Thinking about professional artefacts - emerging from your practice

Artifact - an object made by a human being, typically one of cultural (or historical) interest. In this case the 'cultural' is the culture of your professional practice. In our course therefore, a professional artifact is something of interest and familiar to people in the culture of your professional practice. This is then used to tell the story of/ the experience of the inquiry process. 

The Artifact needs to unfold from your knowledge of your practice and from what you want to say about your inquiry. NOT a solution to your inquiry but a way to talking about what happened to people you work with in your practice using the knowledge(s) of your practice. learning from what you do. Peggy Oki demonstrates how she understands the world through what she does. 

Collaboration ... learning

This blog post is about collaboration. Here is a video of an art work. As someone who makes community based site specific dance work I see this as art. It could also be an tourist marketing product!!

Have a look at this and then watch the video below that about collaboration. I am suggesting this because it is a way of revealing how the material (the professional artifact of the art work/first video) is another way of engaging with the theory (in the second video). Often the artistry we do is the embodiment of the theory talked about.

Letting go of dominating and welcoming making together...Learning to learning involves collaboration and interdependency. 

The making of...

Discussion group

On Monday morning and Tuesday Afternoon we had our monthly discussion groups. We talked about how we create the critical narrative (reflective essays and reviews) for what we are doing. In Module One you are looking at your practice through three lenses – web 2.0, reflection and networks. These themes run through the whole course. At the end of Module One you need to write a critical reflection on what you have done. This is the same as Module three where you have done (the inquiry) and now you have to organise that into a critical narrative to let people know what it was you did and how you did it and what you learnt from it. So basically at the end of each Module you are doing the same thing: critically reflecting and tell the narrative of your learning and linking that to the literature on the topics you have encountered.

With that in mind the context is important: explaining the context in which you have been doing things is important. We talked bout how explaining the context helps the reader understand the thoughts and conclusions you have come to. If one person goes outside the building they can reflect

 ‘if you go outside the building you get wet’

and other person can reflect

‘if you go outside the building you hear a patter sound.’

The Reader needs to know the context to really understand the reflection. The first person was out in the rain the second person was too but they had an umbrella. So their reflections are more informative and understandable when you know the method they used to go outside the building (ie the ‘method’ of going out with an umbrella, or going out without an umbrrella).

This led us to talk about the importance of starting to be aware of you in your practice/study/research: being aware of your own opinions and feelings.  In turn we then talked about the use of reflection throughout the course and how it becomes more meaningful as a practice when you think of it as a way to better identify your own perceptions and the impact they have on your understanding of situations.

Lastly, we talked about how the Module Three artefact therefore also needs to give context and explain the inquiry process NOT JUST BE an antidote to something you found during the Module Three inquiry.

Please read and comment on the posts of other people in the discussion.

Kirsty

Lizzie

Ben

Lawrence

Jessica

Lois-May

Vicki

What do you think?

Adesola

Module Three tutorial

Our Module Three session on Friday was really useful. We talked about the three ways you are reporting on your inquiry.
Written essay
Professional artefact
Oral presentation

Each of these are forms for telling the whole story of your inquiry.
They all should include why you did it what you intended to do
What happened (the data)
What, what happened (the data) told you when you analysis it and triangulated with the literature and your own Professional practice experiences.
How it has impacted on your professional practice.

The artifact is not the result of the inquiry - The artifact is another way of saying what you say in the essay. It is just a professional artifact - 'a thing' that other professionals like yourself will engage with and understand.

Holly's inquiry has been about mapping how people get jobs in, get casted etc in the Musical Theatre industry - she is thinking of telling the story of her inquiry through designing a musical(thinking about lighting design to represent understanding, and staging to represent how things emerged and moving through the steps of the inquiry. 

Tim's inquiry has been about staying healthy on a cruise ship. She noticed her peers play a lot of video games in their spare time. He is retelling the inquiry through the levels of a video game where people can power up on healthy choices (like eating a good breakfast one of the themes that emerged), and loose power when they make bad choices (like not warming up properly - one of the themes that emerged in the inquiry).

We also talked about how important it is to be able to tell some succinctly what the how inquiry was about. If you find you end the story each time at the data being collected it means you have not yet analyzed  the data. You still need to do this. The end of the inquiry is not just organizing the data it is looking at what it tells you and why, from your point of view, from your professional practice.

Cassie is going to write more about the tutorial - http://cassievercoe.blogspot.co.uk/
So is Holly - www.Hollynancy.blogspot.co.uk

Have a look at what they thought also.

Module Three skype session: don't drown in a panic of data collection!!!

On Monday we had a Module Three skype session.

We talked about consent forms: Make sure your consent form has been approved by your advisor (Paula or me). If you had changes suggested to you for your consent form as part of the feedback from Module Two make sure you have made the changes. It is important the form makes it clear how people can contact your tutor is they have questions or comments they want to ask about the project.

Planning: Also a point that is often mentioned in feedback for Module Two is your timetable for your inquiry (the Gant chart). Now you might see why this is so important to keep you on a good track. At this point (Week 3) you might either feel like you have found it hard to get things off the ground, hard to get interviews or trips you have planned confirmed or maybe the opposite you feel like there is so much data you are collecting and you still have so much to go. Either way you can see how time runs away with you. If you think about it we have completed 1/4 of the term already. Having your timetable, that you planned to follow regardless of the crazy of getting into the inquiry is really useful. I strongly recommend that you see the module in three equal parts

1) data collection (including literature and reflection),

2) analysis (in literature and reflection continues),

3) communicating what you have learnt – writing-up the inquiry reflective report and the artefact and getting feedback on your draft.  

So that is about four weeks for each thing. Remember collecting data is just getting the stuff together you are going to think about, it is not the whole inquiry. The meat (tofu) and potatoes is the analysis – what you do with the data – how you make it meaningful.

Capturing process: Just like in Module One, you are on the journey of a module and you need to capture your process in order to reflect on it at the end of the module. It is very easy in Module three to stop posting blogs and not use your reflective diary as much. But you need to capture moments of the process just as much as you need to in the the other Modules. The inquiry is about the journey you take when you decide to find out more about the area/question/ idea that is your inquiry topic. It is not about you coming up with a definitive answer to something at the end. The process of finding out is inquiry. When you go down the rabbit hole of your question what happens? You need to capture moments in the journey to refer to later and to share with other for feedback and comment and a new perspective. Anthony who was in the session is posting about this.

Post at: http://antgifford.blogspot.com/2015/10/its-all-about-journey-module-3-skype.html?showComment=1444731390008#c310913826793685600

Anthony: http://antgifford.blogspot.com

Lastly, we talked about starting itself. In a ‘good’ inquiry there are lots of starts...! Firstly when you got your feedback from Module Two your response to the feedback was not “work done before you start the inquiry”, it was the start of the inquiry- It was the beginning of you thinking more about the question/area of the inquiry. Similarly if you started doing something and realized you needed to change something, that is not ‘starting over’ it is also part of the process of understanding better, of knowing more about the question and knowing more about how to go about looking into it. All the ‘force starts’, ‘mistakes’, changes that you come across are part of you opening your ideas and knowing more about the field so they are the inquiry. This is why capturing your process is so important each bend in the road is a part of how you are coming to know more about this topic and you need to make sure you notice the change and capture that moment before you move on. Otherwise, just like a physical journey, when you look back at what you have done you will only be able to see as far as the last bend in the road, but you know the whole journey was much longer than that.

Remember it is not about ‘discovering’ a solution to a problem – the inquiry is about you finding out more and in order to do so things are going to change. You are going to change.

Ilona was also in the session. She is thinking about different ways of seeing in her inquiry.

Ilona: http://ilonamolnar.blogspot.co.uk  . We talked about different ways of capturing the moments of your inquiry. Your blogs do not all have to be words. The way you capture an idea reflects your relationship with the idea itself (remember that for when we talk about/think about the Professional Artefact).   

OK keep going….

Adesola

PLEASE READ - Module Three

Re: the artefact ……….Indicative word count of 3000
Indicative here means the same value as 3000 words
or
the same amount of effort as writing a paper that was 3000 words long!!!

Please do NOT make your artefact another set of words you are already writing a reflective essay. Enough with the words already you're an artists, creative person….

Remember in Module One: Howard Gardner’s work, 

Communication that uses languages such as naturalistic, bodily kinaesthetic, interpersonal, interpersonal, verbal linguistic, logical mathematics, existential, spatial visual, and musical.

In your professional practice do people use verbal linguistics to explain things OR do they move, sing, act feel, chat, draw to explain ideas to each other. Use the language of your practice NOT WORDS