Storying the Self as/in Pedagogic Practice (Reflective Post #1)

Posted on 22nd February 2025 by Jasper Zheng Shuoyang

In the paper “An a/r/tographic métissage: Storying the self as pedagogic practice”, Osler et al. (2019) presented the practice of narratives and storying the self, as a pedagogic practice to embrace the multifaceted perspectives and subjectivity in artistic practices.

After presenting the four pieces of narratives, the paper weaving together these piece and constructs the fifth narrative, “as a means of critically examining and elevating personal narrative”. Therefore, when I was reading this paper, I decided to write down notes of my thoughts and reflection, if appropriate, as the sixth narratives (See the screenshot below for a few samples).

I see this storying the self approach as a wonderful opportunity to document my learning process in the context of the field/subject I teach – artificial intelligence and machine learning (AIML) for media and arts. Over the past decade, AIML for media and arts has become a field in which new methods, new practices, new norms are proposed, experimented, and implemented every months, weeks, or even days. As a new researcher/lecturer in this field, learning and adapting to these changes often benefit my practices. 

Materialising, appropriating, and sensing making around new technological advances (Dix, 2007) has been a longstanding technique. Often during this process, my colleagues and I pull out the threadscape. For instance, we derive teaching materials (such as examples of works discussed in class), theoretical frameworks (such as taxonomies of approaches), and practical infrastructure (such as the coding repositories for each units). And eventually deliver these contents in a way to encourage students in the course to explore in this intersection of technologies and arts.

In this intersection, I often struggle to keep up with changes. I think narrating my own process of learning and adapting can be a fruitful approach to “weaving the threadscape” in this fast pace and sometimes disequilibrium domain. And if time is allowed, keeping blog posts of narratives, or documentation the development of materials, are definitely sometime I would like to experiment with in future teaching works.

References

  • Dix, A., 2007. Designing for Appropriation. Presented at the Proceedings of HCI 2007 The 21st British HCI Group Annual Conference University of Lancaster, UK, BCS Learning & Development. https://doi.org/10.14236/ewic/HCI2007.53
  • Osler, T., Guillard, I., Garcia-Fialdini, A., Côté, S., 2019. An a/r/tographic métissage: Storying the self as pedagogic practice. Journal of Writing in Creative Practice. https://doi.org/10.1386/jwcp.12.1-2.109_1
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Re-Materialisation in the Pedagogy of Computational Technologies (Microteaching Reflection)

Posted on 13th February 2025 by Jasper Zheng Shuoyang

In the microteaching task, I hope to explore re-materialisation, the practice of transforming intangible computational concepts (the immaterial) back into traditional formats, such as paper and wood, and channelling them into tangible experiences (Ferreira, 2022).

Context

When approaching the object-based learning task, I started by reflecting on my journey as a student and a teacher in the classroom of computational technologies. Object-based learning, especially with physical objects, is not a frequently used practice in this context, since the materiality of computational technologies is often deposited into digital data and virtual environments without their objecthood.

Although we often attempt to use real-world scenarios to demonstrate theoretical concepts, for instance, using the classic tin can phone example to demonstrate information theory, or the Alice and Bob fictional characters to demonstrate cyber security protocols, they typically remain in intangible theoretical scenarios or thought experiments.

What if we re-materialise these fictional scenarios in pedagogic practices? Will the learning experience benefit from it? Will this re-materialisation offer a more accessible language for computational technologies, particular in the context of art and creativity?

Preparation

I decided to plan a rolling dice activity to explore re-materialisation because it’s quick, lightweight and at entry-level. Rolling dice is a classic activity in mathematics pedagogy to demonstrate a concept called probability distribution: throw a die with 6 faces for a few times and tally the results – you’ll likely get uneven counts for each face even if the dice is perfectly fair – this is because rolling dice is always random and uncertain.

I prepared physical dice, papers, and pens. And also gave it a tweak: three out of the five dice are loaded (i.e., they are unfair and biased toward some numbers). In the activity, I asked participants to pick two dice and inspect if they were fair. They were instructed to roll the dice several times, count the results, and discuss their thoughts with the group.

I prepare printed task sheets shown below. It contains a quick brief, instructions, and two template tables for tallying the dice.

microteaching_task_sheet_zhengDownload

Delivery

The delivery on the day followed mostly according to the plan. Frst, I made some impromptu decisions on the day:

I was the first one to run the microteaching on my session, and people were sitting in quite scattered seats in the room, I decided to reorganise the space. I merged two large tables and asked everyone to join together. So this was turned into a group icebreaker – a group of two and a group of three.

Then we started the session:

  1. I distributed the printed hand-outs, and gave a quick introduction of what I teach and how this activity fit into my class.
  2. Then I briefed the participant on the activity – mostly reiterating the first few lines in the hand-out.
  3. Then I asked each group to pick a die and we dived into the dice-rolling.

Filled hand-outs collected from participants.

Reflection

One of the feedback from the participants was “I enjoyed seeing math concepts and jargon turn into familiar objects”. This prompted me to constructivist learning theories, describing how learning can happen when learners construct knowledge through hands-on activities (Narayan et al., 2013). This is something I always wanted to incorporate in my teaching.

I also see the opportunities re-materialisation can bring to the learning experience. Last year during the Mathematics and Statistics unit, I used a software dice roller that I programmed for this activity. But in this microteaching session, by turning it into a tangible activity and bringing participants to a closer space, they actively engaged in the task. And critical thinking also happened during their investigation of the dice – both groups were actively reflecting on the evidence they gained, challenging and updating their answers, and hopefully, learning something new.

References

  • Ferreira, P., 2022. Rematerialising Digital Technologies Through Critical Making, in: Proceedings of the 10th Conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics & X. pp. 134–147. https://doi.org/10.24840/xCoAx_2022_42
  • Narayan, R., Rodriguez, C., Araujo, J., Shaqlaih, A., Moss, G., 2013. Constructivism—Constructivist learning theory., in: The Handbook of Educational Theories. IAP Information Age Publishing, Charlotte,  NC,  US, pp. 169–183.
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Hello

Posted on 13th December 2024 by Jasper Zheng Shuoyang

This is Jasper.

I’m an AL at UAL Creative Computing Institute (CCI), I teach Mathematics and Statistics for Data Science on BSc (Hons) Data Science and AI, and Exploring to Machine Intelligence unit on MSc Creative Computing. I’m pursuing a PhD degree in AI and music technology.

I hope to use this PgCert as a point of reflection, reflecting on my identity as a researcher (my PhD works)/ teacher (my teaching at CCI)/ student (me being a research student)/ artist (me being a music composer and producer), to situate myself into this state of disequilibrium. An overarching theme of my reflections is demystifying the materiality of computational technologies in accessible language and inclusive environments.

I’m also looking forward to meeting colleagues from across UAL to learn about the diversity in pedagogic practices.

List of Posts:

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