Recent Struggles and Thinking

I would love to share some of my recent struggles and my thinking around it. The following is three difficulties that I recently encountered.

Group Discussions and Plagiarism

A student has mentioned to me that she believed another student has copied her work.

I have had a serious talk with the two students after class. Both of them are quite understanding and mature. The copier admitted that she was ‘inspired’ by the other student. She agreed to remake her work; and now we will see how it goes.

I’m very familiar with the procedures of handling academic misconducts. Moreover, we (the studio tutors) have been monitoring their works so it’s usually obvious who the copier is.

The struggle I am facing is that the student mentioned that she is not comfortable sharing her work in a group discussion setting anymore.

I believe that students can learn a great deal in group discussions and presentations. The students are never meant to copy each other’s work, so I don’t think that group discussions are the one to be blamed. However, group discussions do provide the opportunity for the students to copy one another.

There are few ways to deal with that: 1) we can minimise the chances for them to see each others works, but also maintain the method of group discussions.

A colleague of mine would actually divide the students into groups according to a plan she wrote, so that good students are with the good students, and the worse students are with the worse students. My other colleague would actually put students who don’t share the same interests of works (for instance jewellery, womenswear, menswear, custom designs) in the same group, so they cannot copy the works of their groupmate(s) because the works are very different in terms of categories.

These are certainly doable strategies, but these are also preventing the students from learning from students who are better than them; and learning from students who make the same category of works. I believe a big part to group discussion is to allow the students to see the works from better students.

2) We could emphasize the etiquette of group discussion. I wonder whether it would help, as they should be familiar with the ideas of plagiarism/academic misconduct already (this is second term). Additionally, the copiers tend to be the students who do not listen much. Just remaindering them regularly would not make a big difference.

At times, the students are not aware that perhaps they didn’t copy from one another; but instead, they have looked at the same example either from previous students or established artists in class.

How much one work has to resemble another to be called plagiarism/academic misconduct it’s also a topic worth our further discussion.

At the moment I don’t think I would stop holding group discussions. The benefit of group discussions is worth the risk. However, how we can handle it carefully would request more investigating and trying.

Regarding Ukrainian Matter

A student of mine is Ukrainian. Yesterday, she has been coming and going, looking at her phone throughout the whole session.

I understand that the situation in Ukraine, so I was more generous and did not stop her. I have been in wars myself and understand the cruelty very deeply.

I have been thinking whether I wanted to address the Ukrainian situation in my class. However, I did not do so because I don’t want to victimise her or trigger any bad feelings. Furthermore, I am not sure whether I could address this subject matter delicately.

The academia is at times a very isolated place. We rarely understand how close wars and brutality – the matter of life and death are to us. We could think about a few questions. For instance, should we rearrange the students purposefully so that in the next term the Russian and Ukrainian students do not happen to stay in the same class?

Learning New Thing or Redoing Things?

Another colleague and I have been asking the students regarding what they want to learn. To my surprise, the students actually wanted to perfect the learnt skills instead of learning new materials.

I have been struggling about whether I should teach new things or let them do similar projects.

As a teacher, I always wanted to teach new things. For example, we could teach about video-editing, or 3D modelling.

However, we could also redo (with a twist) some of things we have done before.

We could do another stylist shooting and another fashion photography (in studios or outside) which are in-class activities that we have done before.

We could do a twist on it (for examples ask them to use a certain prop – bananas), but it would be a very similar task.

In the fashion industry, repetition is a norm. I do see value in letting students do similar tasks; and in allowing them learn from their mistakes from the last project. I think the students love to do the same thing (or similar thing) a second time because they love to do a better job this time.

However, in order to do that, I would have to give up some sessions on teaching new materials (video-editing, 3D modelling, etc.). This is becoming a dilemma.

In materials, the in-class learning has to align with the teaching outcome; and the part of research and analysis has to align with the technical part. If we teach video-editing, then we should learn about story-boarding and different kinds of shots. It should not be a quick lesson where they just simply hit-and-run. In this case, learning one more set of techniques and ideas is time consuming to a certain degree.

Concluding Remark

Often no one clean-cut method can just solve all the problems. Again, each topic requires further discussion and investigation.

Teaching a is very dynamic process. We can constantly try something out and learn from the feedbacks.