This essay centres around the exclusionary nature of the design industry. My two complementary artefacts—the book, Disobedient Objects and the Let’s Be Brief Creating Value Canvas—encourage students to think subversively, using a range of industry specific and wider cultural praxis to create and define spaces from an employment and sustainability standpoint.
Ethnography — the Sixth Sense
As a qualitative method for collecting data used in the social and behavioural sciences[1]—the ethnographic discipline is often practiced by millions of people worldwide with little to no knowledge of the term. This sixth cultural sense, making sense of its norms and isms can become an intuitive mechanism for the outsider, an immigrant or ‘other’ — particularly from a Black background. And as a son of Jamaican and Grenadian immigrants, I was raised in a family of ethnographers, who were also nurses, care workers, train drivers and station conductors. Each able to decode and translate modes of behaviour from micro aggressions to outright discrimination on a daily basis. This is the lens through which I understand my positionality in Britain.
“Life is going to be so much fuller and richer for being an insider-outsider, so lean into it.” ~ Tamika Abaka-Wood[2]
In these circumstances, every interaction and act of self-care becomes a disobedient act, where positionality is key to both the preservation of my personal and professional identity, and my positionality that has over time enabled me to frame my practice in more rounded, human-centred context.
Teaching beyond academic practice
I work across the Diploma in Professional Studies programme at LCC and CCW to support students in their transition into the world of work and during their industry focused gap year of experiential learning, helping them develop a broader appreciation of craft and its professional / social context, communication skills and, perhaps more than anything, overall levels confidence in their thinking and abilities to execute.
The state of conventional industry requires a level of subversion, challenging students to recognise and extract ever more value, their ‘creative whole’ and an objective proximity to ‘industry’ as a business space and a noun. In liberal workspaces littered with welcoming, flowery rhetoric, the cost-prohibitive, culturally prohibitive, confidence-prohibiting measures create barriers to access long before the stress of the first internship application.
“To disobey in order to take action is the byword of all creative spirits. This history of human progress amounts to a series of Promethean acts. But the autonomy is also attained in the workings of individual lives by means of many small Promethean disobediences, at once clever, well thought out, and patiently pursued…’[3]
Helping students and engaging with employers
I continuously challenge my students to see all apparatus as hackable tools. How can LinkedIn subvert the traditional application process and make the anonymous act personal, real-world connections?
Can I? Should I? Will I? Questions asked by students on a regular basis, reflecting the presumed orthodoxy in an age of affirmation over personal projection. In these moments, disobedience must become a conscious act and value derived from a human-centred toolkit, where resources are close to hand.
Therefore, I created my second artefact, the Let’s Be Brief Creating Value Canvas: an interactive canvas designed to help students find their personality and what matters to them as they work towards unearthing the value of their creativity, positioning and presenting their practice to potential employers, customers, stakeholders, and investors: providing a succinct insight into their personal brand ideology.
The UAL Guiding Policy 1 focusses on employability and a design curriculum that ensures students have the relevant 21st century skillsets in a world where 50% of all employees will need re-skilling by 2025.[4]
This career climate change demand that students’ creative skills and practices embrace a wider range of industries[5], whilst ensuring students’ skills are set within an ethical framework which addresses issues of social, racial and climate justice.
Multiple issues and multiple outcomes
“There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live a single-issue lives.” ~ (Audre Lord, Outsider, 1984)[6]
Anastasia Liasidou’s ‘Inclusive education and critical pedagogy at the intersections of disability, race, gender and class’ cites the contradictory framework for inclusion, referencing the centrality of a social justice discourse in bringing about inclusive education reforms (Artiles et al 2006; Hattam et al 2009; Johnson 2008), where the lack of definitional consensus has implications for the ways in which social justice can “be realised and implemented in and through schools” (Johnson 2008: 310).[7]
This speaks to the core concerns regarding DPS, and funding structures that render a year-long experience in industry—without the promise of pay—a very real barrier to access for students already laden with debt. “Can I afford a year on twenty-percent bursaries? How will my accommodation be covered in the event of gaps in employment or the prospect of a professionally beneficial, but low-pay internship sustains me given an array of overheads throughout the gap year?”
These questions, while paraphrased, are what I hear regularly, where the fanciful gaps in reasoning create segregated placements—placements presented as part of an “inclusion” agenda in terms of learning and participation (Dyson 2005; Warnock 2010) ignoring the cultural politics of disability and special educational needs (Armstrong 2005).[8]
Inclusion is this respect, is reduced to a special education artefact that creates and consolidates fixed and essentialist understandings of students’ “disabled identities” (Thomas 1999) without taking into consideration the ways in which these “identities” are created and sustained within current schooling (Graham 2006). As part of my DPS role, respect and an essentialist understanding of a particular student’s identity allowed me to process and interpret how lived identity has an acute impact on student well-being, their sense of self and unsureness of what the future in education might hold.
A student living alone without financial support from their parents can acutely influence a students’ ability to afford the financial burdens of higher education.
“Changing systems that perpetuate racism, power, and exclusion” (Mullen and Jones 2008:331); and it involves questioning the ways in which schools valorize certain student- identities while devaluing others (Harwood & Humphy 2008; Graham, 2005; Youdell, 2006). As one such example, the student in question felt that in moments of frustration, they were seen as an “angry Black girl” by senior members of teaching staff. These lingering perceptions jeopardised the chance of a harmonious teacher-student working relationship long before my teaching intervention.
Intervention by any means necessary
Whether this or the most stable of circumstances, I implement a student-centred approach to teaching, where an Inclusive Pedagogical teaching method embraces the wealth of intersecting social identities and positionalities that all students bring to the classroom. With continuous reflection, my students gradually become aware of this requirement as a positional (and very necessary) part of their creative practice.
My teaching intervention, while concentrating on transcending the deficit oriented and blame-the-victim approaches that “define educational bodies, relationships and structures” (Johnson 2004:151), was limited by the timing of that intervention (late in the second term of Y2—when intense periods of contact with peers and staff may have already induced ostracisation and marginalisation of either/both their social and educational domain.
This student-centred approach to teaching represents my interpretation of Inclusive Learning Theory, engaging the wealth of intersecting social identities and positionalities that all students bring to the classroom. For best effect, I feel an earlier introduction in the educational process would bring enhanced benefit to students, as Y2 mid-point intervention is often when creative anxiety has already set in, making it a distinct challenge to reconnect students with their passions and/or instinctive insights in a quest to create ‘industry standard work’.
Through recognising ‘self’ as an asset, and ones interests as a resource, we can broaden the chance of a successful inclusive education happens primarily through accepting, understanding, and attending to differences and diversity, which can include physical, cognitive, academic research, social interactions and psychographic analysis, and an emotional toolkit that enables students to judge their work and practice against a new range of outward facing, community-based markers, that allow them to make the most of the environment that surrounds them, stimulating insights, personal development and work that just works.
[1] University of Virginia (2021). Ethnographic research | research. [online] research.virginia.edu.
Available at: https://research.virginia.edu/irb-sbs/ethnographic-research.
[2] THE ANTI BLUEPRINT PROJECT. (2021). Tamika Abaka-Wood Problem Solver. [online] Available at: https://www.theantiblueprintproject.com/people/tamika-abaka-wood [Accessed 20 Jan. 2023].
[3] B. Gaston (1961). ‘Promethues’, Fragments of Poetic Fire. Disobedient Objects. London. V&A Publishing. 2014.
[4] Whiting, K. (2020). These are the top 10 job skills of tomorrow – and how long it takes to learn them. [online] World Economic Forum. Available at: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/10/top-10-work-skills-of-tomorrow-how-long-it-takes-to-learn-them/.
[6] Lorde, A. (2019). (1982) Audre Lorde, ‘Learning from the 60s’ • BlackPast. [online] BlackPast. Available at: https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1982-audre-lorde-learning-60s/.
[7] Liasidou, A (2003). Inclusive education and critical pedagogy at the intersections of disability, race, gender and class. (Ed) European University. P.169.
[8] Liasidou, A (2003). Inclusive education and critical pedagogy at the intersections of disability, race, gender and class. (Ed) European University. P.169.