Young-Jin's PGCert blog

This week, I had an opportunity to observe a microteaching session. The person I observed was to deliver a 20-minute session on a topic of their interest. Luckily, I had reasons to be excited. I have always had an interest in the arts (my PhD concerned the psychology of aesthetics and the arts) and the session concerned “object-orientated ontology”, an art theory I had never heard of before. The session consisted of around 10 minutes of the speaker giving a lecture on the topic, and 10 minutes of the participants/observers thinking about an object that would enhance a non-human-central perspective (for this is what object-orientated ontology is about) – some key phrases in this task included “vicarious causation”, “inherent withdrawal”, etc. As far as I understood, object-orientated ontology concerns the act of going beyond human perception in understanding the world. Art, through artists such as Pierre Huyge and Pamela Rosenkranz (image below), can play a major role in going beyond human-orientated perception to a more object-orientated perception.

The experience was enriching, and I felt I learnt the importance of detaching ourselves from a human-centric perspective in our perception of the world. In fact, I believe object-orientated ontology represents a major intellectual movement nowadays. For example, in a research seminar, I recently came across “posthuman research” (e.g., Ulmer, 2017), which, similarly, postulates the importance of going beyond human-orientated understandings of the world when doing academic research (that said, one can always be skeptical. What are the limits of non-human-centric thinking when these activities are created by humans in the first place?).

However, what piqued my interest was the number of jargon that was used during the session. There came a point where my attention was waning because I could not understand some of the terminologies being used – coming from a science background, I had no reference point nor the vocabulary.

This got me thinking about my own lectures in statistics. Statistics is full of jargon, e.g., degrees of freedom, sampling distribution, central limit theorem, t-test, etc. For my students, many of whom do not come from a mathematical background, the encountering of such jargon must be a daunting experience. Relatedly, I always had in the back of my mind that good explanations (in a standard lecture rather than in a cramped 20-minutes microteaching session) consist of the minimisation of jargon; where jargons are necessary, each jargon should be explained in the plainest language possible. My ideas were reinforced during the microteaching observation. Moving forward, I will think more about the importance of clarity and simplicity in the face of academia, which is unfortunately inundated with jargon.

Word count: 434

Reference

Ulmer, J.B., 2017. Posthumanism as research methodology: Inquiry in the Anthropocene. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 30(9), pp.832-848.

In December, prior to the winter break, I attended the induction session for the PGCert in Academic Practice. Exploring the TPP unit brief, alongside being introduced to the unit in person through the course leader Lindsay, I learnt the aims of the Theories, Policies, and Practice (TPP) unit. Specifically, the unit serves to fulfil three key reflections, namely to “Know and respond to your students’ diverse needs”, to “Plan for and support student learning”, and to “Assess and/or give feedback for learning.” The unit will progress through various modes of assessment, including peer observation, tutor observation, group work with peers, and self-reflection.

Having learnt the learning outcomes of the unit (and beyond), I am excited to embark on this journey. My whole life, I have been associated with schools and universities as a student. In these years, I have been taught in varying teaching contexts and teachers. In terms of my own teaching experience, I have taught since 2016 (whilst still a PhD student). However, regardless of the varying teaching contexts as a student and teaching capacity, this is my first time dipping my foot into the field of pedagogy, where I have an opportunity to learn about learning.

Is there an art and science to pedagogy, and what are my expectations? As someone who is actively involved with the planning and execution of teaching (I am course leading the MSc Applied Psychology in Fashion at LCF), this course will give me an opportunity to think about my own teaching practices. Especially since I specialise in teaching research methodology and statistics – considered by many to be a rather unforgiving, dry subject – I will try to find ways to bring a sense of humanity, fun, and interaction into the classroom, without, of course, sacrificing academic integrity. Perhaps my learning process in this course is akin to what psychologists call metacognition (see figure below, courtesy of Queen’s University; https://shorturl.at/hBGS9), which concerns the act of thinking about one’s own thinking and learning. Some have said that a heightened awareness of one’s thinking may have benefits for learning (Veenam, Hout-Wolters, & Afflerbach, 2006) – I hope this will very much be the case.

Word count: 358

Reference

Veenman, M.V., Van Hout-Wolters, B.H. and Afflerbach, P., 2006. Metacognition and learning: Conceptual and methodological considerations. Metacognition and learning, 1, pp.3-14.

The microteaching session I prepared was called “Colour Associations in Dresses.” Based on historical/popular documentations of concepts such as the “red dress effect” and Coco Chanel’s “little black dress” and the empirical literature on the psychology of colours in both clothing and everyday objects (e.g., Elliot & Maier, 2014), I aimed to both challenge and demonstrate the common psychological associations people have with certain coloured dresses. Another, takeaway message from the session concerned a demonstration that people are both similar to each other and also unique from one another – the two opposites can and should be observable in human behaviour, which is an often-overlooked narrative in scientific research.

The session was planned in the following structure: 1-2 minutes of outlining the structure of the session to the participants, 8 minutes of telling participants to think of and note free associations in relation to the following imaginary objects: white dress, black dress, red dress, green dress, and blue dress (where participants write down as many things that come to their minds as they imagine these objects in front of them), 2 minutes of noting all the associations in Padlet, 2 minutes of general discussion regarding how the session felt, 5 minutes of discussing the associations in relation to the literature, and 1-2 minutes of debriefing.

There were two notable deviations from the initial plans. Firstly, given that the microteach session was no longer planned to be in person, I had to improvise from using a real object to using an imaginary object– I asked people to imagine dresses of different colours prior to beginning the free association task. Secondly, I did not expect there to only be two participants. Given that part of the later activity was to discuss consensus across people, there was always the risk of being presented with two people who happen to be entirely different in their way of thinking so as to nullify – unluckily – any form of consensus.

Despite these unwelcome circumstances, all went to plan. For both participants, white dresses were associated with purity, wedding, and a form of cleanliness. Black dresses were associated with funerals yet also something chic/classic. Red dresses were seen to be associated with ideas of confidence and strength/boldness (see visualisation below).

I then went through some empirical evidence (e.g., published papers) to discuss human associations with certain colours. However, I also took the opportunity to emphasise the nature of human-based data: where there can be consensus, there will inevitably also be variations between people – either caused by certain cultural backgrounds (accountable) or by pure personal preference (unaccountable). The debriefing was cut short due to the time limit.

Some feedback I received was the following: I could have improved on time management – for example, green and blue dresses could have been omitted. Also, for the free association task, I could have done the free association task for each item one by one instead of lumping all dresses into 8 minutes – this may have induced some ambiguity in the instructions. Importantly, the post-task session did not include much discussion regarding the application of this activity in the context of fashion.

I agree with these suggestions. Should this activity be developed into a one-hour seminar session, I will most definitely take these suggestions into consideration.

Word count: 543

Reference

Elliot, A.J. and Maier, M.A., 2014. Color psychology: Effects of perceiving color on psychological functioning in humans. Annual review of psychology, 65, pp.95-120.

Hello world! Young-Jin Hur here. I am the course leader of the MSc Applied Psychology in Fashion.