For the past 15 years I have worked as a teacher librarian at a secondary school delivering Information literacy lessons on a regular basis, developing a range of activity-based materials and activities, changing the mode of learning from Direct Learning to Student Centered Learning. For the last 4 years I have been working as a librarian at Chelsea College of Arts at the weekends, and since September 2024, been working as an Academic Support Librarian P/T at LCF, where I am beginning my teaching journey in HE. What I would like to do now is use my experience and what I have gained through the PGCert, to develop engaging activity based sessions to deliver information literacy to students (maybe even staff) at UAL. I am now working with a small number of courses to help support students with their research, and have delivered the Referencing with Lego Workshop in full twice.
Positionality
I am a white female, who grew up in the Eastend of London. I was the eldest of two children, but sadly my brother who had epilepsy died young.
I consider myself to be working class.
My parents struggled when we were young, and we grew up wearing second hand clothes, not having proper meals, toys and other luxuries, like sweets. Fortunately, my children have not known this. However, some of my family still struggle. I have witnessed alcoholism and drug abuse and mental illness. And feel that I have a greater understanding of these issues as a result.
I went to university, the first in my family to do so, as a mature student.
I have worked in education and libraries throughout my career, and as such have received a good grounding in equal opportunities and disability awareness, racial and sexual equality. I have worked with young people with a range of neurodiversities, and some with extreme physical and developmental disabilities and their parents, and a number of transgender students.
I am open minded and respect other people’s beliefs. I am not religious, and like to think, not too judgemental. Having worked with people from all walks of life.
One of my best friends at school was Jamaican, and I have several mixed race family members.
Since the inception of the Empathy Lab, and Empathy book collections, I have been promoting Empathy through reading, as I feel empathy is important to engender in young people. At university, my own empathy allows me to see things from different points of view, and to have some level of understanding and appreciation of others situations.
Education should be both accessible and inclusive for everyone and I have worked towards this in small ways at school and by developing book collections that reflect the students in terms of background, ethnicity, gender, religion race. I want to ensure I can do the same at UAL by being inclusive in all that I do.
I don’t like to see people being treated unfairly and am beginning to think that I may be a bit of a feminist! (Smiley face!)
It has been my belief that learning through play has many benefits in engaging students in learning.
However, the more that I read, I begin to realize just how important Play is in education, not just in the accepted childhood play, but for all ages and increasingly in HE where the advantages are beginning to be realized and unlocked!
There is much evidence to support play as a pedagogy in childhood, but its benefits are far more reaching and a growing number of advocates and research has shown how play in HE can aid not only learning, but also mental health, helping to improve wellbeing and reduce anxiety. In their paper, the Physiology of Play, potential relevance to Higer Education. Koeners, M & Francis J (2020)
identify three key areas of play physiology relevant for higher education:
“physical and mental resilience; social intelligence; cognitive flexibility and intellect,” (p149)
and conclude that,
“the incorporation of play within higher education by developing ‘Playful Universities’ a place of learning that embraces some form of play, will allow us to promote progressive failing, building resilience and developing individual and collective creativity”. (p154)
It is the creativity in our learning and Teaching practices that will essentially help to develop deeper understanding, and help store knowledge in long term memory, rather than short term memory.
Joy in learning and creativity helps to counteract the fear of failing, avoidance of risk and other negative aspects of performativity and goal-oriented teaching practices. Koeners, M & Francis J (2020), Smith, Sophy (2019) Smeed, J. (2019).
As Smeed ,J (2019) writes, Referencing is a technical topic. It is fiddly and difficult to learn. Perhaps because it is so uninspiring, that students lack engagement. By introducing activities and play, it is hoped that the workshop will engage and create enthusiasm for the topic. Also, helping to create joy and stimulate longer term understanding/ memory.
Although the question of mental health was not part of my project. The importance of Play as a tool to help improve mental health, at a time when the figures are increasing, year on year, (see figure 1), cannot be ignored. Play’s importance to mental health is a significant benefit in addition to the enhanced learning benefits it brings.
MH statistics
Fig 1. House of Commons Library (2023)
In 2021/22 416,000 UK students said that they had a disability of some kind and 119,000 UK home students said that they had a mental health condition.
So, although this intervention is not about mental health, it could be a great way to help counter raising stress and anxiety of students and help those mental health sufferers in Higher Education
Inclusivity
In addition to the above benefits, it is also possible that Play can help break down barriers for international students too!
As just over half of the University’s students are Overseas students (50.7%) according to the university student dashboard UAL (2023), it is important that teaching is inclusive.
Providing activity base learning and supportive learning environments where students are able to participate successfully drawing on their experiences will help to provide Inclusive teaching, which is so important for international students. (Carroll & Ryan, 2006)
Teaching Excellence Framework
Smeed.J (2016) talks of the acknowledgement by the government of the importance of innovation, creativity and enterprise’ as skills to teach, as written in the QAA benchmark statement (2015) and the institutions role in creating Innovative problem solvers as mentioned in the Teaching Excellence Framework. These are all skills which can be developed through learning through play.
Susan Lapworth of the Office for Students says
“Our updated regulatory guidance on access and participation plans includes the expectation that providers will look at multiple areas to improve graduate outcomes for disadvantaged groups, some of which are: development of the curriculum; pedagogy; learning resources; student support; employability; and opportunities such as work experience, placements and internships.” OfS (2023)
In the Teaching for Excellence results, published in December 2023, UAL has been shown to offer good support to students through Academic support, employability, disability etc, as demonstrated in the recent Teaching for Excellence Framework results where UAL was awarded Silver for Student Outcomes. Bronze was awarded overall and for Student Experience. Some may say Bronze is good, it is better than ‘Needs Improvement’! But more work is needed here, I am sure all would agree. Some of that may come in the form of more play!
With student numbers expected to rise to over 1million in the UK by 2025-26 and an increase in international students of nearly 10% compared to 2023-24 forecast, (see figure 2), it is more important than ever to ensure inclusive teaching practices.
Koeners, Maarten P. & Francis, Joseph (2020) ‘The physiology of play: potential relevance for higher education’, International Journal of Play, 9 (1), pp 143–159. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/21594937.2020.1720128
Smeed, Julliette (2019), ‘Exploration: It’s a serious business Learning How to Reference – Playfully’, in Alison James and Chrissi Nerantzi (eds) The Power of Play in Higher Education creativity in Tertiary Learning. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, pp307-315.
Smith, Sophy (2019), ‘Exploration: Play in Practice – Innovation through play in the Postgraduate curriculum’, in by Alison James and Chrissi Nerantzi (eds) The Power of Play in Higher Education creativity in Tertiary Learning. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.57-66.
One of the joys of using MS forms to collect data is that a lot of the analysis work is done for you. The data is sorted and visualized into nice graphs. I did not have to go through and sort and categorize the data to form data sets as I would have if collecting the data manually using paper questionnaires or feedback forms and entering onto a spread sheet to generate graphs and pie charts and the like. Although, I did for question 2, where it could be seen that there was a reoccurring theme to student’s answers
Question 2
Over half of the students who answered this question mentioned the order in which to cite, as something that they had learned.
5/8 = 63 % represented visually here
Question 3. What do you feel you need more practice with? The answers here were more varied, and it was not possible to find a pattern or reoccurring theme, however 2 students out of the 10 did mention images. I would have been very happy if they all said, ‘remembering to reference as I go’! As one student did.
Question 4. What will you remember from this workshop? Four student’s answers included referencing, and five LEGO. MS Forms produced the following Insight:
Question 5. Was anything completely new to you, puzzling or surprising? Not everyone answered this question, but of the 8 who did, 6 said no. As most of the students were already familiar with referencing, this session was more of a refresher. But hopefully a good one!
Question 6. Reflecting on your experience, at what point in the session did you feel most involved? There were 9 responses to this question, and 5 said the LEGO, however, looking at all of the responses, there were four students who mentioned the practice, using LEGO to reference. So, I am pleased with this response too.
Question 7.
All ten respondents answered this question. To me this implies that this question was a more straight forward question for everyone to answer. Everyone felt confident in answering the question. All of the responses were positive, and seven students stated that they found the session ‘fun and engaging’. I will take that!
Question 8. Do you have any suggestions for us to improve future events? There were two responses for this question, both I don’t knows.
Sometimes it is what hasn’t been answered that is important. Maybe the fact that not many answered this question is a good thing, and they left it blank because they enjoyed the workshop so much. I wish!! Or, maybe just too shy to make suggestions.
Question 9. There were ten respondents to this question too, and all positive, stating that the workshop had increased student’s confidence equally by a little or a lot.
The final question was about recommending to a friend. I would have liked this to have been a better response. In the graph I was disappointed. But I that is due to the way the data is represented.
If you look at the raw data
I think that this is still a positive response as all of the scores are 6 or above. The graph produced by forms was, I felt, in this case a little misleading. Out of a possible score 90 the question scored 73. I think that is a good result.
So I guess it just goes to show that Forms is not totally reliable and that you should still check the analysis that it is providing. Or am I just clutching at straws? What do you think?
Are you wondering what happened to question 1? Or have I totally bored you with all of this information? Well, I saved the best to last! Did you enjoy today’s session? There were 10 responses, all positive.
Can referencing be fun? Yes! After this feedback I believe that I can say with a little more certainty that Referencing can be fun, and I am not the only person working in HE to have found that LEGO has an amazing array of uses in teaching. These can be seen in the number of STEM LEGO sets that are now produced, and over the last decade the growth in LEGO Serious Play as a teaching tool in Higher Education.
These are just a few of those teaching with Lego:
Carina Buckley – Southampton
Dan Swanton – Edinburgh
Bianca Fox– Sussex
Andy Legg – Chichester (watch Andy’s video below)
and of course UAL to name but a few
References
Buckley, Carina (2015),‘Conceptualizing Plagiarism: Using Lego to construct students’ understanding of authorship and citation’, Teaching in Higher Education, 20(3), pp. 352-358. DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2015.1016418. Accessed: 28/1/2023
Buckley, Carina, (2015), ‘Conceptualising Plagiarism: Using Lego to construct students’ understanding of authorship and citation’, Teaching in Higher Education, 20(3), pp. 352-358. DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2015.1016418. https://dio.org/10.1080/13562517.2015.1016418. Accessed: 28/1/2023
Koeners, Maarten P. & Francis, Joseph (2020) ‘The physiology of play: potential relevance for higher education’, International Journal of Play, 9 (1), pp 143–159. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/21594937.2020.1720128
Leavy, Patricia (2017) Research Design: Quantative, Qualative, Mixed methods, Arts-Based and community-Based Participatory Research Approaches. New York: The Guildford Press.
Smeed, Julliette (2019), ‘Exploration: It’s a serious business Learning How to Reference – Playfully’, in Alison James and Chrissi Nerantzi (eds) The Power of Play in Higher Education creativity in Tertiary Learning. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, pp307-315.
Smith, Sophy (2019), ‘Exploration: Play in Practice – Innovation through play in the Postgraduate curriculum’, in by Alison James and Chrissi Nerantzi (eds) The Power of Play in Higher Education creativity in Tertiary Learning. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.57-66.
The process was, in itself, not too daunting. The main restraint for me, as I imagine for all participants, at this time of year, is time, being the busiest time of year, with new students, and inductions, board of studies, etc.
For me I had the added difficulty of starting a new job, with most of my energy (& headspace) going to learning a new role and delivering a good service to students and academics. The timing of this change was both good and bad in equal parts. I have managed to see my way through the process, but not as well (and I certainly have not been able to devote the amount of time), I would have liked, to the process and reading. I hope that I am able to cover the cracks!
I am sure everyone has similar stories as we work with what life throws at us!
The plan of action
The action plan didn’t really get off the ground. The nice spread sheet that I started and the critical path analysis I planned to do was left behind! The Action plan mainly internalised with notes here and there. I am usually more organised than this, (or so I like to think!!).
Timeline
One of the first tasks was to identify a group of students to work with, once I had finally decided on my topic.
18/10/23: I wrote to the course leaders and tutors of the 5 courses that I work with.
I had responses from 2 of the members of staff that I contacted, and the ball was set rolling!
27/10/23: I would be working with the first year BA Fashion Photography students. 2 groups.
Date set for the 16/11/23. I originally asked for 1.5 hours for the session. This would allow for discussion about consent forms, Harvard experience, fun rubber duck poll of student’s confidence of referencing etc, and more time at the end for feedback and comments.
1/11/23: Told the session would have to be 45 minutes.
3/11/23: Session date rearrange by tutor for 9/11/23. I week early! Less than a week to get ready!!
Fortunately, I had the first task organised, but needed refining and the timing need to be altered to fit in 45-minute session. The second task I had already ideas for but needed to get these prepared pronto! Along with signing off consent forms, Feedback forms, Ethics forms etc!
I am sure you have all been there. It is not a week I would like to repeat too often!
I made it by the skin of my teeth, it has to be said.
Since that day in November, I question now, how have I achieved so little? I have had 2 months to get this done, why has it come to the last minute, to get everything in order? As I flick through my notes, I realise that I have done quite a bit of reading here and there, and started to write blogs, but never got round to finishing them, and tying the two together. So, I hope that the rushed ramblings now make some kind of sense.
9/11/23: 2 workshops took place. Students completed Feedback forms.
Email to tutors and library staff observing/ helping with field notes, to say thank you and ask to complete staff feedback form
15/11/23: Email reminder to staff re Feedback form
1/12/23: Email to students to remind about feedback if not already completed and asked if anyone interested in group discussion/interviews. No Response!
As with the Micro teaching session that I ran last year, the verbal feedback and general feel was very positive. Both tutors in the room and Library colleague thought that the session went well.
Staff comments at the time and following the event:
“I loved your presentation”.
“That went well!”
“Students really seemed to engage with the LEGO “
“The session was simple but very easy to understand how references works, and it was very informative. Thank you very much”
Observations (Field Notes)
Most students were engaged with the activity. There was a definite buzz in the room. Especially in the morning session which was a smaller group of 12 students.
Students seemed to engage throughout the session, and all seemed to be enjoying playing with the LEGO. So much so, that it was difficult to get one student to stop playing with the LEGO and focus on the other tasks!
Most other students seemed to be fully engaged with the 2nd and third tasks too.
They look like they are having fun!!
The afternoon session started off with 12 students, but there were a few late comers (4) who missed the first 5-10 minutes, arriving at the end of the first task, (LEGO building session). I did notice at one point, one of these student on their phone, however, I believe, (it looked like), the other students were busy and engaged with the tasks 2 & 3. There was lively discussion about the ordering of the parts of the citations.
Some lively debates about order of citations took place
Student’s comments at the end of the session:
“It was a fun way to think about referencing.”
“It makes more sense, now.”
When asked if students were familiar with Harvard Referencing, most replied that they had used it before, but found the session a useful refresher.
One student stated that they had not used Harvard before, and found the workshop fun and informative.
Another student said that they liked the comparison between building LEGO and writing assignments.
I have found Lindsay’s Action Plan Blog outline useful in reminding me what I needed to do. There are unfortunately some elements that just got left behind because of the timings, See the Process Blog!
One of the things that I am really upset that I did not do was to get to feed back to the students who took part in the workshop. I think that this is a really important aspect of research,
and as Leavy, P (2017) states,
“it is Ethical Practice to share research findings.”p42.
It is not too late to do so, once I have analysed and drawn my conclusions!
Following on from some reading about Participatory Research, I began to develop the idea that I should do more to collect more data and involve the students more, and one of the reasons that I started to think about a post workshop focus group and possible interviews. Unfortunately, my attempts to contact students through the course tutors and directly were unfruitful, and I got no response. So the feedback on the work shop is based solely on the feedback and observation of the day. No further interviews or contact with the students took place, other than my requests for volunteers to take part in a group discussion or individual interviews. This leads me to believe that the workshops, may not have been so well attended had they not been timetabled. This also makes me believe that I am justified in believing that there will be no parity in student experience when it comes to information skills unless it is built into the curriculum and timetabled. Having information skills as ‘Add-Ons’, through Academic support, are great, but they only reach a small number of keen students, and perhaps, not even the students who need the help most.
The Resources for the workshop were designed for the BA Photography Students but could equally work with other students in my cohort. However, I believe that it is important to ensure that the resources are relevant to each group. I know from the time I have worked at LCF and Chelsea Libraries, that my colleagues are aware of this need and work hard to adapt teaching materials to the groups that they are working with. What is a crying shame, is after hours of research and updating materials, only 4 students turn up to a workshop, a workshop that the tutor has instigated and asked for!
The questions used are so important – yet the time given to this exercise was limited far more than I would have like.
The changing in timing of the workshop, bringing it forward a week, meant that I had a week less time to think about and sample my questions.
However, I did manage to get some feedback from others and did revise some of my questions (in fact most! If I remember rightly!!).
I did not want my questions to be too simple, not too many Yes/No answers. It was important to have an element of reflection for the students too.
MS Forms is a great tool for gathering data quickly and collating and producing nice graphs and statistics.
However, there are a few pitfalls too, See table below:
One such, and important pitfall is that you are not able to see when a participant has completed a feedback form, whereas if you have paper forms, you can hand them out and collect them in at the end of the session. This also adds a sense of obligation to complete the feedback.
Bias is another issue that can be associated with feedback forms when asked to complete by tutors or people that participants want to be nice to, impress, or if they like them, they don’t want to upset them!
Advantages of electronic forms:
Inclusivity. Allowing students time to use translators to read questions and take time to think about answers. I thought that this was a really important point, given the high proportion of international studying at UAL. Not all International students will experience a language barrier, however, everything that we can do to be as inclusive as possible is a positive in my book! These advantages can also be of benefit to other students too, additional time to process questions and reflect and formulate answers will work in many students favour, including neurodivergent students too.
Disadvantages of Paper forms:
On the spot feedback tend to be rushed, with little time for reflection.
Can be difficult to manage if large numbers, (even small numbers, if long questionnaire).
I have never undertaken a piece of research before, and was not very confident when it came to filling in the Ethics form, plus the topic of my research was not decided until later on, so my first attempts at the Ethics form, were very vague.
Having narrowed my topic and completed some reading, I began to develop a clearer idea of what my research question would be. Although, this too did take some refining.
Comments from Lindsay below, helped me to reshape and focus the question and the participants for the project.
There were a couple of versions of this, mainly the title changed a few times, and in the later version, I gave the option for students who were interested in being interviewed to give further feedback to contact me.
Interviews were not in my original action plan. But having listened to pod casts by Social researcher Rick Harris, who dares to challenge the status of the interview transcript as the ‘gold-standard’ of qualitative research, in the ‘Tyranny of the Transcript’
and video by Dr Ivy Taslima and Dr Fungisai Muchenje reflect on their experience of using participatory research methods in their PhD research, See link below:
I decided that more discussion either in the form of a post event focus group or interviews would be a great way to develop the data, and get more student participation. Unfortunately, despite my contacting the tutor and emailing students directly, none were willing or able to participate in Interviews or Focus group.
The workshop, ‘Referencing with Lego’ has been adapted from Carina Buckley’s (2015) article which I refer to in my blog Conceptualizing Plagiarism – the idea, which can be found here:
The first part of this workshop is based on the micro teaching session that I did with peers around a year ago, January/February 2023.
The Session had such good feedback that I new that I wanted to do more with the session.
The Micro teaching session was only short, and I was limited in the 20minutes that I had. I had always wanted to develop the idea into a longer session with further activities to get students practicing referencing in a fun way. Hopefully this session will be as successful as the microteaching session. There are lots of reasons for wanting to do an activity-based session around referencing, many of them I talk about in the blog ARP – My Research Question ARP – My Research Question | PGCert (arts.ac.uk)
The plan for the session was adapted from the Micro teach plan, and although the first part is essentially the same, I have made a few changes to timings.
The second part of the workshop is a little tamer, with me demonstrating some useful tools for referencing, e.g. Cite them Right and the UAL Visual Referencing Guide. Students were asked to bring along their laptops so that they could join in at this point too, so that they were active throughout the session.
The third part of the session is in two parts and is essentially a matching game. I wanted students to be able to create references for books that they were either already familiar with, or likely to become acquainted with, so I chose books that were from their reading list/s.
This part of the session was the most time consuming to prepare for and involved the tasks:
Find appropriate material to reference. A number of images from book covers were used, and students had to match the bibliographic data card.
Book covers Used
2. Copy to create several resource packs.
3. To create a reference for each of the covers, using Lego bricks. This was my original idea, but I did not have enough Lego. I wanted to stay with the Lego theme, so I printed Lego bricks on paper, 2D, but looked 3D, and added different parts of the citation on a different colour bricks.
4. Theses had to be cut out before the session, which was very time consuming.
5. At this point I was not aware of numbers and room layout as I was visiting the students in their lecture room. So I wanted to ensure that I had enough for students to work in pairs or slightly larger groups.
Collaboration is of course essential. This increases the fun aspect, and competition between individuals and groups. Although competition was not suggested by me and no prizes were mentioned, the competition seemed to be a natural outcome and is an important element of Game Based Learning. (More on Game Based Learning can be found in my blog “Blog 18-1-23 – Part 2”
Buckley, Carina (2015), ‘Conceptualizing Plagiarism: Using Lego to construct students’ understanding of authorship and citation’, Teaching in Higher Education, 20(3), pp. 352-358. DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2015.1016418. https://dio.org/10.1080/13562517.2015.1016418. Accessed: 28/1/2023
