w’en mi jus’ come to Landan toun
mi use to work pan di andahgroun
but workin’ pan di andahgroun
y’u don’t get fi know your way aroun’
Linton Kwesi Johnson, Inglan is a bitch, 1980
Introduction and Context
This report develops my proposal to bring students on walks in the area surrounding Elephant and Castle; inviting them to explore the geography; connect with the local environment as a practical and creative resource; and spend time together outside the classroom setting.
Through providing time and space to foster community building we can link students’ experience at university with the wider community in the area; and, particularly with neurodivergent students in mind we can introduce movement and offer opportunities for activities outside the classroom (Beames, Higgins and Nicol 2012) (Hamilton and Petty 2023) that scaffold learning through ambiguity (Orr and Shreeve 2017).
Drawing on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (Maslow 1946), Yemi Gbajobi’s presentation at the 2025 UAL Education Conference draws attention to thinking about “what students need, not just what we want them to be” (Gbajobi 2025).
Without basic needs being met, students have little chance of succeeding academically. It is from this understanding that my intervention departs.
This intervention is developed out of my experience as a neurodiverse learner returning to education on the PgCert and my experience as a lecturer working with diverse groups of students on BA Design for Art Direction (DfAD).
An activity I participated in adjacent to the PgCert, the Power Hour of Writing facilitated by Carys Kennedy–an hour-long online session where participants work synchronously on whatever they choose–made me curious to identify other approaches to opening up ringfenced time to focus on course activities without pressure to perform and with agency for self-direction.
I want to offer students ways to develop a sense of community, an atmosphere of creativity, and methods that support good mental health. At the same time, recognising that lecturers face significant pressures and share some of the same needs as students to connect meaningfully with the community in and around work[1], and to engage in activities which promote wellbeing and creativity, so my goal is to develop an intervention which supports students and tutors alike.
Inclusive Learning
The approach I’m taking involves considering the human needs of students equally alongside academic needs.
Through the Inclusive Practices unit, I’ve come to better understand that inclusivity relates to a broad range of factors, and several at once (Crenshaw 1991). From my own positionality and in response to the large proportion of neurodivergent students on DfAD[2], I’ve focused on an intervention to support neurodivergent participants[3]. Through the perspective of the Social Model of Disability (Oliver 1990), I’ve learned that reducing the obstacles neurodiverse students encounter can positively impact students with other characteristics.
Arts Student Union research[4] found 31% of students consider dropping out of university, and a similar number, 33%, don’t think the university cares about their wellbeing. Mental health difficulties are amongst the top 3 reasons students consider dropping out. The research also shows that across demographics students engaged in community activities at UAL do better academically and report improved mental health.
Whilst community will mean different things to different individuals, and the suitability of certain activities will vary from person to person[5], this research shows that a sense of belonging is a factor that impacts positively across groups and characteristics.
bell hooks draws attention to the role that “practical discussion of ways the classroom settings can be transformed so that the learning experience is inclusive” (hooks 1994 p. 35) should play in our conversations as tutors.
Recognising the classroom isn’t an ideal setting for some neurodiverse students[6], this intervention focuses on environmental changes as an inclusive shift.
Embedding inclusive practices in the curriculum yields benefits in bringing a conversation about inclusivity to everyday interactions[7] thereby destigmatising difference.
As described in a previous blog post 2, there is a dissonance between UAL’s stated aims regarding inclusivity and the resources provided for delivery. Consequently, those working directly with students are often the ones identifying, designing, fundraising for, and implementing steps to reimagine opportunities for inclusivity[8].
Walking is a simple; versatile; low-cost activity. A Stanford study has shown walking positively impacts imagination (Opezzo & Schwarz 2014). Walks can be structured and augmented in various ways to present students with opportunities to engage through writing; image-making; discussion; and social interactions.
Whilst emphasising process, walks will present opportunities for curiosity, exploration, observation, and reflection that echo aspects of the non-linear experience of learning through creative practice[9]. They will help collapse the division between university and lived experience, inviting participants to reconsider hierarchies of knowledge and received notions of formal education practices.
Students report have difficulty negotiating the ambiguity that creative education can offer up[10]. Orr and Shreeve (2017) identify ambiguity as an implicit and challenging aspect of creative education[11]. This intervention aims to explore conditions which support occupying the stickiness (Orr and Shreeve 2017) that might describe this productive creative space.
Reflection
“By queer use I refer to how objects or spaces can be used by those for whom they were not intended or in ways that were not intended.”
Sara Ahmed, 2020
Walking and creative practice have a long-standing alliance. I’ve been inspired by practitioners including Kathy Acker, Francis Alÿs, VALIE EXPORT, David Hammons, Mona Hatoum, Mihret Kebede, Pope. L., Ima-Abasi Okon, Nam June Paik, Adrian Piper, Pipilotti Rist, The Situationist International, La Monte Young, and many more.
When I’ve been engaged in practices involving walking and running with others[12] both as leisure and integral to my creative practice, I’ve noted significant mental and physical health benefits, as well as expansive creative experiences, and human connection through shared reality and emotional and discursive exchange.
Peer and tutor feedback noted the intervention has the capacity to scaffold students becoming familiar with ambiguity; that it’s deliverable and versatile and it places emphasis on community building. Colleagues drew particular attention to the way these activities can support students new to London in situating themselves, and the ways they build on inclusive approaches already embedded in my practice such as assessment methods and Non-Violent Communication (NVC) techniques[13]. Rachel Brown encouraged me to explore how, through collaboration, students can shape the walks and noted from her recent experience participating in an NVC workshop that she would have engaged more fully had it been embedded in a walk. Ella Belenky and I saw potential for combining our interventions for students to build and arrange image repositories through walking workshops.
A consideration with planning walks within the curriculum is to introduce different levels of challenge and to explore ways to maintain student engagement: Initially I plan on bringing students to visit local institutions on foot; following up with a walking documentation task; before trying more experimental prompts such as those in the accompanying slides (see Appendix 1).
Action
“I thought it would be an interesting site to do a work that didn’t require language, it just required an action. A simple action, and that was simply to crawl.”
Pope. L.
As I identify in my proposal, “These activities will provide a setting for community building; activate curiosity; offer students opportunities to develop their observation and documentation skills; develop space for dynamic reflection; support a shift in expectations around the spatial organisation of sessions; and reconsider the primacy of language through a multimodal approach to learning.” (Gibbons 2025).
Art Direction is a broad field including many contexts, practices, and media. Students arrive with wide-ranging interests and ambitions. It is important for student engagement to find introductory exercises that connect the underlying skills and methodologies from which they will develop their practices whilst providing opportunity for exploration around their individual interests and from each student’s positionality.
I intend to bring these practices in during the first year-one unit, Introduction to DfAD, with a view to implementing feedback from those students to develop exercises for application in other units.
I can envisage related interventions being tailored for different parts of the curriculum. The year-two unit, Public, Participants, and Audience, could be suitable to continue working with walking practices once some of the objectives have been scaffolded in year-one – expanding to explore other media such as mapping and 3D visualisation techniques.
Evaluation and Conclusion
bell hooks shows us the prompts to pay attention to inclusivity must be ongoing (hooks 1994). I found this to be my experience working on this unit. My understanding and capacity to enact inclusive practices in my teaching and day-to-day life increases as my ongoing engagement with this material is maintained.
Conversely, at times where I have little capacity, it is harder to prioritise these important practices. By embedding activities which support student and staff wellbeing into the curriculum, these often-unmet needs can become reprioritised.
Working on this proposal has helped me to see the wide-ranging benefits this intervention could bring to students and staff. It’s helped me better connect my values and academic practice, centring community building; mental health; inclusivity; and creativity through empathic, mindful, and playful activities.
Evaluating the effectiveness of this intervention will require obtaining feedback from students and staff.
Whilst student feedback anecdotally suggests the activities amplified through this intervention are elements which are valued and can impact positively on students, I will consider which feedback methods to use to understand the effectiveness of the intervention[14].
This intervention is a way of centring community building whilst introducing practices and theories related to movement and observation, taking people out of their comfort zone through contextualised activities.
It is important to work towards a wider pedagogic framework which reflects the values of enacting inclusion (Florian & Spratt 2013), beginning at a person-centred approach that values students, providing multiple modalities for feedback, considering ways to make exercises collaborative, reducing the stress of summative assessment, and continuing to reflect on the effectiveness and suitability of activities. As Pope. L. reflects on another category of institutions:
“Museums have a lot of chutzpah but they should put more of that moxie out in the street instead of images on websites.”
Pope. L., June 2020
[1] Anecdotally, I often hear peers report that structural obstacles such as fractional contracts and budget cuts result in few opportunities for meaningful exchange with colleagues, whilst workload pressures reduce opportunities to meaningfully engage with students.
[2] In our current year 2, almost 50% of students have an ISA.
[3] My observation discussed in my blog post 2 is that students and staff with access needs are not adequately supported by the broad stroke and standardised provisions of ISAs.
[4] The research by Yemi Gbajobi–presented at the UAL Education Conference 2025 at London College of Fashion on 1stJuly 2025–cited earlier demonstrates that students who feel part of a community at UAL through participation in the Student Union had higher retention rates and improved attainment across a wide range of demographic factors.
[5] I acknowledge that planning an activity that foregrounds walking may be disabling for some students. The social element of the activity may be disabling for other students. I will need to plan provision for those who are disabled by these activities.
[6] Studies evidence that neurodiverse students can find the traditional classroom settings challenging and unsuitable for meeting their needs (Beames, Higgins and Nicol 2012) (Hamilton and Petty 2023)
[7] In a year-two unit I ran last academic year I conducted a workshop with editor and publisher Kaiya Waerea where we worked with students using prompts from Waerea’s publication Access Questions for Self-Publishing: A Resource (2024) to explore various questions arising in the process of making a publication. This led students to foreground questions of inclusivity and to discuss their own access needs in group work.
[8] Besides workload impacting staff wellbeing the bureaucracy involved in fundraising may in itself be an obstacle for neurodiverse staff. Designing an intervention that might only need a risk-assessment to be completed reduces the disabling factors at play in the implementation of this intervention.
[9] Orr and Shreeve identify that “Conceptualising a tolerance of ambiguity and uncertainty as a threshold concept in creative disciplines (Osmond 2009) means that we need to consider ways to help students transition into the Art School.” p. 7 of 12 (Orr and Shreeve)
[10] Feedback across years highlights the difficulty some students experience in interpreting more independent creative briefs and moving through the uncertainty of creative processes. Academic Support tutors can help students to interpret briefs; however, in my experience a lack of resources dilutes the coordinated impact Disability Support, Academic Support, and course tutors have in their efforts to support students in exploring ambiguity in their emerging creative practices.
[11] In Art and Design Pedagogy in Higher Education: Knowledge, Values and Ambiguity in the Creative Curriculum (2017) Orr and Shreeve describe working with ambiguity as follows: “Where no known specific factual outcomes are envisaged at the start of the learning journey, the engagement in learning is a process of discovery and creation by individuals. Students must learn to manage and work through ambiguity to succeed in creative practice. This is deemed to be a threshold concept for design students (Osmond et al. 2010; Osmond and Tovey 2015) and is a familiar situation for tutors who need to reassure students that it is acceptable to not know what the end goal might be.”
[12] I visited Ima-Abasi Okon for her workshop at the Städelschule, Frankfurt in 2024 where participants joined her for runs around the city in tandem with studio visits. Sarah Ackland’s Taking Space women’s running group initiative has been an inspiring reference in its combination of feminist activism, community building, and an engagement with the built environment through practical and theoretical perspectives.
[13] Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is a communication method developed since the 1970s by clinical psychologist Marshall Rosenberg. NVC evolved out of person-centred therapy, and uses the four components of Observations, Feelings, Needs, and Requests as the basis for a more empathic and collaborative communication. Working with NVC practitioner Ceri Buckmaster over the past few years we have embedded methods such as check ins, and go-arounds, and, with students, co-designed shared aspirations and agreements. Whilst many students have benefitted, we have also seen some limits to these tools for students who are less comfortable talking about feelings, needs and personal matters in a formal learning setting.
[14] Methods could include online feedback forms; a focus group, informal discussions, indirect feedback through course reps; observing changes in student confidence and engagement; and through evidence of student documentation gathered for submission. I’d also be interested to explore measuring if this impacts areas such as wellbeing, retention and attainment.
Use gives us a sense of things: how they are; what they are like.
Sara Ahmed, What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use, 2019
References
Ahmed, S. (2006) Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham; London: Duke University Press.
Ahmed, S. (2019) What’s the Use?: On the Uses of Use. Durham; London: Duke University Press.
Ahmed, S. (2019) Use is a Life Question. [website] Available at: https://feministkilljoys.com/2020/08/28/use-is-a-life-question/ (Accessed 20 June 2025)
Beames, S., Higgins, P. and Nicol, R (2012) Learning Outside the Classroom: Theory and Guidelines for Practice, London/New York: Routledge.
Crenshaw, K. (1991) Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color. Stanford Law Review, Jul., 1991, Vol. 43, No. 6 (Jul., 1991), pp. 1241-1299. https://doi.org/10.2307/1229039
Hamilton, L. G. and Petty, S. (2023) Compassionate pedagogy for neurodiversity in higher education: A conceptual analysis. Front. Psychol. 14:1093290. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1093290
hooks, b. (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. London: Routledge.
Florian, L. and Spratt, J. (2013). Enacting inclusion: a framework for interrogating inclusive practice. European Journal of Special Needs Education, 28(2), pp.119–135.
Gbajobi, Y. (2025) ‘The Student Experience Jigsaw: Is education enough for student success?’. [conference] UAL Education Conference 2025. 1st July 2025
Kwesi Johnson, L. (1980) ‘Inglan is a bitch’, Bass Culture, [vinyl] UK: Island Records.
Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370–396. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0054346
Oliver, M. (1990) The Politics of Disablement. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Opezzo, M. and Schwartz, D.L. (2014) Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The Positive Effect of Walking on Creative Thinking, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition Vol 40, No 4, 1142-1152
Orr, S and Shreeve, A. (2017) Art and Design Pedagogy in Higher Education: Knowledge, Values and Ambiguity in the Creative Curriculum. London: Routledge.
The Museum of Modern Art (2020) Pope. L.: Crawl | Artist Stories. [YouTube] Available at: https://youtu.be/0N7OnQkch7s?si=95eTAuHyE1zXI4At (Accessed 22 June 2025)
Morton, T. (2018) All Art is Ecological, London: Penguin.
Waerea, K. (2024). Access Questions for Self-Publishing, PageMasters.