I include a continued reflection on my colleagues’ micro-teaching. I noticed that, although I was encouraging students to explore their own ways of relating to an object as a learning resource, thus generating research questions, my session felt at the time as if it didn’t leave as much space for the agency of my object to be recognised – the more abstract, yet more impactful relation to material in the long run.

This was evident when E-Sinn invited us to traverse the contours/scumbling of a jumper, before showing us images of the end place of that jumper were we to mistreat it (littering Ghanaian beaches). The juxtaposition of material and image exemplified how an idea can be multiplied across mediums to affect a participant.

I also struggle to establish a kind of ‘thick description’ as a launchpad for exploring concepts in theory sessions (Hartblay, 2018). Dan emphasised that conversation itself could be viewed as an object worthy of both documentation and deconstruction was thought-provoking. D’s treatment of our names as these complex, fragile objects, also helped me consider what resources I can tap into that all students share and all use as a way of exploring concepts that might be described during theory lectures?

Tilly’s and Paula’s sessions were both more instructive – Tilly demonstrated the importance of grain direction in the book making process, while Paula used wire and sponge to explain the workings of DNA structures. Both emphasised that an incremental/segmented making process provides a kind of slowness which can reveal more about the intricacies of the thing being described than a flat diagram or a set of bullet points. [Textures of learning?]

Hartblay, C. (2018) ‘This is Not Thick Description: Conceptual Art Installation as Ethnographic Process’. Ethnography. 19 (2), pp. 153–182.