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.
Last tutorial. I don’t know where the term has gone!
Aside from various troubleshooting questions, David said something that really stuck with me. He asked how I’ve kept my creativity alive, whilst studying this MA.
And to be completely honest, I haven’t. I’ve been so focused on doing well with the course that I’ve forgotten to create things just for me. My creative spark has kind of died recently and David asked how I’m going to get it back. The last time this happened I took self portraits every day for a year … and that got me thinking. It got me thinking about my BA dissertation on the use of self portraiture as a therapeutic tool, and maybe I can connect that to my project. In thinking about the conclusion to my evaluative report and the research that I have conducted, I think there is an argument for using creative interventions to empower students. After all, my stakeholders are students in art schools! And what better use of creativity than to make people feel better and empowered. I know that I don’t have long left before my project is assessed but I think I can tie this into my project in time. Maybe one last intervention, testing whether this would work or not.
I also realised that I’ve been neglecting an element of my research – the arts education environments. I don’t know why I’ve forgotten to ask people about them so I’m going back to the people I’ve interviewed and asking about their experiences in arts based universities in the UK.
David and I spoke about my theory that art schools are weird – nowhere else in society will you be in a building full of thousands of creatives. There is an expectation of exploding out into the world when you graduate with a phone full of contacts and a successful career ahead of you. I think this expectation is even more when you’re a working class student – you’ve chosen to study a creative subject instead of the norm for people who are like you. So there is even more pressure to succeed and prove people wrong.
After the tutorial I took myself to a coffee shop and just tried to absorb everything that David and I had discussed. I realised how far I’ve come, even just in the last couple of months. And I realised that I’m far more capable that I ever would have imagined – I’ve taught myself video editing, and talked to people who scare me. I’ve put myself out there and been rejected. I’ve been vulnerable with my tutors and my stakeholders and I’ve not fallen apart. I’ve had failures and successes. But after everything, I’m still standing. And I’ve created a project that I’m proud of and one that I think has the potential to help a lot of people.
Action Points
Go back to people I’ve interviewed and ask about their experience of the art education environment that they studied in ✔️
Think about how creative interventions could be a solution moving forwards ✔️
Finish blog posts and actually publish them instead of keeping them in my drafts (sorry David, I know I said my blog would be up to date by now) ✔️
Rewrite evaluative report – finish it by Friday 25th November to leave time for last minute editing ✔️
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.
