As I am also an archivist from the same team at UAL, Grout’s argument (2019), aligns with the teaching and archival work that I help to support on a day to day basis. Her own thinking has helped to shape the teaching that our team delivers. We teach through our academic support online workshops and through in-course sessions, in collaboration with course tutors, related to our collections. We have embedded into our delivery, some of the challenges of archival bias. Of course, we can find ways to do more… perhaps particularly around who we reach in terms of our audience, and also how we might involve students in the future shaping of our collections, see Pardue (2023).
When we are helping to develop students research skills, we encourage critical reflection on sources. Including, of course, archives. (Albeit it is also important to note that what is meant by “research” at art school can be something quite different to that in other subjects. See Orr and Shreeve, 2019).
In ASCC teaching sessions, particular emphasis has been brought to the two aspects that Grout highlights. Firstly, archival absences when institutional archives reflect wider societal inequalities. Who gets represented, who is missing, erased or ignored. (See also Michel-Rolph Trouillot, 1995). Secondly, the biases present in how archives are arranged, described and interpreted. An archive description can give the appearance of ‘objectivity’ when in fact it is highly mediated by the describer. It can re-produce biases from the original archival record, or it can be a product of the archivist’s own bias. The act of description and interpretation of the record produces something new. This will affect how it is recieved by the researcher.
Bringing students’ awareness to these things, is something that we try to do in different ways through different types of teaching session.
One of the ways is through object reading (talked about in many of the other readings from this first week). Before working at UAL, I do not remember being consciously introduced to it during my own education. Though perhaps looking back on it, I may have been encouraged to think in this way on some occasions, for example when doing a close reading of a work of art. So for me it has been an example for me of “learning through teaching”. I have gained a better understanding of it through leading pre-planned sessions using it. Following the work of Judy Willcocks and others, Object Reading is used across UAL as a methodology. As I understand it, it emerged from material culture (C.S. Pierce and others). It enourages students to inspect a given artefact in different ways. Through doing so, the aim is to develop the student’s critical thinking skills.
I think I might want to come back after this session to consider why it has become such a large part of UAL teaching. I can speculate on many very good reasons why. I myself, when running these sessions, can see the benefits. However I am also curious to explore what other methodologies one might bring in to encourage students to think critically. And other ways to respond to archives, as well.
Alternatively, the college archives themselves have a vast record of past teaching practices, that definitely themselves show the biases mentioned above, and need to be critiqued for this. However, they might also help to historically situate our current practices better, or see where things have been attempted in different ways in the past, which could enable better critical understanding of our present moment. (For example, the return to vocational or ‘apprenticeship’ teaching, or emphasis on ‘maker’ rather than ‘artist’, may itself be called for on grounds of social justice. But this does have its anticedants in earlier moments of art school teaching. How might we make sense of this?).
Another way of introducing the challenge of archival bias, has been to introduce students to the theoretical principles underpinning traditional archival practices. This equips students to navigate collections. It also helps to consider how information about collections shapes our understanding of them. What it reveals, what it might obscure. We get students to thinking about how an archive has been structured (arranged and described). Arrangement and description is a highly mediated and mediating process. which past and present archivists contribute to.
These things are both vital. However there are potentially many more ways one could approach archives and archival research critically. Exploring these is something I am interested in. There is, however, a limit to what can be transmitted within many of the single, stand-alone sessions we teach… to be returned to!
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Hannah Grout, ‘Archiving critically: exploring the communication of cultural biases,’ in Spark: UAL Creative Teaching and Learning Journal, Vol 4 / Issue 1 (2019) pp.71-75
Orr S and Shreeve A (2018) Art and Design Pedagogy in Higher Education: Knowledge, Values and Ambiguity in the Creative Curriculum. Routledge research in higher education. London New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Lucie Pardue, ‘Correcting the Record’, 2023, Into the Archive (UAL Archives and Special Collections blog, https://www.arts.ac.uk/students/library-services/special-collections-and-archives/stories/correcting-the-record Accessed 17/01/2025)
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Beacon Press, (1995)