Every mark you make
Sabbatical Week T minus 2, in a drawing class
My sabbatical starts in two weeks. Nine months away from programme leadership, with a book to finish, papers in progress, and fieldwork aspirations involving Bristol and Stockholm. I am unclear about what my role will look like on my return having completed my three-year term as MBA Programme Director, with so many changes afoot in the University and in the Sector. I am hoping that a path will emerge as my sabbatical progresses, and I am deliberately trying not to strain at that and to notice how things develop naturally.
The advice I was given about the first phase of a sabbatical was to allow time to decompress and change gear. So today, satisfying my pathological need to be early and to be prepared, and even though my sabbatical has not officially started, I enrolled on a weekly drawing class. It looks to me like it may turn out to be some of the most useful time of my week, and not for the reasons I anticipated.
We had been sent prework to research the work of a particular artist, and we started with drawing feathers. We were invited to complete five to seven quick drawings, then a stylised one, filling a feather outline with pattern, and then a final warm-up drawing in a medium of our choice. We each had a fine liner, a dip pen and a pot of ink (which I tried and suspect needs more technical competence than I have) and a set of drawing pencils from HB to 6B. Then, after a break, we were given half an hour to choose the medium and the style we liked the best, and to make a final drawing or to finish one of our earlier ones. There were no rubbers. Every mark that went onto the paper stayed there.
I have spent a lot of my working life thinking about how people learn to act under uncertainty, and conventional teaching design tends not to serve that. So, I sat there being taught and reflected on the teaching.
There was no judgement. The tutor gave very little feedback and none of it was evaluative. Nobody was told their work was good. What she offered instead were suggestions of the kind that assumed you were going somewhere and might find this useful on the way, such as, “work on the contrast in the centre”, “develop the shadow on that side”. She was warm throughout and never once told anyone what she thought of the standard of their work, only commenting on their progress through the process.
Everything was time constrained. The session consisted of short exercises with never quite enough time to do them. This sense of urgency meant you couldn’t afford to dither, redo or second-guess. You kept going because there was no other option available. Anyone who has run a design sprint will recognise this mechanism and it was interesting to feel it as a learner in a different context. It was freeing, ironically, and required a permanently forward-looking gaze.
There were no introductions. We were invited several times to turn to our neighbour for a brief discussion to share, for example, why we had come, and that was that. This was interesting to me, as we still found ways to satisfy our natural curiosity about each other. I had not expected this to really be significant, but it was. It meant that I was not required to decide which version of myself to present, as I would have had to do if I had introduced myself to the room. I did not have to worry about what impression it had made. For anyone anxious about speaking in public, it must have been a considerable relief. I suspect the absence of structured introductions removes a barrier I normally build into the opening part of almost every course I teach.
There were no external standards. We were invited to try a range of media in a range of styles and then to continue with whichever we liked best. We did not have to justify the choice. Nobody's work was set against anybody else's or against an objective standard. We set our own goal and our own challenge, and the facilitator provided a structure inside which they were pursued. The only standard was my own.
The absence of external standards might be comparable to taking an effectual approach to education. We each began from where we were, we each decided what we wanted to do, and we each used our own personal preference as the standard by which to measure our work.
Status Anxiety. I found it difficult not to want to be the best, to not rank my own output against that of the other students. In a place with no need whatsoever to perform, I still felt the urge and found myself comparing my work with others. I don’t know if it’s about my need for external validation or just a hard-wired competitive streak or maybe both but if the habit is so ingrained in me, I should reflect more about what I assume my students bring with them into the classroom.
A strong need for external validation might be making me behave like a little yacht on the open seas, being blown wherever the winds of recognition and praise will take me. It might not necessarily be where I want to go.
This is the first of what I expect will be an occasional series about the sabbatical - what I am reading, what I am doing, where I am going, and what it turns into.
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