When starting to think about my micro-teaching session, I was already feeling relatively restricted. It had to be online, and the physicality of the ‘object’ would be virtual. I’m a tactile practitioner, most of my teaching is technical and physical, so the idea of trying to relay the feeling of a particular ‘object’ through a screen felt near-impossible. I decided I needed to go a different route.
‘OBL isn’t just about objects; its about teaching, too. It’s inextricably linked…to the promotion of active, open-ended, student-centered learning.’ (Cain, 2010) 1
I honed in on the ‘student-centred’ and wanted to think about the session as an ice-breaker, and something that got people moving, having fun in the virtual space and hopefully thinking about household personal objects within the context of the everyday, and object-based learning. Typology and a typological approach came to mind, and how that relates to our personal relationship with ownership of certain familiar objects. By definition, typology is a ‘study or analysis using a classification according to a general type.’
‘Throughout the modern era, photography has been enlisted to classify the world and its people. Driven by a belief in the scientific objectivity of photographic evidence, the logics utilised to classify photographs-in groups and categories or sequences of identically organised images-also shape our visual consciousness. In the twenty-first-century, new digital technologies and globalisation have radically transformed the applications of photography, making the reconsideration of photographic information systems ever more urgent.’ (The Order of Things, Walther Collection, 2015)2
The term ‘typology’ is one particular way photography, and pedagogic photographic practice has often been employed. I felt in prep, the reading for this session, Hardie’s onus on the use of museum collections within OBL disregarded photography, apart from some minor references to archive or photographs of the objects themselves; the importance was ‘to develop student’s visual literacy (their ability to read objects and make and take meaning from objects)’ 3(2015, Hardie) Reading a photograph is an art in itself and definitely tricky to convey online so looking further into typological approaches to photography, which were first used to describe Bernd and Hilla Becher’s documentation of dilapidated German industrial architecture in 1959, they are highly focused on these ‘mundane’ buildings as subjects, there for capturing a record of an ever-changing landscape, ‘typologies not only recorded a moment in time, they prompted the viewer to consider the subject’s place in the world.’
So instead of focusing in on a singular object I thought I could create some kind of virtual treasure hunt, interactive, where students could be ‘active learning…doing things and thinking about the things they are doing’4. I would design a hunt of 3 different objects they would have to find in their own locations. We would be able to, for example: find a set of keys, a very familiar object, something everyone has, but how when grouped together and looking at them all together as a ‘series of types’ the object transforms into something different, hoping to ‘facilitate small group interaction and discussion’.5 (Hardie, 2015)
The three objects will be designed get slightly broader, intending to get a little more personal, and self-reflective in nature, ending with ‘an object important to you’. This may create an obstacle however, as it will likely take longer for people to find (I have planned 3 minutes to find each object) or people may not have something suitable. We will just have to see how it goes…
‘How artefacts can surprise, intrigue and absorb learners.’ (Hardie, 2015)6
- Cain, J (2010) Practical concerns when implementing object-based teaching in higher education. Available at: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/127600453.pdf . ↩︎
- Wallis, B (2015) The Order of Things – Photography from The Walther Collection. Available https://www.walthercollection.com/files/press-files/TWC-Press-Release-The-Order-of-Things-EN.pdf
↩︎ - Hardie, K (2015) “Innovative pedagogies series: Wow: The power of objects in object-based learning and teaching”. Available at https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets.creode.advancehe-document-manager/documents/hea/private/kirsten_hardie_final_1568037367.pdf ↩︎
- Hardie, K (2015) “Innovative pedagogies series: Wow: The power of objects in object-based learning and teaching”. Available at https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets.creode.advancehe-document-manager/documents/hea/private/kirsten_hardie_final_1568037367.pdf ↩︎
- Hardie, K (2015) “Innovative pedagogies series: Wow: The power of objects in object-based learning and teaching”. Available at https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets.creode.advancehe-document-manager/documents/hea/private/kirsten_hardie_final_1568037367.pdf ↩︎
- Hardie, K (2015) “Innovative pedagogies series: Wow: The power of objects in object-based learning and teaching”. Available at https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets.creode.advancehe-document-manager/documents/hea/private/kirsten_hardie_final_1568037367.pdf ↩︎