COVID-19 has dramatically changed teaching at CSM and the museum is no different. Teaching has always been a core part of the Museums output and we are committed to supporting our students and staff at this time. We’ve been working hard to create a range of accessible self-directed online teaching resources for CSM staff and students to accompany our online teaching programme. Our online output will never replace our physical, object-focused teaching but we hope our new Moodle page and LibGuide will be a useful addition for now and for the future.
Moodle page
Our Moodle page is our hub for self-directed study. We’ve made a series of videos introducing key topics and methodologies and created online activities to accompany each of them. The short videos all feature objects from the collection, filmed and photographed in our study room. We’ve tried hard to give an indication of the kind of interactions you would have had in the museum under normal circumstances through the videos by filming the objects being handled, unwrapped and moved around to give a sense of scale and texture.
The Moodle page currently has sections on Climate Emergency, How to Read an Object, Emotional Readings of Objects and Playful Thinking, but more will be added throughout the year. For now though it allows students to access our core teaching methodologies at their own pace, maintaining the students access to the collection online.
The Moodle page is automatically accessible for students at CSM but we can arrange access for other UAL students. Please contact us if you’d like to arrange this.
LibGuide
Our new LibGuide offers different resources, looking more deeply at how the collection could be useful for students during their time at UAL and beyond, with examples of other student’s interactions with the Museum and a hub of other resources, written, audio and visual to look at in their work. We also have a new video on the LibGuide explaining how best to use our online catalogue, the first port of call for most research, which we’re pleased to share with you here.
The shift to digital
The shift to digital teaching has been a big shake up for everyone, especially our students, but as a museum, we’ve found good things to come out of a potentially bad situation.
"It been a really good challenge. It’s made me re-think my practice as a teacher. Converting my physical teaching into online teaching has made me think more about accessibility, what we really want students to come away with, and how we present what we do. The online version is like the concentrate, compact version of the full size model we usually teach with. All the good bits are in there, it’s just a bit more streamlined and edited."
Sarah Campbell, Curator
The shift to digital has also had positive knock-on effects for one of our biggest teaching sessions of the year. Each November the Museum stages a handling session for the Bigger Picture, a cross disciplinary project-based unit for second year BA students. On 24 November a virtual object handling event was held online for 100 BA Graphic Communication Design students. The session will be repeated for BA Product Design and BA Ceramic Design students in the Summer term. This year’s Bigger Picture theme was the Climate Emergency and Intersectionality, so we decided to explore the colonial histories of botanical drawings in the Museum. These seemingly anodyne drawings of plants are closely linked to colonial models of exploitation and extraction and we were very lucky to have a wonderful guest speaker, Dr Apurba Chatterjee, who specialises in the colonial roots of botanical drawings. Holding the event online enabled us to produce some wonderful resources using digital formats like the Padlet world map, which really laid out the global spread of the colonial project and how its legacy still exists today.
Things are certainly different at the moment but museum is still accessible to students and staff. We are doing all we can to facilitate physical visits safely and are still open to take appointments for staff and students up until 18 December this year, and re-opening on 4 January next year.
Image credit
Chinese Dreams by Zhiwen Tang, 2016
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Cancer by Tamsin Van Essen, 2007
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Hamster Shredder by Thomas Ballhatchet, 2007
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Meanding Portraits by Andrea Hsiang-En Liu, 2018