Communities of practice event notes

Visitors to our CoP Drupal UAL

We had a wide verity of interest: including senior management and teaching staff. It became clear from our conversations that many staff and students are lacking web building awareness, knowledge and skills and are appreciative of all advice and support offered. A basic understanding of web environments, processes and developments should be viewed as a fundamental requirement of any professional and training professional practitioner, we questioned/concluded why UAL do not acknowledge and support web building/cultures and skills in their curriculum? We also discussed how MOOCs Massive Open Online Courses may impact on arts education and how by addressing web literacies (like in Drupal UAL CoP) we may start to encourage and develop a new arts web development community of interest to support more UAL staff and student engagement and Innovation in this area.     

Possible future UAL CoP or UAL work: Impacts of challenges of digital and technological Innovation in arts education and curriculum (MOOCS and digital literacies, digital skills for employability)

My visit to Paint Club

Paint Club members were visitors to the Drupal UAL CoP session so naturally we continued the conversation around digital/technology and its relationship to traditional arts processes. The drupal and Paint Club groups were very interested in collaboration possibilities in terms of developing and connecting The Paint Club activities with digital innovation projects to help integrate and engage their work with a wider audience.

Subjectivity and Feminism

We had a conversation about the lack of representation of feminist issues at UAL to an extent that these issues are almost a lost history at UAL, the group also questioned to what extent were senior management engaging with Feminist issues as there were no ‘knowledgeable’ members in this area of senior UAL planning committees. The analogy also was provided (useful for my benefit) that the same type of perspective could be likened to the advancement of digital technologies e.g. if there was a lack of senior management knowledge and expertise in these particular areas how do UAL encourage, develop and innovate in these areas. 

Whilst I understand and agree with all these arguments, I also feel that the focus on feminist issues at UAL in my 15 years at the college as student and staff are far stronger then focus on male issues which from my perspective is not supported or recognised in any part of UAL. In all my time at UAL I have never seen male issues being addresses or supported by UAL in any form. So I would be great to see UAL addressing all these issues but maybe from a general combined gender perspective as opposed to male or female?  

Possible future UAL CoP or UAL work: Exploring male and female gender issues in arts practice