects data that can inform both the course and wider institutional response during this crisis, helping to ensure that students’ increasingly complex circumstances and needs are known about and accommodated, whilst also facilitating collaboration between different departments and services.

For more information about the Academic Progression Tool contact me, Lucy Panesar (APT Project Manager) on: l.panesar@lcc.arts.ac.uk

Embedded links
30th April 2020
LCC Student Changemakers
An introduction to the LCC Student Changemakers, a staff – student collaboration initiative.

London Map by Jodie Valerie

As an academic community, we are more aware now than ever of the persistent racial inequalities in the higher education sector. The latest sector research says that work to address this needs to be in partnership with students and with sufficient focus on race as a stand-alone issue (NUS & Universities UK, 2019). LCC has been following this recommendation with Liberate the Curriculum, and this year takes staff-student collaboration to the next level.

The new LCC Student Changemakers initiative creates the opportunity for students to play a sustained partnership role in curriculum and pedagogic development through the lenses of liberation and decolonisation. A total of nine Changemakers are being recruited for a 2020-2021 pilot (seven so far), offering one to each programme area for 4 hours every Wednesday.

Changemakers are currently completing an initial online training programme to gain:
- Understanding of institutional processes around curriculum and pedagogic development, such as course reapproval and monitoring, unit feedback and modifications, course performance indicators and enhancement initiatives such as the UAL Academic Enhancement Model.
- Capabilities in working with programme/course teams, promoting collaboration between course teams, students, librarians, academic support, language development etc. and an understanding of where their role sits in relation to Course Reps, Peer Mentors etc.
- Confidence in being agents of change and facilitators of liberation and decolonisation, including how to participate and facilitate discussions and other work to address issues related to race, whiteness, the legacy of colonialism etc.
From mid-May they will be working closely with staff in their programme to identify key opportunities for facilitating decolonisation within undergraduate curricula. For more information please contact me, the project manager on: l.panesar@lcc.arts.ac.uk
20th April 2020
Inclusive Remote Teaching

LCC staff can learn more about ensuring safety, equity and inclusion in our new ways of working in a new session on Inclusive Remote Teaching with Lucy Panesar and Emily Salines on Thursday 16 April 11-12.30 or watch a recorded version via Collaborate playback.

The safety, equity and inclusion of students and staff is at the forefront of our minds right now, as we adapt our ways of living, working and studying in the current circumstances. And whilst a number of us are fortunate enough to continue working and studying at home, in good health and with the opportunity and resources to engage remotely, there are students and staff in less privileged positions and for whom existing disadvantage is increasing.

It is the University’s Public Sector Equality Duty to ‘remove or minimise disadvantages suffered by people due to their protected characteristics’, and whilst we have been making great progress at LCC in reducing disadvantage for students with disabilities and from certain ethnic groups, this new situation calls for new types of effort. Other posts to this Hub offer great guidance on creating digitally equitable environments for students, promoting methods relying on the lowest levels of immediacy and bandwidth.

Watch a recorded version in Collaborate Playback via this link: https://eu.bbcollab.com/collab/ui/session/playback/load/6987b00268c142ab9ded0998e06b33f4

8th April 2020
Supporting Student Progress

At LCC a significant number of undergraduate students leave their courses prematurely, many by the end of their first year. This can be due to a range of factors and complex challenges students face on entering higher education. Some of these challenges are beyond our control, but many of them can be anticipated and countered with timely and appropriate support. Some new students feel out of depth academically and could benefit from Academic Support or Peer Mentoring. Some may be experiencing cultural or language barriers to participation, which the UAL Language Centre or International Office could help with. Others with financial, health or accommodation issues which UAL Student Services could help them to resolve. Course tutors are often the first point of contact for new students and are well positioned to signpost students to such support.

To help courses with this, the college has developed the Academic Progression Tool (APT) which serves as a digital, collaborative, monitoring and communication aide for prioritising support to students. The tool provides tutors with a unique combination of information about their cohort, in an interactive workbook they can add to and communicate through. The information includes the students fee and enrolment status, links to ISA documents, and grades after exam boards. Where possible, I’M IN attendance data is also included as an additional indicator of each student’s engagement.

APT emerges from the Student Support and Progression Project initiated by Adrienne Tulley in 2018-19, in which time nine LCC undergraduate courses fully participated, using the tool to prioritise support to students identified as at risk of leaving. Using data to prompt support interventions in this way is known in educational technology terms as ‘predictive analytics’, as previously written about by Lee Lewis, and at UAL LCC are currently leading the way in this area with the Academic Progression Tool.

The project is now managed by Lucy Panesar (Progression and Attainment Project Manager based in D114) and offers all LCC undergraduate courses APT to support their 2019-20 year 1 cohorts. The tool comes with additional administration support from Veronica Otero (Project Administrator based in LCC’s Academic Registry) and outreach support from Chris Bryant (Student Experience Officer based in LCC Academic Support). Colleagues can find more information from the APT 2019-20 User Guide and by contacting Lucy, Veronica or Chris.

Talking Teaching: Supporting Student Progress

Mon 23 March 1-2.30pm At LCC a significant number of undergraduate students leave their course prematurely, many at the start of their first year. This can be due to a range of factors and complex challenges students face on entering higher education. In response to this, the college has developed the Academic Progression Tool (APT) which serves as a digital, collaborative, monitoring and communication aide for prioritizing support to students in their first year. Academic and Support staff are encouraged to attend this Talking Teaching session to learn more about using APT to support their students and to also contribute to the development of the tool. The session will be facilitated by Lucy Panesar, LCC’s Progression and Attainment Project Manager.

20th January 2020