Last week I returned to uni to do a Masters in Fine Art with Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. I’ve decided to keep a blog to record my successes, failures, high points and breakdowns as hopefully it should be beneficial to myself and others in a similar position. Also having a blog seems to be the in thing and makes you sound fairly important and internet savvy…so here we go!


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Continued from previous post;

The execise was slightly broad and vague and, as i seem to be finding with the group tasks, we did go off on tangent somewhat, it seems one person tends to dominate the discussion but manages to lead it off track, in this case Yoga woman got out a book of education defintions prompting another girl to abruptly tell her to ‘ditch the book’, which i found quite funny. The second part of the task was about…guess what…blogging! Yep that’s right, part of our assesment for this module is to produce 4 blogs, i think this is to encourage reflective writing and to discussion of new technologies and how appropriate they are within our practice. Good job I got a head start here!

Other events since my last post included a trip to an opening of a group show at the Crypt Gallery on Thursday that my new uni friend was taking part in. The space was amazing, i’d love to show some work there, i’m thinking some huge fleshy nudes would go nicely. Anyway the free wine resulted in my feeling quite ropey the next day and having to physically drag myself to the Serpentine gallery for a performance that our Fine Art tutor had organised tickets for. Itwas called The Party, I haven’t seen much performance art but I’m not hugely motivated to make an effort so I primarily went along to take the opportunity to get to know the tutors, unfortunately they hadn’t bought enough tickets and I ended up watching from the outside and then they left almost immediately after it was over…oh well I least I made the effort.


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Hello! This morning saw the first workshop of the first module of the PG Cert in HE titled “Introduction to Teaching and Learning in Higher Education”. We kicked off with a group participation exercise whereby we formed pairs and discussed things we’re looking forward to and things we’re not looking forward to this semester, we then formed groups of four and discussed the commonalities of our anticipations. My group was made of 3 people from my course (MA Fine Art with PG Cert in HE) ie-students, and one woman who i think is a yoga teacher. I got off to a bad start as I couldn’t work out in what capacity the tutor wanted us to think about our anticipations, the task it seemed was directed at those who are already in teaching positions whereas I’m an art student, a teaching student and a receptionist, all of which involve different sets of things that i’m looking forward to and dreading! After a bit of discussion I got the idea though (it was in the capacity of a teaching student-seems obvious now!) Myself and the other students were all looking forward to the challenge and learning new skills and also the chance to motivate others and hopefully see the results…the yoga lady said she was going to do everything the same as always and so had nothing to look forward to. One of my fellow students expressed concern about being subjected to observations, this made me realise that this isn’t something that worries me at all and i’m actually quite looking forward to the one to one contact with the tutor, perhaps this is because I prefer familiarity with my teachers and feel more secure than when I feel they don’t know who I am and I could potentially fade into the background, maybe this will influence my own teaching style. What does concern me however, is the inevitable insecurity and intimidation i’ll feel when meeting the students, they’re not that much younger than me and they’re more used to being in education than me so they scare me!We went on to discuss different roles; firstly we individualy wrote down all the roles we feel we’ll be encompassing over the next few months, again I completely got the wrong end of the stick and wrote down a bunch of roles personal to me such as student, teacher, artist, administrator, treasurer, athlete (riding my bike to uni) and then I got really deep and put friend/girlfriend/sister/daughter (puke!) Obviously as soon I realised we were talking about the roles that teaching encompasses I hid my notebook in utter embarrassment! So we then looked at individual roles and in groups listed the skills and characteristics required and how they would then be developed and which resources and support we could access.

I’m going to have to start a new post now because i’m running out of words!


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Cont. from lst post;

So I went home.

Well that just about wraps it up for my 1st ever post. I have a feeling I’ve done it wrong but I hope it’s been interesting for anyone who might have had a look. THANKS!


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Day 2 as an official blogger! I had meant to start this during the build up to the course starting but I went on a jaunt around Britain for 2 weeks instead, the photos and drawings from which, I plan to base much of my work on, more on that later.

So the course started last week (Monday 14th Sept). As predicted I was late and couldn’t find the campus and so embarked on a jog around Kingston and finally found my new peer group and tutors in the canteen, to top things off I then proceeded to get ink from a leaky pen all over my face…great start!

We all introduced ourselves and had a chat about the course, the tutors made it very clear that the Fine Art was the main focus and the PG Cert a sideline so to speak and shouldn’t interfere with the development of our practice. We then had a tour of the impressive workshops and studios and met the technicians. The sheer amount of opportunities these facilities open up is mind blowing, I got really over excited and decided to learn everything and anything, first on the list- welding! (if nothing else at least I could make a bit of money as a flashdance impersonator!)

Despite some confusion over admin issues (it has all been very disorganised and last minute leading myself and other course mates to worry about fitting it in around our jobs) the first day went really well, i was pleased with the size of the group and it was reassuring to meet down to earth people with similar backgrounds to myself ie; haven’t done much art since graduating and only just figured out what they want to do. So I left feeling very positive and happier than I have been for a long time.

We had a day and a half workshop to kick off the PG cert. Strange to be in a classroom environment again! There were about 30 people in the workshops, most of whom were already teaching and had come from the nhs or different parts of the university. Despite occasionally feeling a bit out of my depth the workshop worked really well and although some excercises were geared towards the non-students with teaching experience, it didn’t interfere too much and I felt that I had picked up a lot.

Other recent developments include; being forced to join facebook, starting a new job as part time receptionist at the British Heart Foundation, which is going well and involves wearing a Britney headset, which is fun! I did attempt to go in to uni yesterday afternoon as the ‘facebook group’ had made loose arrangements to meet up and have a go in the print workshop, however no one else turned up so I wandered around aimlessly for a while before having a play around with some of the aformentioned ‘Britain Jaunt’ photos on photoshop, but wasn’t sure want I was doing or what I really wanted to do.


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