On Tuesday our staff met with student reps to discuss issues arisen from the recent Learner Voice survey, as well as talking about the new Assessment Video and considering possible new storage and work space solutions in the department. Here is a brief summary of what was discussed.
Assessment Video
We wanted to ask our reps what they thought of this. This is a new resource that has been shown to both first years and second years to help explain the way we assess work in art in a more compact and easy to understand way. Our reps all agreed this was a great way of doing assessment lessons and our A2s said this was better than the way it was done last year. So overall this got a thumbs up from our reps!
Storage and Work Space in the Department
As we are a growing department full of students with lots of ambition (and therefore lots of work!), our department is now becoming difficult to work in in terms of space and storage. As we are of course on a limited budget, we wanted to ask the reps if they had any ideas on how to solve some of these problems. One of the issues brought up was the lack of space in the computer area as people tend to work on there sketchbooks at the computers. We suggested more students could work upstairs as B and F block are free so there is lots of table space. After some discussion the general consensus was that the rooms needs a move around to make more space for independent work, and if we could also fit in more storage for work while we were at it that would be amazing. So staff are going to sit down and have a chat about how we can rearrange the rooms, and also put a proposal together for some new furniture and possibly storage which could be put to senior management.
We will keep you updated on this one!
Darkroom Dryer
As many of you will know our old print dryer finally went kaput a few weeks ago and since then we have been trying to find a solution to put in its place. So far we have been using the tall film dryer cupboard and have put a set of drawers in the darkroom for people to leave their prints to dry in. Reps told us this wasn't the best solution as it takes overnight for their prints to dry, but the film dryer seems to be working well. So for now we'll stick with this, but we have also ordered a different kind of print dryer that we are going to test out as well!
Any other business
Noise downstairs:
Staff are concerned at the levels of noise downstairs and how it is starting to become a bit of a social area! Our classrooms are for working in and lessons are being disrupted constantly by this, and with the issues we are having with space at the moment this isn't helping. Reps were asked to be vigilant when working downstairs and help staff try and maintain a quiet working atmosphere in the department.
Sketchbook presentation:
A few of our reps were finding presentation in sketchbooks difficult which they said would be helped if there were more examples available of what a sketchbook page should look like. Now we do have a large catalogue of sketchbook examples on Pinterest, however it was said that these were sometimes hard to find as they are in folders for each subject rather than for a task. So if someone wants to see how a photoshoot is presented for example, it isn't easily there for them to find.
Staff and reps are going to spend some time reorganising our Pinterest boards to make this more accessible.
Untidy darkroom!:
It was raised by our reps that darkroom rules lately are not being respected by students particularly working in their frees. There have been issues with students taking drinks in with them, leaving a mess, and not looking after the equipment i.e. leaving enlargers on.
We suggested having posters in each enlarger booth to remind students of the rules and protocol that needs to be followed when they are using the darkroom, and our reps also suggested a booking sheet for students to use when the are in their free periods. We will trial this and see how it goes, and put these into place as soon as possible.
Thank you to our reps for a really helpful and productive meeting! We will hopefully be meeting again before Easter to discuss a proposal for storage and the rooms.
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