Pg Cert 2024

The teaching environment that I work within as a 3D Print and Digital Design Specialist Technician is situated outside of course curriculum and all my offerings are accessible to all students and staff throughout LCF. My offering comprises of three main parts, one being group workshops which are my main form of traditional teaching, these cover multiple facets of the 3D printing world with a focus on aligning these within fashion. They all aim to train individuals with the knowledge and skills to utilize 3D print within their own creative practice. Another part of my role is to facilitate student use of machinery and equipment. This is done one to one after they have received ground training within the workshops. The final facet of the teaching within my role is to support throughout individual student projects, advising and enabling individuals to make the most of the technology in the most complimentary way to their own practice. This is done by utilizing digital design, materials, techniques and putting them together in a unique formulation.

This open accessibility and broad range of different aspects to my teaching means that my average group of attendees should be made up of a broad range of different backgrounds and people groups, representative of society at large. Whom I have the pleasure to get to know to varying degrees dependent on their individual study and work requirements. Unfortunately, however throughout studying this unit I have realized that the people-groups represented within those coming into my teaching space is actually really narrow. As shown in the below pie chart taken from our 2023/24 intake of students to LCF, there is a overwhelming majority of white students meaning that our cohort is already not very diverse and so we should be attempting to increase an intake of different people groups to the college itself.

Fig 1: LCF Home Ethnicity 2023/24

Having done plenty of reflection on this I believe that it is also a more widespread problem within the 3D Print industry swell as our university. The industry itself is a very privileged environment, where only those with the capital to purchase machinery and material tend to be able to break in. Looking back at the history of 3D printing it is predominantly white and male (with one notable exception of a Japanese Doctor who was not credited for his discovery as he failed to complete his patent within the correct time frame). I have realized that these are the examples I use within my teaching resources, when referring to the history and discoveries within 3D print all the imagery in my existing workshop slides and online space all show white men. By using these examples and not including other visual representation of ethnic groups I believe I am perpetuating this by subconsciously showing students who may aspire to be a part of this world that they can’t as I have no visual representation of people like them in my examples. My own positionality (as a white middle class woman raised in the UK) has exacerbated this, having been raised with many situations where white males are overrepresented and other people groups are not acknowledged, this is not something that I even notice as it simply feels “normal” to me. This to me feels unconscious however my unawareness is in turn its own form of White Privilege and means that I am still enacting racism through my “unconscious bias” (Tate, 2019).

Then when I move on to contextualize 3D Printing within fashion my teaching materials become slightly more diverse with examples of female practitioners shown, however even within this part of my resource, examples are limited to mainly White European women.

I believe that by continuing this underrepresentation of diverse people groups through my teaching I am actually perpetuating and exacerbating the problems of systemic racism within our society and so this is what I would like to address in my teaching intervention.

My initial thoughts on how to tackle this lay in replacing many of my examples within my teaching resources with those showing more diverse people groups and backgrounds however when started looking into implementing this I really struggled to find good quality examples. I tried a few different methods of sourcing these such as contacting previous students, asking around colleagues and industry professionals to see if they were aware of any diverse examples of 3D print being utilized well. I also looked up professional academic mailing lists to try and find something that was relevant to no avail. The only piece of joy I came across was one ex-student who is happy to send over examples of their own work. I believe this will be a great benefit to my teaching resources as this student’s work both represents a black minority group and highlights how black individuals have the opportunity and space in society to create work using this technology.

Having spoken to a professional of colour in the field of Colour Science, Dr Kwame Baah, I was struck by his story and it’s relevance to my dilemma. He explained that for 20 plus years he hardly saw any one else of colour in his field and then all of a sudden one year he met a few students of colour breaking into this work and the next year a few more. He tracked this back to a professor who had invited him to give a talk, the professor had taken photos of this talk and had used them to publicize the course. These images had shown individuals of colour that there were professionals in this field like them and therefore in their minds it became a career option when previously they may have felt it wasn’t an option due to their under representation Kevin Leo Yabut Nadal, Ph.D. (2012). Inspired by this one of my next steps will be to contact an Asian professional that I know to request that I could host a workshop to explore her work in 3D printing with students and talk about it’s relevance to the fashion industry which I might take pictures of and use to publicize my workshops, presenting both my workshops and the field as a more diverse space. This is something I would like to take forward with professionals from other marginalized groups aswell however currently do not have the contacts and so will be working separately to build my own professional network.

Another consideration which came up in multiple conversations with different colleagues is the application of 3D print in different industries and how each of these industries may have different people groups represented more than in others, for example I noted that many of the professionals applying 3D print in the fashion industry are female, where as many of those applying it in the medical industry are Asian. These existing groupings may give me ways to showcase 3D printing used by different people groups as examples that fit outside of the fashion field. I could use these examples to push students to apply these innovations in their own work in a new way to drive innovation within both the fashion world and 3D print industry. I believe this could give students exciting new opportunities and different ways to look at their work which would truly enhance their learning and educational experience.

For my intervention I plan to combine the two previously mentioned concepts by hosting a series of talks about 3D printing within different industries. I would like to invite a different practitioner from each industry to present how hey utilize 3D print in their field. I would intend these practitioners each to be of a different ethnic minority in order to demonstrate to marginalized students that they could succeed by utilizing 3D print just as each of these individuals have. In order to do this I will be going to 3D printing conferences and events to network expanding my contacts from purely within fashion to a much broader group within the 3D Print world. I believe this will also develop both my teaching practice but also my own creative practice and own world view which is invaluable to me.

Bibliography:

Baah, K. (2024) Verbal conversation with Kira Oliver, 15 July.

Tacking the ‘BPOC’ Attainment Gap in UK Universities | Shirley Ann Tate [Video] (TEDx Talks, 2019)

University of the Arts London (2023) Fig 1: LCF Home Ethnicity 2023/24 Available at: https://dashboards.arts.ac.uk/dashboard/ActiveDashboards/DashboardPage.aspx?dashboardid=5c6bb274-7645-4500-bb75-7e334f68ff24&dashcontextid=638574232293078863 Accessed: 24.07.2024

Nadal, K. (2021) ‘Why Representation Matters and Why It’s Still Not Enough’ Psychology for the People Blog, December 2021. Available at: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psychology-the-people/202112/why-representation-matters-and-why-it-s-still-not-enough Accessed: 24.07.2024