Nora Beckman
MA Applied Imagination
Evaluative Report
Title: Creating Space for Student Exchange
Question: How can structured cross-disciplinary exchange be supported at CSM?
How it began:
One of the first things I noticed when I started at Central Saint Martins (CSM) was the distinct lack of support for collective engagement in this course and department. As well as a lack of access to other students or courses or departments. There is a lack of spaces for interactions, networks for student-to-student communication, and community building in the university. As a queer person habituated to finding and building meaning with marginalized communities in liminal spaces, this is a resonant and familiar experience for me.
Intro:
I’ve been working on a variety of ways to address this issue which I call siloization and the attendant isolation that are real issues at the University of Arts London (UAL) and specifically CSM. Students are cut off from each other, with no way of knowing their peers except by chance, and powerless to make structural changes. The university does not facilitate spaces to enable these interpersonal interactions to occur. This compartmentalization is preventing and interrupting the exchange of ideas, resources, and creativity potentially possible at the university. As Jeroen Chabot explains Reinventing the Art School in the 21st Century, “art and design are no longer an exclusive act by a single individual artist or designer” (Chabot, p.15).
Audience:
This is an issue that affects both staff and students at UAL and CSM, but because of power differentials, most acutely students. Students are vocally aware of this lack and many student conversations naturally turn toward discussion of the frustrations of the siloing in the school.
During a more formal listening session with students, one remarked “I feel like they treat Chinese students like tourists here.” And another said “There seems to be this understanding about how powerful a network can be and they really nourish that [in business school]. And that doesn’t seem to be the case here. Not that people don’t want to help each other, but there’s not this kind of understanding about how to build a career you need to have as large of a network as possible and as strong as one as possible. That isn’t really a value here.”
Key themes:
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 a student’s cohort, by “structured” I mean care and support externally, and by “exchange” I mean sharing, communicating, cooperating, connecting, collaborating. Theorist Donna Haraway’s concept of tentacular thinking can hold all these ideas, she says: “we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. We become-with each other or not at all…” (Haraway, p.4). As a whole, all these concepts come to signify empathetic and holistic nurturing, especially including the often-overlooked areas of learning, particularly in Higher Education, such as social and emotional. Educational theorist Etienne Wenger in his 1997 book Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity says “learning is, in its essence, a fundamentally social phenomenon, reflecting our own deeply social nature as human beings capable of knowing” (Wenger, p.4).
Learnings:
After structural analysis and dialogues with more than twenty UAL staff, my diagnosis is that this compartmentalization is so extreme at CSM because of funding structures and departmental silos at a staff level, meaning there are few initiatives or staff addressing cross-departmental issues or looking holistically at the student experience.
There’s also a trickle-down effect from the specifically British, decade-old experiment in “semi-autonomous” funding of higher education, meaning it’s partly subsidized, similar to institutions like the BBC, but through public loans to individual students. The impact of this means the metrics of tracking “success” for this public investment are only through individual surveys like the NSS. This tracking takes much institutional energy and cannot measure intangibles like community or social learning.
I have researched these issues with exploratory conversations, theoretical grounding, collaborations, and large and small interventions. I have started initiatives like holding space for socials where students and staff can interact with each other in their departments, UAL-wide workshops on collaboration, activating the Platform Bar with programming, to CSM-wide open days and skill-sharing.
I have collaborated with staff and students across the university on ways of creating access and space for exchange. I have an in-depth collaboration with MA Innovation Management student and CSM Changemaker Poojitha Lal on ways to address this issue. While we are collaborating on the wider issues and initiatives, Poojitha has also taken on the intertwined issue of mapping communication avenues between the university and students, with the goal of increasing and streamlining access to information for students, so that when there are opportunities and events, students can know that they are happening.
I have also collaborated closely on workshops and conference presentations with Adam Ramejkis in Intercultural Communications and Academic Support, building upon Adam’s passion for helping students as well as using his familiarity with the university structure to hold space for students to engage in conversations with each other and offer it to the wider staff.
Using my elected position in the newly-created “School Rep” role for the Arts Student Union, I explored ways of creating decentralized information-sharing networks between Course Reps at the school. I was hoping that I could use this position to facilitate more exchange between the cluster of Programmes I represent, Culture and Enterprise, Spatial Practices, and Graphic Communication Design, but with the school-year calendar and a lack of timely responses, I have ruled out this possibility given time restrictions. I have also been discussing other initiatives with the student officers, most specifically CSM Student Officer Minna Ellis and LCC Student Officer Sophia Nasif to address a lack of support for community and information at the university.
Within my own programme, which is where my interventions began out of frustration of not knowing or having access to students in Culture & Enterprise, I have iterated the idea of the social as a physical space where people can come together to meet each other over the course of the year. The most recent social had almost fifty attendees with sustained, engaged conversations happening throughout. I also supported Programme Director Richie Manu in establishing a monthly Breakfast Club where students from C&E can gather for conversation with each other and him.
Finally, I began initiatives with Liam Green who is the CSM Culture Producer for College Community and Culture. We began to take action to establish Open House access for students to different departments, a Skill Sharing week, a Feast for Conversation, programming at the Platform Bar, and more. Because of time constraints and the length of planning time required to have college-wide events, none of these happened before the course ended, but we have proposals for two events that will happen in January and February and more are in development.
I brought these learnings to more senior administrators recently, having ongoing discussions with Rebecca Wright, CSM Academic Dean of Collaborations, and meeting with Danielle Tran, UAL Director of Education. I also have a meeting planned with CSM Head of School Rathna Ramanathan after the course ends. With all of these conversations, I have received responses similar to those of most staff I speak with: acknowledgment and sympathy but a lack of initiative to make changes.
I think one of the reasons this widely-acknowledged problem runs into administrative roadblocks is that “creating space” is something of a philosophical conundrum: it is illusive potential for something that can’t be concretely mapped or timetabled. It does not result in a tangible product to be displayed, but rather is taking seriously the importance of intangibles like interaction. I want to emphasize the importance of holding space for creative improvisation, to make room for new possibilities to occur.
Challenges:
Many of the key frustrations of working on a project that is looking critically at the university as a student are consistent with the core of the issue itself, ie a severe lack of access for students to information and resources. Reliance on staff to respond and make things possible because of this lack of access for students reduces individual agency to make change in the university. I was consistently frustrated by my inability to access even basic staffing information about organizational charts of the school, meaning each piece of information I received had to be given to me by a staff member.
One of the other challenges with making lasting change is the issue of time: as discussed with the founders of an alternative school, and a behavioral change consultant, community-building and culture shift both require longevity. The course is ending right as the gears of the university are being set in motion in response to my challenges and initiatives. As the number of key people invested in these ideas has grown, the more confident I am that these issues will continue to be addressed, with or without my presence.
Positive Impact:
There is tremendous possibility here to aid connection-making and community. While measuring impact in these sorts of initiatives is complicated, an issue I have discussed with multiple community-builders and administrators, I have received positive feedback from interventions staged thus far.
When students have a lack of agency to change the system and a lack of support to interact with students outside their courses, the feelings of isolation can be intense. Connection and support, opportunities that are traditionally recognized as important parts of university life, have been lost in the current neoliberal paradigm of individualism. Making connections takes sustained effort, support, and the willing participation of those involved—in some cases, potentially also enumerating the value of such connections to students themselves. But even apparently simple acts of offering space to meet other students and encouragement to talk with facilitation have lessened feelings of isolation and frustration.
References:
With a vast number of textual resources supporting these ideas and the importance of community, connection, care, communication, in education and as a way to counter neoliberal exploitation and the ensuing issues stretching to climate change and inequalities, there is ample theoretical backing to use these concepts as justification and impetus to instigate change within the university. I’ve read books from established educational theorists like John Dewey, bell hooks and Paulo Freire; books on the current state of universities and hosting events; researched systems theories and design systems, entanglement, care, social learning, queerness and marginalization, and beyond. Together they provide rich arguments for the importance of the ideas I have used to counter the siloization at CSM.
Conclusion:
UAL’s slogan is “The world needs creativity.” In the end, I agree viscerally with the research showing that creativities are not born in isolation. As Rob Pope says in the book Creativity: Theory, History, Practice “we never create anything fresh or valuable in utter isolation; we always create in relation to other people and other things” (Pope, p. xvi). I, as a student, want for myself and for everyone here, more and better avenues to interact with this incredible ecosystem of people and resources gathered under one roof, and yet walled off from each other. Learning does not happen in isolation. The myth of the lone-genius clings, tenacious. We deserve more, we deserve each other.
Opportunities Beyond Course:
I’m passionate about the concepts embedded in SCDE, 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 decentralized, diffuse approach seems most effective. I have identified strategic partners and both actioned and made progress towards specific initiatives. Much of what I started, and continue to lay the groundwork for, will continue after my time on the course ends, and the conversations I have been having administratively will continue to encourage movement on these issues. I’ve been exploring avenues for funding, so that I might be able to stay to continue working on this issue for the remainder of the ‘22-’23 school year.
Regardless of what the outcomes are, as changing this Kafka-esque system can feel impossible, I remain rooted in hope for a better version of the university. As Stephano Harney and Fred Moten write in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, “I believe in the world and want to be in it. I want to be in it all the way to the end of it because I believe in another world in the world and I want to be in that” (Harney & Moten, p.118).
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