Teaching Beyond the Curriculum
Abstract
This presentation and proposed paper concerns the ways we each find ourselves in our cities. How we find our way around, find out about the places we live, visit or pass through, and how we find selfhood and community in the changing fluid spaces of cultural ebb and flow in urban landscapes. Technologically infused infrastructures of buildings, transport and communication together with time based obligations of work and recreation intertwine with the physical spaces of built environment and human coexistence to create complex layers of ‘being’ in place. Finding our ‘selves’ through this maze of physical, digital and cultural existences has variously been described as a happenstance of metaphors (McFarlane, 2005), a glocality (Meyrowitz, 1985, 2005), an unknowable labyrinth (Coverley, 2006), a memory machine (Sheringham, 2010) and a drama in time (Geddes, 1904/2004). Continuously reconstituting our expectations, adapting to the fluctuating rules of changing roles, attuned to language, tone, inflection, hidden meanings and socio-cultural historical inference, identity of self becomes a game of mirrors, an adventure of performative camouflage. Who do I need to be today? Who and what do I trust? Is it safe? To investigate possibilities of citizen urban belonging in the complexity of a digitally augmented urban lifeworld, we propose a creative study project, tentatively entitled “Reading and Writing the City”. Utilising a student-tutor research partnership approach, staff and students take equal participatory research roles as individuals working within and between groups to re-imagine ownership of our urban hyperlocal home territories in creative digitally augmented ways.
Pen is an RSO 3 for the SMARTEL Erasmus+ Project and visiting lecturer in digital learning at the University of Malta, Fac. of Education. She holds MA Learning & Teaching in Higher Education, MSc Multimedia Systems, is a Fellow of the HEA and Member of the British Computer Society. Her PhD title is “Experiencing the Smart Learning Journey, a pedagogical inquiry” (Melit). A former Lecturer and Senior Lecturer at London Metropolitan University, Pen regularly presents at the International Human-Computer Interaction Conference and has given invited sessions at the RCA and University of Oxford.
Trevor Norris (MPhil, D.H. Lawrence, Crisis and Feeling in Nature and Art) is senior lecturer and course leader in BA Creative Writing and English Literature, and a member of the Finding Ecologies research group at London Metropolitan University. His teaching and research interests lie in the intersections between urban culture, eco-philosophy, aesthetics and nature writing, and more broadly on questions of cosmological change in the ecological emergency, the biopolitics and histories of social change, and in practices and activism outside the academy focused on new ecologies of care.
6:30 pm - 8:00 pm
Friday 17th November, 2023