The Teaching methods and Practices session were very engaging giving me insight into my peers, their practices, and how they use these to enhance teaching practices. Vanessa discussed how she used her lived experience as a nurse course trainer to best understand her students pastorally. Another colleague shared her works as an artist and expressed how she used her practice within her teaching area of Fine Art. Hearing my colleagues speak about their journey and use of their skills into transferable skills gave me confidence in my work and ability as I too do the same. Sharing my career practice as a Buyer with group discussions, critical reviews, and development and my skills practice as a Pattern Cutter Designer with photo’s to detail how my abilities can best be used in a similar way to connect with my students through objectivity learning and critical discussions.
I chose to focus my reading for this discussion on “Archiving critically: exploring the communication of cultural biases“-Grout, H (2019)Archiving critically: exploring the communication of cultural biases https://sparkjournal.arts. ac.uk/index.php/spark/article/view/120 ( Accessed 17th January 2021).
In this Hannah explores the effects of conscious unconscious bias in the archives how ‘The archive determines not only what material is available for teaching and learning, but also the way in which those resources are presented and understood’. With my practice and role as an academic, I found this very engaging as archives are often used within academia as teaching tools. Therefore as an institution, it is important to highlight the presence of cultural bias in archives. A focus on the critical discussion is necessary, dissecting and not taking archival research at face value or as truths because to do so is to continue this bias into teaching having an effect on people from diverse less privileged groups.