Category Archives: My Project

Feedback from Fifth Intervention

Interventions, My Project, , ,

I would like to start this post by giving my own feedback for this intervention. I didn’t take part in it, obviously. But I feel like I’ve come full circle. Let me explain. For my application for MAAI we were asked to write about creativity. This is what I wrote:

Creativity is defined as the state of being creative and also as the ability to move away from traditional ideas, rules, patterns and relationships, to create new ideas and interpretations. I think this is so important as a lot of people struggle to express themselves with words. It’s seen as ‘weak’ or ‘embarrassing’ especially amongst men. But this is why creativity is so important and can make the world a better, and arguably healthier place. Being creative gives a voice to society, where they have the ability to say something and communicate a message without having to say anything. 

Considering I wrote the above when I was half asleep, I’m amazed at how much it still rings true and how my project ended up back where I started.

Now for the intervention.

Going into this I had no idea what would happen. I had no idea how many people would engage with it or be willing to create art as well as write about their feelings. After all, I’d already established that one group of my stakeholders aren’t the most open when it comes to sharing feelings. I posted the challenge on my personal Instagram account, as well as my photography Instagram account, alongside a post on Facebook. I also emailed it to people that I had interacted with over the course of my research in case they were interested and wanted to participate.

Feedback:

Someone who took part told me in person that they didn’t see the point in this and that it was just one more thing for them to get done. Another told me that it was the wrong time of year for them but they would be willing to try it when they are less busy with work.

Survey Results:

I find it interesting that the people who took part in this were at the lower end of my target age group for my stakeholders. This could be for a few reasons:
a) the older students didn’t see my challenge because they’re not on social media as much
b) the younger students were willing to try something to see if it helped
c) the students at the lower end of my age range have more free time to take part in something like this
This is a pretty even split between three answers. The number of answers was pretty small however so I would be interested to see what the answers would be with a larger number of participants/respondents. I also think that writing about feelings could be seen as off putting, even if you’re the only one reading it back.
I think this is what I expected. After all, it was just one 10 day challenge and things don’t change overnight, especially when it comes to feeling like an imposter. I would be interested to see the responses after a series of interventions like this to see if over time there was a gradual change.

*Looking at my survey again (the day before my final presentation), I realise I should have asked the gender of the people who took part in my challenge. This would have allowed me to see if this approach would be helpful for working class students in general, or just one group of them. I am slightly annoyed that I overlooked this detail and that I have no time to rectify it.*

Expert Feedback:

I didn’t receive any replies to emails I sent to experts about this intervention, however I did discuss this intervention during a job interview I had. One of the people interviewing me is partnering with Museum as Muck for a research project (it hasn’t been formally announced yet), an organisation that aims to get more working class people in the arts. She was very interested in my research project, especially this intervention, because she said that keeping creative working class students interested in pursuing a career in the arts once they graduate is important and something that she has noticed needs work on. She suggested that I reach out to more arts universities and trial creative interventions such as workshops and challenges such as this one, to encourage students to be creative for fun again, instead of just having to meet deadlines.

Everyone should be an imposter..?

Inspiration, My Project, , ,

I was scrolling through LinkedIn on Monday and came across this video by Steven Bartlett, a well known young entrepreneur who appears on the TV show Dragon’s Den. At this point I’m pretty much done with my project, I’m just writing up my report. But I wanted to share my thoughts about this video because I think it’s important and adds something to my research.

My response to the video on Linkedin

The phrase comfort zone was coined in 1991 by a Judith Bardwick, a management thinker in a book called Danger in the Comfort Zone.

“The comfort zone is a behavioral state within which a person operates in an anxiety-neutral condition, using a limited set of behaviors to deliver a steady level of performance, usually without a sense of risk.”

Going by this definition of the comfort zone, it is reasonable to infer that being out of your comfort zone induces anxiety. However anxiety and imposter syndrome don’t necessarily go hand in hand. For example, a person might be trying horse riding for the first time. Something that they have never done before and is very out of their comfort zone. They might be very anxious about it – what if they fall off and break their neck? What if the horse isn’t strong enough to carry them?

But do they feel like an imposter in this situation? I doubt it.

Yerkes and Dodson conducted an experiment in 1907, establishing a link between anxiety and performance. The main idea of their study is that nervous systems have a perfect zone of arousal. Too little and you’re in your comfort zone, and you begin to get bored. But too much, and you panic. This panic goes on to stall your progress and decreases your performance. (See diagram below)

Going back to the original video that inspired this post, I don’t think we should all feel like imposters. For some people, feeling like an imposter drives them to work harder and to succeed no matter what. For other, feeling like an imposter makes them freeze and sees productivity plummet. In my opinion, it is slightly unfair to tell people how they should feel. Especially if you have a huge platform like Steven Bartlett does. There will be people who don’t feel like an imposter wondering if there’s something wrong with them. I don’t mean to imply that he had any bad intentions with this video, but I think that he could have phrased it a lot better. It is important for people to have role models and I imagine Steven is this for a lot of people. And his words have a lot of weight for people who look up to him.

https://positivepsychology.com/comfort-zone/

https://www.simplypsychology.org/what-is-the-yerkes-dodson-law.html

Imposter Syndrome – Robbin Chapman PhD

Inspiration, My Project, , , , ,

Robbin Chapman, PhD who is the Associate Dean for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging in the Office of Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging at the Harvard Kennedy school, published a presentation about imposter syndrome. Whilst I would love to share every page of it here, I’ve screenshotted the slides that resonated the most with me and that I think are the most relevant to my research.

(Complete side note, I really like the name of Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging. It somehow sounds more friendly and welcoming than Equality, Diversity and Inclusion.)

Almost all of these describe the environment at arts based education institutions. And other places too, of course. From conversations I’ve had, art schools are some of the most competitive and exclusive places that people can choose to study. I have also heard that whilst there might not be ‘systems of oppression’, the environment itself can feel oppressive.

These might all be amazing and helpful tips, but I think they are easier said than done. I also think that normalising self doubt is a scale – there is a certain level of self doubt that isn’t normal, and can prevent people from functioning to the best of their abilities in an education environment and in the workplace.

I would add ‘create’ to this list for the group of students I am focusing on for my project. They are all creative students and making art is a valid way of expressing how you feel, or just a way to release any pent up frustration, anger or disappointment.

This self assessment tool was thought up by one of the women who first coined the term ‘imposter phenomenon’. I like the idea of self assessment but I do think it would be easy to cheat, and downplay how you are feeling. Sometimes when people fill in things like this, they still give the answers that they are expected to give, even if they are not showing the results to anyone. However, if this chart was filled in with 100% honesty, I can see it being a very helpful tool in the realisation of how much or how little you are experiencing imposter phenomenon.

Something about this that I find quite odd however, is that the self assessment tool at the end of the presentation has had its name changed. Originally it was called the Imposter Test or the IP (meaning imposter phenomenon) by Pauline Rose Clance when she wrote it – as seen here on her website. https://paulineroseclance.com/pdf/IPTestandscoring.pdf
I think this is a great presentation and very helpful for students in higher education, but I do have to question why it was necessary to change the name of this self assessment tool. Was it just to create a more cohesive presentation? Or was it because imposter syndrome is the more commonly accepted name for this feeling?
When I first saw this presentation about imposter phenomenon, I thought that maybe it is something that arts based universities should display on their websites, or around campus. But I am unconvinced about how many people would pay attention. I know that personally I ignore most posters that I see on the walls at CSM, simply because I don’t have the time to stand and read a long poster. (I’d also probably be in the way, based on where they are usually hung)

https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/hks-communications-program/files/pp_robbin_chapman_041119_impostor_syndrome.pdf

Creative Interventions as Empowerment

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For my BA Photography dissertation, I wrote 2000 words on photography as a therapeutic tool. From an outside perspective, self portraiture can be seen as narcissistic and vain. Studies have shown that self portraits allow people to get in touch with aspects of themselves that are yet unexplored, and can aid in the process of healing from trauma. There is a reason that art therapy is used a lot by therapists and in prisons.

The practice of the self-portrait can be incredibly empowering. It means using photography to look inside ourselves. To work on our inner world as a way of opening or deepening our unique creative process, which can be developed with any form of artistic expression, or even life itself. To start a dialogue between our thinking mind and our ‘gut’ to draw from an inexhaustible source of meanings which must be expressed. (Nunez, 2009)

In the midst of struggling in my third year of my BA, I created a photo series documenting my journey through 30 days of a depressive episode (see images below).

Today I Left The House For an Hour
I Hate My Body
Felicity – 0 Brain – 1

I am not saying that every working class student who is struggling with imposter syndrome should take self portraits and then they’ll feel better. That would be a rather sweeping and naive statement. But I think that there is a way for universities who specialise in art, to use art to empower their students who come from less represented groups. Maybe that manifests itself in a monthly theme to create work to respond to, or maybe that’s just the invitation to start a personal 30 day challenge accompanied by daily thoughts that are written down.

Nuñez, C. (2009). The self portrait, a powerful tool for self-therapy. European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling, 11(1), pp.51–61. doi:10.1080/13642530902723157.

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Social Interactions

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I was reading this article on Refinery 29 about imposter syndrome in the workplace, aptly titled Do I have imposter syndrome or am I just a working class woman? and it had a link to what I believe is a chapter from a book. The chapter is focused on social class differences in social interactions at university.

I picked out some quotes that I found especially interesting.

.. working-class students’ minority group status is more evident at university than in their prior educational settings, and this may lead them to feel out of place at university (Croizet, Austin, Goudeau, Marot, & Millet, 2019; Easterbrook, Hadden & Nieuwenhuis, 2019)

Additionally, universities are distinctly middle-class environments that include their own norms and cultural values that can clash with working class values (Rubin, Denson, Kilpatrick, Matthews, Stehlik, & Zyngier, 2014; see also Batruch, Autin & Batura, 2019). More specifically, universities embody a middle-class independent approach to learning and achievement, which is discordant with interdependent working-class values, making university more alien and difficult for working-class students (Stephens, Fryberg, Markus, Johnson, & Covarrubias, 2012)

I find this quote both interesting and confusing. Interesting because I think working class students being a minority in higher education isn’t necessarily more obvious than a student’s previous school. It all depends on where they went to school – did they get a scholarship to a private school where they were a minority? Or did they grow up in a LPN, where the majority of students were working class?
And confusing because nowhere did they define what these ‘working class values’ are. I couldn’t work out if they meant traditional, slightly old fashioned working class values or if there is a 21st century context to this phrase.

Finally, working-class students are often the first in their families to attend university. Consequently, working-class families have less experience with universities and are often unable to provide the same level of financial, informational, mentoring, and/or identity support as middle- class families do to their sons and daughters (Rubin, 2012b).

This particular quote reminds me of a conversation I had before I even started this research project. One of my friends who doesn’t study a creative subject was complaining that her family seem to think she’s too good for them now, and she was feeling out of her depth at home and at university. I think that this is a problem that a lot of working class students could experience – since starting at university now they don’t fit in with their family, or their peers at university. This could feel very isolating and a constant feeling of being an imposter.

Rubin and Wright (2015, 2017) found that (a) working- class students tended to be older than higher-class students, (b) older students tended to have more paid work and childcare commitments than younger students, (c) students with more of these commitments tended to spend less time on their university campus, and (d) students who spent less time on campus tended to be less socially integrated at university. Rubin and Wright also found that working-class students tended to be less satisfied with their finances, and that this social class difference in financial satisfaction helped to explain their lack of social integration.”

This mention of working class students tending to be older than higher-class students is very interesting to me. When I was looking at demographics of students at various arts universities, it was very hard to find out the ages, due to data not being disaggregated or being split into broad age groups eg 18-25, which personally I didn’t find very useful. The age difference between working class students and the rest of the student body could be a reason that a lot of working class students feel alone, simply because they don’t feel that they have anything in common or they feel at different stages in their lives.

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Going back to the Refinery 29 article, once again imposter syndrome is being gendered. I acknowledge that the author of the article is female so she is talking about her experience. However the other people she spoke to in her article are all female too. And yes, there is research that shows that women are more likely to have imposter syndrome in the workplace. But that isn’t to say that men don’t experience it too. And talking to some men or non-binary people would have created a more balanced article, in my opinion.

Rubin, M., Evans, O. and McGuffog, R. (2019). Social Class Differences in Social Integration at University: Implications for Academic Outcomes and Mental Health. The Social Psychology of Inequality, pp.87–102. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-28856-3_6.

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Environmental Stress

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With a short amount of time left, I decided that I couldn’t physically speak to everyone that I had already interviewed. So instead I sent emails with a one question survey, asking them to describe the environment at their university.

Not everyone responded, which I expected seeing as it’s a hectic time of year for everyone, and emails get lost in inboxes very easily. If I’d been able to speak to these people face to face I would have asked them to expand on these answers. But I think it says something that in short snappy responses, I didn’t get one outright positive answer. I suppose high pressure is more of a neutral answer, because it could be a good or bad thing, depending on attitude and how one copes under pressure.

Trying Again

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I have interviewed almost as many male students as female now, and I’ve noticed that there is a big difference in responses. Female students are more likely to be completely open to talking about their feelings and have apparently nothing holding them back from being vulnerable in front of me. Male students have been closed off in person and for a while I couldn’t figure out why. I have male friends who open up to me about their emotions and at first I felt insulted that my male interviewees weren’t being honest with me. But after talking with David about this problem, I realised that a man I don’t know is hardly going to open up to me. Men are stereotypically bad at talking about feelings, especially feelings that are less than positive. How could I expect them to open up to me, a complete stranger? I think I was being naive and not thinking about this properly.

So I followed up from my interviews with a Likert scale survey – David suggested having an even number on the scale so that there is no truly neutral answer. I also switched up the ends that disagree and agree sit at, so that they didn’t just go down the survey clicking the same button every time (I know I’ve been guilty of doing this in the past, as have my friends). Not all of the male students that I interviewed responded to this survey, which I expected but around 30% of them did. I set a hard deadline for them to respond by, in order to analyse the results and write this blog post, however the majority of them missed the deadline. This means that the results aren’t a reflection of the feelings of all of the male participants in my research. Of course I will update the results if any more responses come in.

From these survey results, I think it is clear that my male interviewees were much more comfortable talking about their feelings when I wasn’t there, and they just had to click buttons on their phone or laptop. Taking a person out of the equation, who was asking potentially stupid or invasive questions definitely helped, as did the anonymity.

Do We Grow Out of Imposter Syndrome?

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The age group I’ve chosen for my stakeholders is 18-27, and I realised that I’ve never explained my reasoning behind this. At 18, you’re potentially away from home for the first time, studying in an unfamiliar environment. At 27, you’re considered a mature student. You’ve probably done your BA, left education to work and then come back to university to continue studying or you’re in higher education for the first time after working for a few years. There are different factors that could make students feel like an imposter at each age.

But is imposter syndrome something that can be grown out of?

Author Valerie Young, who is an expert on imposter syndrome says, “people can still have an imposter moment, but not an imposter life.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8028514/

I like this quote that I came across whilst reading an article by Sumina Mainali because to me it implies that imposter syndrome doesn’t have to take over your whole life and it doesn’t have to be a permanent condition.

“In the long run, many of us have grown out of the imposter syndrome and into our own
knowledge and skills—and humility. We embrace what we know and all that we do not know.” I saw this quote in the blurb for an article in Nurse Leader, 2011. Sadly the full article was hidden behind a paywall and I couldn’t access it. However I find this small tidbit very helpful, and connects with conversations I’ve had about imposter syndrome, where I’ve been told that people think imposter syndrome is something we grow out of because that’s what their parents have told them. This quote almost implies that once people embrace the things that they do know and make the most of their knowledge and skills, the feelings of being an imposter will become less significant.

Branching Out

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In my tutorial last week, David mentioned potentially including some male stakeholders. I had been conducting a few interviews with male working class students but it hadn’t really been my focus.

And then in class Zuleika gave us a refresher lesson on bias, and overcoming it. And I realised that although I had been conducting my research with the best of intentions, my bias had been showing. And it was holding me back, and potentially stunting my research. And whilst I doubt that many men will open up to me and admit to feeling any other way apart from confident, that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t include them in my research.
The majority of academic papers on imposter syndrome talk about women, however a study in Quartz says that actually men are experiencing imposter syndrome more than women.

“I first learned about this two years ago, when my editor at the time asked me to write on the subject. Instead of feeling understood or validated, I felt defensive. It had never occurred to me to look around my male dominated industry and worry that I didn’t belong; the notion that I should relate to imposter syndrome seemed to imply that I deserved to feel like a fraud. As I started to report the article, I worried that not suffering from imposter syndrome would be interpreted as a sign of arrogance. This concern, it turns out, is well-founded. Contrary to stereotypes, research suggests women are as confident as men—they are just penalized rather than rewarded for the same self-assured behavior.“

The article goes on to mention something called the Imposter Phenomenon Scale. I find it interesting that it is named after the original name for imposter syndrome and this supports the argument to stop pathologising it and calling it a ‘syndrome’.

“Overall, women self-reported more imposter syndrome according to the scale. But the researchers found that men experienced more stress both when getting negative feedback and when told their results would be shared with the professor. “Collectively, our findings suggest that male IPs [imposters] fair worse when confronted with performance cues than do female impostors,” the authors wrote. “Male IPs experienced greater anxiety after receiving negative feedback and under conditions of high accountability than did female IPs, and exhibited less effort and poorer performance on a task when held accountable to a higher authority.

Conversation around imposter syndrome has always been gendered. But its balance has been slowly shifting over the past few decades. The condition was first identified in 1978 by two clinical psychologists, whose study only focused on women. In the years since, gender-related data on the subject have been mixed. Some have found that women do experience more imposter syndrome, while others have found no correlation.“

I find this paragraph particularly interesting – in the course of my research I have searched for imposter syndrome numerous times, both on Google Scholar, in the library and just regular Google search. Every time, the top results mention women. Therefore I don’t think I agree with the statement about the discussion around imposter syndrome becoming less gendered. Hypothetically, if a male student was searching for information on imposter syndrome, and saw that the first 10 results were about women overcoming imposter syndrome, he might feel even more alienated or alone. However, that isn’t to say that men don’t feel like imposters in education or the workplace.

I also think there is a problem with women telling other women that they are suffering from imposter syndrome. But how do they actually know? In a room full of women, they are all going to have different feelings. And yes, there might be a big proportion of them who feel like imposters but you can’t assume. At a lot of conferences targeted at women, there generally is a class or a talk about overcoming imposter syndrome. I’ve not seen anything similar at conferences I’ve found that are aimed at men.

https://qz.com/1296783/it-turns-out-men-not-women-suffer-more-from-imposter-syndrome

Fourth Intervention

Interventions, My Project, ,

I decided to accept David’s challenge to move into video and I made a video using quotes from interviews I had already conducted. I watched the video with some of my stakeholders. I wanted to see their reactions to seeing their own words back, and if they found it comfortable/uncomfortable.

https://youtube.com/shorts/85_OY_9ommQ?feature=share

I chose to watch it alongside them to pick up on their body language and facial expressions, as sometimes they are more telling than the words that people say. Whilst I think this intervention was successful I think that I can do better. Using stakeholders that I had already used was in hindsight, a mistake. I think that this would have had more impact if I had shown it to people who hadn’t been involved in my project up to this point. I think I could have also shared this video on social media from the outset, something which I have now done in the hopes of gaining more widespread feedback from people I’ve not yet spoken to.

Because this was my first video, it is very short. I used this video as an experiment into video editing and after this video I taught myself how to use Final Cut Pro so that videos I make moving forwards are longer, more professional and easier to watch.

*Feedback from participants*

“It would have been more powerful to hear our voices back. I think it would have had more impact.”

“I felt uncomfortable because the beads were such happy colours in the video, mixed with not happy statements. But I liked it.”

“A longer video would have been good, but I liked the length of this too. It was like watching a TikTok video.”

Summary

Looking back on this intervention, I don’t feel that it was overly successful. Whilst I shared the quotes from stakeholders, I’m not sure this was a good way to answer my research question, and empower working class students to overcome feelings of being an imposter.