The writer and theorist bell hooks describes the moment we come to understand internalised racism is when we start to begin to unravel how many of our prior experiences and formations of knowledge about the world and our place in it are informed as our experience as racialised people of colour, and as people who are racialised as white. We see can begin to understand certain past actions and decisions unconsciously re-inscribes the value we place on ourselves or others depending on where they fit within white supremacist racist hierarchies. From an intersectional framework, I can know that I am South Asian, and even though I am anti racist and anti colonial, I am aware of the history of complicity of Brown culture to perpetuate Anti Blackness. I carry that with me wherever I go, I always need to keep learning, and actively resisting anyways that I might replicate whiteness and ingrained power hierarchies whilst teaching. I am aware of how every single one of us needs to be working on actively unlearning harmful things we have internalised about the world around us and our place within it. This is so very true of the learning environment. In the video ‘Witness unconsious bias’ it becomes clear, we are past explaining this away as ‘unconscious bias’, it is not enough to purely be aware of this bias. We have to be continually readdressing our approaches to students and their experiences and consciously taking responsibility of our positionality and how this impacts how we mark/treat our students. Unconscious bias is internalised racism. My journey into race awareness arrived when, as a queer person on my undergrad, I picked up Audre Lorde Sister Outsider, and it changed my life completely, to see articulated the specific pain of internalised oppression, the intersectional identity of gender, queerness and race, described in her writings, radicalised my politics from that moment on. This is where many of us, as bell hooks says, who are wounded, come to theory to articulate and form words and language around experiences we were unable to name.
Hahn Tapper (2013) ‘A pedagogy of social justice education: social identity, theory and intersectionality’, 
Pp. 411- 417
From reading Tapper (2013) I reflected on how important it was to create spaces of learning that were dialogical, created critical conversation and allowed lateral space for students and teachers to learn from each other, taking into account the Social Identity of all who were present. It is to acknowledge how learning environments can be co-created between teacher and student, and any hierarchies of knowledge be abolished. Tapper explains that “an ideal educational experience exists between a teacher and students rather than emanating from a teacher to students. A teacher needs to create experiences with, and not for, students, integrating their experiences and voices into the educational experience itself”. We don’t have enough spaces to talk about race in arts education, and the underrepresentation of artists and designers of colour specifically at UAL, means students come onto courses and have their cultural and subjective experiences minimised.
Social justice education using Social Identity theory, explicitly refutes the ‘Banking theory’ of knowledge transfer, and embeds critical enquiry and theory that leads to epistemological curiosity. In this way students are actors in their own agency and empowered in their learning spaces. We give them tools to speak, rather than limit the parameters of what is to be observed. Tapper explains how this way of teaching takes into account people’s intersectional backgrounds, and names the power dynamics present in the institution of the university. This is illustrated in the pillars of Pedagogy of Social Justice education below in fig 1.
Dialogic spaces are not centred on the one of the courses I’ve witnessed, and I wonder how we might go beyond a numbers game of just including disabled, trans, poc students on the course as visible tokens of difference, but do nothing to address their intersectional identities, or imagine intersectional learning spaces.
Retention and attainment in the disciplines: Art and Design’ Finnigan and Richards 2016.
From reading this report it is clear how much staff diversity has an impact on student learning experiences, by marginalised students as well as white students. It discussed how art and design school pedagogy has been focused on the crit format, and also one to one tutorials where tutors give feedback after the student has done the work, and this causes a lot of low scores for the national student satisfaction survey, as students are not taught per se, and how this disproportionately affects working class, poc and disabled students the most. Instead student centered teaching practices and dialogic spaces would instead help the art and design learning environment to hold space for students of varying experience and knowledge, and to incorporate these in their work. The report mentions how the inclusive practice teaching module was formed, and created a space for tutors taking the module to reflect on their own practice and positionality as educators and to create small interventions in their curriculums. This could be an extended reading list or workshop or presentation. This type of process causes educators to see how these relatively minor inclusions to curriculum can change the context of much teaching being done to help dismantle and bolster social justice education practices in UAL.
Provocation – Courses are beginning to widen the students they accept onto the course as mentioned in Burke, P. J. and McManus, J. (2009) ‘Art for a few: Exclusions and misrecognitions in higher education admissions practices’, and to look beyond the existing caches of cultural capital that students from higher socio economic and class backgrounds of students possess. Though students recruited outside of these boundaries are not sufficiently supported with the student centred teaching approach they need and require to bridge the gap in cultural capital. They are still left to ‘get on with it’, no research skills session are introduced, and everyone is given brief quick group tutorials with tutors gasping for air with no breaks or provision to go beyond telling the student what to do to complete the brief. As mentioned by Richards and Finnigan, “However, with increasing group sizes, and the increase in diversity within Art and Design studio spaces, providing feedback at an individual level for learning becomes increasingly challenging.” (2016) they reflect on how the university being privatised and taking on more students, builds this ‘spread thinly’ teaching environment. This has led to strike action and represents deeper issues at play, that involve the financial management body of the university itself, that prevents marginalised students from succeeded in such environments.
Liberation and social justice means giving more time and workshop sessions to students without the prior subject background and assumed learning skills in order to level the playing field. This is underpinned by reading Hahn Tapper (2013), where he writes how Paulo Friere in Pedagogy of the Opressed, “explains the role that identity plays in the shaping and implementation of education. One of his most important arguments is that students’ identities need to be taken into account in all educational settings. They should not be approached as if everyone in the classroom, including the teacher, is starting from the same place in terms of social status and identity.” (2013). Intersectional approaches to understanding student’ multiplicities of backgrounds could bolster the student and learning experience in not closing the gap of skills, research, planning and prior subject knowledge they might not have, but by enriching everyone’s experience by sharing all knowledges in a collective student group. This would put less stress on the model of individual tutors trying to lift students’s work on a one to one basis, but encourage processes of epistemological curiosity and enquiry that enabled students to radically support each other and understand each other in relation to each other.
Admissions see ‘potential’ now as beyond ‘what students already know’, but how are intersectional marginalised working class/poc/disabled students able to learn how to tap into their ‘potential’ if we aren’t nurturing their progress in a person centred teaching practice? Dialogic spaces would allow students to speak to each other and learn from each other. This kind of methodology I have put into practice in other courses at a different UAL college, where I have been allowed the freedom to build a student centered teaching practice into the module.
I recognise myself in these struggling students, I remember not understanding 1st year, not knowing how to decipher what was expected of me, floundering with research material that was personal to my subjectivity, but didn’t seem to translate to the subject being taught in a very rigid manner. I am speaking specifically about textiles here.
Whereas on the Performance Design and Practice course where I taught in 2020- 21, I did witness dialogic spaces in action. There was group discussion where broader ideas of social justice were included and built into the fabric of the pedagogy and curriculum areas. Where a performance practice is specifically about the body, thinking about how we negotiate our bodies from different perspectives is a crucial aspect of teaching this subject. In a design degree however, cultural studies (or anything critical for that matter) is separated from the course based skills practice, and design skills are taught in such a way that students have to fit themselves inside a marking structure and European design/thinking process. This is what is valued. I personally find this hard to witness (and teach).
On other courses, such as at post graduate level at a different UAL institution, I was given opportunity to use dialogical methods to critique standard design pedagogy. To do this I led a module that incorporated looking at artists and designers from the global world, textile artists that looked at race, queerness, disability and gender, borders, nationality and imperialism. Artists such as Faith Ringold, Diedrick Brackens, Maria Nepomuceno, Mona Hatoum, Gees Bend, and Jeffrey Gibson. The students were told to “Research an artist from the list below – what do they tell us about the world we live in today, and how so through textiles”
This work allowed us to start with cultural ideas and processes that explored thinking process that began with material culture, fibre history, global perspectives, bodies, and tools that were textile knowledges not formed from Western design processes. Students were asked to incorporate a contextual history of a material, such as the colonial history of cotton, indigo, jute, etc into their work, and use their weaving as a research tool using embodied processes of weaving – back strap looms – to create a political narrative essay.
In this way students wrote essays that were deeply personal, and questioned their own historical implications to racism, slavery and empire. It was wonderful to see the end of the project come to fruition and witness how students had examined their own positionality as designers and makers to critique power relations in a global society and world, and crucially put these ideas of theory into practice – as Paulo Friere states. We need to practice theory, and theory needs to be embodied, we cannot have one without the other, or try to separate them, they must be intergrated. This kind of alternative pedagogy works, and we can see direct results. But as these are post graduate students, they are better equipped to research themselves and are working to get the most out of their degrees.
For the the first year students I work with – something extra is needed, and a plan for my artefact will explore this.
Decolonizing textile tools brief – written for Sept 2021
Decolonising textile tools workshop
This series of workshops with artist Raisa Kabir, will begin as an introduction to textile making, designing and using tools that are de-centered from Western euro-centric technology and thinking frameworks. We will equip you with the tools to begin to understand how to research an area of textile history, such as colour, pigment, material, technique or artist, from a global, ecological and sustainable viewpoint, and translate these into weavings, and explore the languages of design.
Too often designers are seen as removed from the centre of production, by starting with back strap weaving – a type of weaving found in many places across the world, such as Mexico, Peru, China, India – will be re-situating our perspective on textile making tools and machinery that places us as tools ourselves, where we will be learning how to be researchers, through our bodies, and material exploration. There will be small research tasks each week, where you will share and learn from each other what you have found, about a global textile artist, a material, a technique, a colour.
We will start the project, with looking at a variety of textile and weaving making processes that are off loom, low tech and branch from ancient weaving technology found across different regions. We will assess how cultural imperialism affects craft and textile identities related to place, land, culture and language, and how there are several strands of global textile thinking, where an embodied practice can innovate and make us think post industrially about textile design.
The project will allow you build a research folio, that you can then translate into a woven sample, using back strap looms, and begin to experiment with colour, texture, fibre, and using your body as a tool for action, reflection and research. We are decolonizing the way we imagine textile production, and to think about global labour processes and our role as textile designers, makers and producers in this time, when resources and materials are dwindling and how we can incorporate reducing our impact on the future
Key words: diaspora, migration, production, labour, industrialisation, indigenous, intangible heritage, technique, process, global weaving techniques, tacit knowledge “
I will end on a quote from Tapper (2013) where we can sense and understand how these incremental shifts can create ripples in education, but more importantly allow students to reflect on themselves and keep on questions ideas around power, and to continue this practice once leaving the institution. This kind of affect can’t be measured, but we can only imagine how these students will go on to teach others and share thoughts on questioning ideas of race, positionality, and contextual history. We cannot dream or imagine a future without understanding who we are now, and what we are the products of.
“Students who learn to internalize the responsibility they have to change the world around them and feel empowered to do so are repeatedly reminded that social change is ultimately a lifelong process. They are taught not to grandiosely expect the organization’s programs to hold the secret to life. Rather, they are taught that each program’s goal is to start this deeply reflective process but not to finish it.”
Burke, P. J. and McManus, J. (2009) ‘Art for a few: Exclusions and misrecognitions in higher education admissions practices’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 32(5), pp.699-712.
Sabri, Duna (201 7) Students’ Experience of Identity and Attainment at UAL, Final year 4 report of a longitudinal study for the University of the Arts London. Project Report. University of the Arts London, London
Friere, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the oppressed. London: Continuum.
Finnigan, T. and Richards, A. (2016) .‘Retention and attainment in the disciplines: Art and Design’
hooks, b. (1994) Teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom. London: Routledge.
Richards, A. and Finnigan, T. (2015) Embedding equality and diversity in the curriculum: An art and design practitioner’s guide. York: Higher Education Academy.
Tapper, T. (2013) ‘A pedagogy of social justice education: social identity, theory and intersectionality’,