Work Placement

I have always had an interest in teaching, more specifically high school and college age range and so for my work placement I decided to go and work in a foundation art and design diploma college as a teaching assistant for that academic week. The college I went to for my work placement was also the college where I studied my art and design foundation diploma. I have a few ideas of careers I would like to pursue but teaching further/higher education in art and design is definitely one that I think I may go into. I thought going back to a familiar place and setting would be good for me as it would give me first hand knowledge to pass onto the students I would be helping for that week. From the experience I was hoping to gain some experience about what it would be like to be a lecturer in that setting and subject, mostly to see the difficulty levels but to also see if it was as rewarding and mutually beneficial as I had thought it to be. 

On the foundation diploma course at the college there are many different pathways that the students can choose from, for example; Fine Art, Photography, 3D, Textiles, etc, I was mainly working with Fine art and 3D while I was on my placement. I had various roles as a teaching assistant throughout my work placement. I did quite few one to one tutorials with the students, going through their sketchbooks and journals. By doing this it made it possible for me to help them navigate what kind of style and mediums they wanted to pursue in their final major project, which they had just started the week that I arrived for my work placement. I helped students with their research too, giving them introductions on how best to research by using the library resources that they have. 

The lecturers at the college asked me to bring in my portfolio that I used for my university interviews, that I also made whilst studying at the college, so that the students could see first-hand what kind of things universities look for in portfolios and prospective students.  I did around three portfolio tutorials with groups of students on the fine art, 3D and photography pathways, as these were more relevant to the style of work I had in my portfolio. 

I told the lecturers that I run the life drawing society classes at UCA and because of this they asked me to run a few of the sessions whilst I was there, and so I ran one class every day for that academic week while I was there. I prepared classes by asking the model to do certain poses for different amounts of times, to test the students in their capability to adapt to environment whilst drawing. I also prepared different materials for them to use in the class, rather than using the typical charcoal and pencil that they are used to I asked them to use collage, paint, wax resistant’s and various drawing tools such as forks with ink. This also worked as a great portfolio building exercise as it builds experimentation for their portfolio. 

At the end of the week I was asked by the lecturers to give an artist talk, for this I used my digital portfolio. this work placement has made me reconsider many aspects of my artistic practice and also affirmed that teaching in further/higher education is definitely a goal for me to work towards. I had so much fun working on placement and am excited to see where it leads in the future!

Final Pieces of the life drawing class