How can structured cross-disciplinary exchange be supported at CSM?
As I unravel this question, each turn exposes more strands: a paradox. The problem I’m looking at is tentacular as theorist Donna Haraway would put it—it’s not something with a straightforward path towards “solving,” as people ask me for my “solution.” Even the confines of a linear essay are frustrating since for me it is more dynamic and rewarding to work in generative, playful, questioning, and collaborative ways. If we’re questioning and reinventing established structures, why not practice with the written form as well?
it’s like that idea
where you enter into a specific place
thinking you’ll know the experience
but once you’re there it’s a distorted landscape
the wrong side of the looking glass
instead of clarity
it’s wavey rigidity
proclaiming itself holistic
from a megaphone by a charlatan
it’s isolation
rooms and departments
aquariums locked
because money is water
and opening will upset the balance
getting us all wet
it’s avoidance hidden behind the word parity
when each person brings unequally
with their very presence
it’s each administrator in turn
throwing up their hands
saying “we’re doing our best”
“it’s not our purview”
“we know it’s an issue”
“we’ve been trying to change”
“it’s so good to hear from a student”
It’s a chart so full of lines stretching
dotted lines crossing
power lines weaving
that it most resembles a forest
ecosystems are not straight lines
and this place is a jungle
without the rationality of nature
it’s protecting its own interests
the bottom line
reputation
but the world needs creativity it cries
with mouth and palms stretched wide
before stuffing pockets
and zipping them shut
perhaps it’s folly, as I was warned
to look at this blind giant
wrapped in his own charm
Circling back to my research question, I ask how can structured cross-disciplinary exchange (SCDE) be supported at CSM? on behalf of every student I have talked to at UAL, past and present. By “cross-disciplinary” I mean outside of only your cohort, by “structured” I mean care and support externally, and by “exchange” I mean sharing, communicating, cooperating, collaborating. As a whole, these concepts come to signify empathetic and holistic nurturing, especially including oft-overlooked areas of learning such as social and emotional.
For the question of SCDE at CSM, there are different levels of exchange possible. First, how exchange is and can be fostered for students in individual courses. Second, at a departmental or programme level. Third, at a college level. Finally, at a university level. Additionally, I have been finding this exchange applicable not only for students but also for staff.
Investigation: Primary Research of People and System Structures
I’ve been investigating SCDE with a series of formal conversations with staff across UAL, discussing individuals roles and issues around siloization and structure. This dynamic approach aids in reflexive learning through its process: each conversation acts as a mechanism of information exchange with siloed university staff, as information gathering, and as a method of raising visibility and urgency to the issue of student siloization and the need for tangible solutions. These conversations increase the issue’s footprint and yield subsequent conversations in ever greater expansion.
An essential part of the project and research, these conversations also contain frustrations: almost everyone I speak with acknowledges that these are known problems. Yet for students, solutions remain in the theoretical realm, without communication or application.
| Name | Role | Department | Keywords |
| Vikki Hill | Developer in Academic Enhancement | UAL Teaching, Learning, Employability Exchange | compassionate pedagogy |
| Nina Trivedi | Coordinator | UAL Teaching, Learning, & Attainment | Changemakers program |
| Graham Barton | Head of | UAL Academic Support | whole systems thinking |
| Matthew Phull | Lecturer | CSM Academic Support | emotional work |
| Leanne Benford | Manager | UAL Post-Grad Community and Events | facilitation, community-building |
| Fred Cavanaugh | Coordinator | UAL Post-Grad Community and Events | events, community building |
| Jonathan Carson | Associate Dean | Student Experience & Enhancement | glue, funding |
| Darla-jane Gilroy | Associate Dean | CSM Knowledge Exchange | creative thinking, empowering |
| James Purnell | President and Vice-Chancellor | UAL | communication |
| Emily Sellon | Educational Quality Officer | Arts Student Union | organizing, communication |
| Richie Manu | Programme Chair | CSM Culture & Enterprise | community |
| Adam Ramejkis | Staff | UAL Intercultural Communications & Academic Support | non-hierarchical, support, |
| Ve Dewey | MBA Graduate | Culture & Enterprise | accountability |
Outside the UAL community, I’ve also discussed with people from American Universities & Schools, to other British ones, situating the UAL/CSM structure and experience within a wider frame of reference. I’ve found overlapping frustrations around siloization and bureaucracy elsewhere, but the depth of the problem seems especially acute here.
Investigations: Secondary Research of Concepts
I’m building a rich validation of why and how cross-disciplinary exchange is important. Not only am I having conversations with people, I’m also engaging with the depth of research, application, and thinking about these topics available in books and articles. In addition to research about formal education, I’m asking “what does exchange contain?” and delving into notions of care, social-emotional learning, collaboration & cooperation, interdependence, and freedom.
For example, in the book The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence, the idea of care is turned from an individual practice to something embedded and enacted structurally. Ettienne Wenger’s book Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity also focuses on mutual interdependence, community, and conversations being the social fabric which makes actions possible. He builds the social theory of learning, emphasizing social participation as a process of learning and knowing.
Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble discusses ecological entanglement. Biomes are repetitive, messy, full of looping-backs and iteration. Creation and creativity are entangled. The act of observing changes the behaviour of the observed. As applying these notions to my current process, this means that research is not passive, the conversations I am having, calling attention to issues and ideas, are themselves forms of intervention as I begin to make networks between. This research is an action of making-with this system, of my becoming-with these people, this University.
Further applying these concepts, I agree with the UAL slogan “the world needs creativity.” But creativity is a radical act that requires radical entanglement, something that SCDE promotes. There seems to be an understanding of the importance of multi-disciplinarity at a course level: there is piecemeal alignment. But the University as a whole is caught in a very different model of precarity which has necessitated a granular and siloed approach to its organism, robbing actors within of vital life force and interactions.
Interventions: Holding Space for Change
In addition to conversing with people and books, I’m putting these ideas into practice and testing to see how they work in the world. From June until now, I’ve worked to hold space for students in a direct exchange, raised the issue within two academic conferences to UAL staff, and facilitated a conversation with outside experts for advice.
23 June 2022: Summer Social with Culture & Enterprise Department
Holding space for students and facilitating interactions. People from all 5 of the C&E courses attended. One mature student coming back to school for his BA in CCC said “I have been waiting all year for something like this, so I can meet more people.” Another graduating MAAI student opened up about her isolation and exclusion within her course: again, wishing for more avenues to create community outside individual courses. A graduating ACE mature student explained she had really been hoping for more opportunities to create community. Students have been uniformly grateful for these spaces, wanting more.
6 July 2022: Creating Spaces: Presenting at Academic Support WDWTWA Conference
MA IM student Poojitha Lal and I collaborated to present a talk reflecting on the need and challenge of creating spaces for connection in the university to assembled staff group of around fifty. It was an attempt to use established avenues to share ideas with people embedded in the system, in the hope of creating further conversations and possibly change. The presentation led to more conversations, including a brief one with Vice-Chancellor James Purnell, and further opportunity to work with Academic Support.
12 July 2022: Communication Across Courses: Workshop & Presention at UAL EdEx Conference
This was another attempt at creating conversation and sparking ideas with staff, at a conference more geared towards pedagogy. Presented over 45-minutes, it offered reflections on emergent networks of knowledges and communications that arise from Adam Ramejkis’ non-hierarchical, transdisciplinary approach. As this conference was online and the audience smaller, it was not as effective in reaching people. Though there was a positive response from participants, it didn’t spark further conversations on my end, though hopefully planted seeds.
21 August 2022: Convening Founders of Fire Mountain School
Convening the four women founders of the 40-year-old progressive US school Fire Mountain School and facilitated a discussion of their views on education, critical responses to dominant educational ideologies, how their personal backgrounds impacted their desire to start a school, and my project to get responses and expert feedback. It was helpful to have their wisdom and inspiring to hear their viewpoints. Though they were excited by my project and had advice, they were not that hopeful of the ability to change the system, especially in this time period, exposing a weakness in the project.
The Space Between Here and There
I’m passionate about these concepts, having engaged with them before they became my formal project and will continue after the deadlines. For such a tangled system as UAL, there is no magic bullet solution to supporting cross-disciplinary exchange, but rather a decentralised, diffuse approach seems most effective with the time I have available. I have identified a few different partners and specific actions that can occur, and am beginning to have a clearer picture of the shape of the problem.
It’s frustrating that there is so much scholarship and thinking on this subject—captured in words, books, and conversations—and a deepening consensus that siloization limits community, collaboration, and exchange, particularly at CSM. Yet people within this system seem to continually struggle to take action on holding space for exchange to happen. As psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion urges, we need to move into the space without desire or memory, letting go enough so there is room for the unknown.
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