Learning in and through the community:

A Westminster Institute of Education perspective on undergraduate scholarship and research

Phil Whitehead
Westminster Institute

Background

The nature of much of the work at Westminster Institute of Education is practitioner based, practice led and informed by close links notions of ‘community’. One programme has this aspect in its title: Performing Arts: Community and Education. The suffix defines both the landscape for the course and the direction in which tutors aim the student experience. Also central is the view expressed by the Arts Council of England in their publication, ‘Ambitions for the Arts’ (ACE 2003) , where they assert ‘the arts have power to transform lives, communities and opportunities for people throughout the country’. We want our students to investigate this transformational power by making or 'realising' performance work within specific community settings. This article draws on examples from Performing Arts that highlight both the potential for learning through a research-based approach and some emerging creative tensions and practical considerations when working in community settings

Examples of community projects with research implications/possibilities

Six students participating in a stage 2 module on storytelling and performance poetry spent ten Friday evenings in writing and performance workshops in a Category B prison. They worked with about ten inmates who were convicted of serious and violent crimes, including ‘lifers’. The project was funded to support the participation of Steve Larkin, an Oxford-based slam poet and Hammer & Tongue auteur. The students, Steve, and the participating inmates helped to put on a Slam Poetry Show, performing their own work and participating with inmates to an audience of 80 visitors and ‘residents’.
Seven students devised and performed their own music-theatre-style piece to an audience of patients from the Centre for Enablement at the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre (NOC).
Four Spanish exchange students devised a short play based on the first love of Pablo Neruda following research into his published letters and poems. They performed in English (with the poems in Spanish) to an Oxford residential care home. STAX, the Brookes Students’ Union volunteer organisation, encouraged them and helped find a welcoming venue.

A number of contentious issues emerged from the project examples above that relate to research-based learning with a community focus. These issues are currently widely debated within the national performing arts field (see PALATINE 2005).

1. The issue of working in community contexts

Students’ work ‘in the field’ - in hospitals, prisons, schools, the urban street - is premised on the importance of experiential learning (Kolb 1984) and constructivism as discussed by authors such as Kolb (1984), Vygotsky (1962) and Laurillard (2002). Moon (2001) reminds us this is also seen as central to developing inquiry and reflective practice though it involves risk and raises ethical issues as well as a labyrinth of preparation, action and re-action, as the case studies show.

Prison project

In the prison project, inmate participants were fully aware of the boundaries between them and visitors and the penalties for transgression. All the students were security checked, had a formal security briefing plus updates from an officer at governor level. They also had de-briefings outside the prison after most sessions. Most of the students had experience of the prison from a previous project. However, around week 6 and over two workshops, an inmate passed a student notes of a personal nature. The student acted sensitively and maturely to resolve the situation but there were serious repercussions for the inmate and some sleepless nights for the visitors. The project was under threat of suspension.

Care home project

In a second case involving work at a care home, Educational Studies exchange students who were not performers offered material that was interesting, well organised and very well performed. The audience enjoyed it immensely but admitted in discussion afterwards to not really understanding either what was going on or much of what was said. The students' reflecting on their work responded with the following points. Baume (2004) calls this kind of reflection ‘reflection on action’ rather than ‘reflection in action’.

The care home was perhaps the wrong place. This led to much discussion. They were convinced at the outset that this work would be best understood by a generation familiar with the codes of etiquette and circumstance around Neruda’s writing in the early 1920s;
We should have explained better and probably on an individual basis what we were trying to do;
We could have spent more time visiting the care home and worked alongside the residents to create the piece, involving them perhaps more in the final work;
We felt it was appropriate to perform in Spanish for part of the piece but should have provided a translation and explored much earlier how this may best have been understood by the residents;
The presentation of ideas (in this case biographical reconstruction through a dramatic format) was one that was not usual in the educational classroom context but was something we would consider including in our future work.

Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre (NOC)

In the NOC session, the students presented their work as a celebration of life and vitality. It was a good piece of performance work and at one level was well received yet at another, raised a number of questions in the post-event feedback concerning the students’ intention and general understanding of context for the work. This resulted in a fruitful if heated discussion between the three tutors present, between the tutors and the NOC staff and between the tutors and the students. Unfortunately, there was no opportunity for discussions between patients and these groups. Tutors challenged the students’ references to ‘when you have recovered’ to an audience of people who, in the main, would not. What about the juxtaposition of this very able-bodied work and the devastated physical bodies of some members of the audience. Some of the group also presented a distinct and overt Christian message during and at the end of their performance which tutors viewed as inappropriate.

Case study conclusions

Does the above constitute appropriate engagement with the local/regional community by staff and students at Oxford Brookes University? And if it does, how do we nevertheless deal with both the risky elements and the ethical dilemmas it raises?

At a recent meeting at the prison (July 2005) the Slam project was evaluated as an effective, worthwhile and valuable contribution to the rehabilitative and therapeutic regime such that a further grant has been made for continuation in 2005-06. However tutors are considering cutting back on student involvement to reduce the risk of personal attachment.

Certainly the view of health and arts practitioners was very supportive and encouraging of this type of activity though the lively debates continue. For example, the dilemmas surfaced at the July 2005 Arts and Health Network Conference organised by the School of Health and Social Care.

It is my view that it is exactly at this nexus of creative tension, risk, dilemma and emotion facilitated by the community context that opportunities for the construction of knowledge and understanding and deep learning occur. But there are plenty of qualifiers, including a more research-focused, ethics considered approach and an in-depth consideration of both project and individual risk assessment. (See Oxford Brookes guidance on risk and on ethics approval for research.)

This leads directly into the research issue.

2. Issues of research, scholarly activity or both?

Is this project work scholarly? Is it research-led, research-tutored, research-oriented or, as intended, inquiry and research-based as Jenkins (2005) suggests?

Scholarly, yes. Soon or immediately after the work, students must submit individual, written, critical evaluations using a range of journal, critical performance review and report formats. The results invariably provide evidence of deep learning and reflective thinking.

However, the research element is far more problematic. Not only is it much less clear whether, before the event, students were engaged in a research process or activity with the possibility of identifiable and valid research outcomes, but their perception of this work as ‘research projects’ is also fuzzy. In almost all cases the students reported that they should have completed more ‘research’ prior to their performed work in the community context, but their written work and comments showed that by ‘research’, they meant gathering information about their audience and how this related to the content of their work. They were not using the word to mean investigating a central issue or problem that was being addressed nor any formalised methodology for collecting data. They were not doing what those describing arts research in community contexts, such as Staricoff (2004), would recognise: developing sub-questions or extending their knowledge of the general health-related context) to elicit a deeper understanding. They were not exploring further ways of seeing or knowing through performance nor to broader debates about research in the arts and the role of the practitioner as researcher (AHRC, 2005). They were making a piece of work and reflecting on their past action. It was less clear that they engaged in what Baume (2004) describes as reflection for future action and if they were, it was not explicit nor were we as tutors explicitly framing their reflections within an emerging, practice-led arts research paradigm.

Whilst the community and scholarly elements of these projects impacted significantly on students’ learning and contributed to the establishment of an inquiry-led approach by tutors, the explicit notion that students are engaged in research has not yet been realised. If we accept (and this is still a contested notion), that the relationship between research and learning and teaching needs to be more firmly embedded within the undergraduate experience, that there are ‘particular benefits’ to students (Seymour et al, 2004, p498) and that the student experience needs to be reinvented to include this more explicit relationship with research in the field, including students’ own research alongside that of their tutors’ (Seymour et al, 2004; Jenkins, 2005), there remain issues, tensions, threats, opportunities and pragmatics that we continue to consider as tutors. Here are some of the questions that remain, followed in parenthesis by the resources and ideas that guide our considerations:

Do we have a sufficiently rigorous interrogation and stakeholder-accepted understanding of the term ‘community’ in a local, regional, national and global sense? (Everitt, 1997; Schechner, 2002).
Why should communities welcome academics, artists, and arts projects, let alone students, into their midst? (Lacy 2002; Oxford Inspires/Evolving City 2005; Cotterall and Waldorf, 1999)
What do we mean by research in the arts, arts-based research, arts-based educational research, practice–led research and is it any different from other kinds of research? (AHRC, 2005)
How can we best present research paradigms to undergraduate students that articulate with practice – be that creative practice or vocational practice (and these are not mutually exclusive) and by association have relevance, currency and credibility; for example, how might creative processes (Schechner, 2002, pp188-225) be aligned to research processes (AHRC, 2005)?
What role can e-learning, and particularly Performing Arts’ student blogs, (Oxfordblogs, 2005) play in inquiry-based learning and knowledge construction?
What contribution could the research-teaching nexus make to employability? (See Seymour et al, (2004) p529 on student perceptions of benefits here).
How might research roles be best interpreted within a particular project or context: tutor as researcher, student as researcher, student research assistant, and tutor as research assistant/mentor?
What are the risks and ethical considerations involved in students researching and working in and around the lives of often vulnerable people?
What are the risks and ethical considerations in not encouraging this kind of engagement with the community?
How do we know? We need to evaluate this kind of project work, particularly impact studies on students’ personal and professional gains (see Seymour et al 2004, pp494-495 on establishing a typology for research and evaluation and pp529-531 on personal/professional benefits.

References

ACE (2003), Ambitions for the Arts, Arts Council of England, online at www.artscouncil.org.uk/aboutus/ambition.php [30.07.05]
AHRC (2005). Research Funding Guide (Criteria: Research Process) Arts and Humanities Research Board online at: www.ahrc.ac.uk/apply/research/research_grants.asp [30.07.05]
Baume, D. (2004), Reflection in Action – or not, Educational Developments, SEDA The magazine of Staff & Educational Development Association Ltd. Issue 5.3, Sept. 2004.
Catterall, J. S., Waldorf, L.(1999) Champions of Change: The Impact of the Arts on Learning, Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE). A series of studies on research and action research available from: www.capeweb.org/rcape.html [30.07.05]
Everitt, A. (1997) Joining In, London, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.
Jenkins, A. (2005) Linking Teaching And Research at the Institute (and Beyond). Notes for & presentation at WIE Research & Knowledge Transfer Conference, July 2005
Kolb, D. (1984). Experiential Learning: experience as the source of learning and development, Englewood Cliffs, Prentice Hall.
Lacy, S (2002). In Schechner, Performance Studies, An Introduction, London, Routledge; p. 226.
Laurillard, D. (2002) Rethinking University Teaching: a conversational framework for the effective use of learning technologies (2 nd edition), London, RoutledgeFalmer.
Moon, J. (2001) Reflection in Higher Education Learning, PDP Working Paper 4,available from: www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources.asp?process=full_record&section=generic&id=72 [28.07.05]
Oxfordblogs (2005), Homepage and links. Available from: www.oxfordblogs.net [28.07.05]
Oxford Inspires/Evolving City (2005). What’s Happening, April-June 2005, A Guide. Online at www.oxfordinspires.org/ [30.07.05]
PALATINE (2005) 'An Inspector Falls: The challenges of Addressing Health and Safety issues in HE performing arts'. PALATINE Subject Centre for Dance, Drama and Music, online at www.lancs.ac.uk/palatine/workshops05-06/#health [15.11.05]
Schechner, R. (2002) Performance Studies, An Introduction, London, Routledge; Chapter 7 on Performance Processes; Chapter 8, Global & Intercultural Performance.
Seymour E., Hunter, A-B, Laursen, S. L., Deantoni, T. (2004) Establishing the Benefits of Research Experiences for Undergraduates in the Sciences: First Findings from a Three-Year Study, Wiley Periodicals, published on-line at www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/108561292/ABSTRACT,
Staricoff, R. L. (2004) Arts in health: a review of the medical literature, Arts Council of England, available from: www.artscouncil.org.uk/information/publication_detail.php?rid=0&sid=&browse=recent&id=405 [30.07.05]
Vygotsky, L. S. (1962). Thought and Language. Edited & translated by: Hanfmann, E. & Vakar, G. Cambridge, MA:MIT Press.