In advance of this weeks session, we needed to select and have to hand a unit brief, session plan, teaching artifact or details of a learning activity from the course we teach on. We would talk through them and reflect on ways that we could improve and enhance them.
I brought in the unit brief I had just written for a YR1 project – which had a very challenging learning outcome related to teamworking which I brought forth for discussion. Something to unpack perhaps for a future blogpost…
However I think my biggest take away from this session was the ice breaker exercise that a fellow student spoke about as part of her teaching. Amanprit who teaches on Fine Art at Chelsea, showed us an exercise she uses where you are given a piece of paper that will ask you to speak about your latest piece of work as if you were speaking to….(insert person here). The examples ranged from relevant industry people from exhibition curators to magazine writers, from someone 11 years of age to someone in their 70’s. (See Fig 1.)
I thought this was a really great way of getting students not only to talk about their work, building their confidence in sharing and speaking about their work with clarity; but also, how their vocabulary and tone would change from person to person.
How could I translate the same exercise into my own practice? In a fashion context it could be a manufacturer, a magazine writer, a buyer, a friend, an investor etc. With manufacturers they could lean more into talking about their work in a more technical way. A magazine writer they may talk more to the concept and mood of the collection – what is the story? A buyer perhaps about silhouettes and design details, who’s wearing it? Who’s going to buy it?
This could be a great exercise for our FY students who will likely come across these conversations as they graduate in the coming months. Thanks Amanprit for the inspiration!!