Pedagogy 2025: Emerging Theories, Teaching & Technologies

This month the Leeds School of Arts hosted Pedagogy 2025: Emerging Theories, Teaching & Technologies, a virtual conference as part of the Architecture Media and Politics Society (AMPS) pedagogy series. AMPS is an international, interdisciplinary research organisation that facilitates debate around global issues and regional topics via its conferences and publications. Leeds Beckett University was one of three institutions that hosted the event, sharing organisational duties with KU Leuven (Belgium) and Marywood University (USA).

Colleagues from BA Illustration provided the conference theme of Meaningful Matters: Rethinking Academic Impact. As educators, we are acutely aware of a need to demonstrate evidence of 'impact', often measured in units that overlook the immeasurable byproducts of education: creativity, critical thinking, difference, well-being and, crucially, meaning making. This call aimed to challenge the conventional metrics of impact, refocussing priorities towards pedagogy and community building. The School of Arts in particular has a rich heritage of art school teaching that stretches back to the original Leeds School of Art in 1846, and subsequent influential and groundbreaking courses over the years. Many degree programmes within LSA continue to incorporate these important pedagogies to this day.

The keynote panel was delivered by lecturers from BA Illustration Benjamin Hall and Jo Hassall, along with former course director Ian Truelove, who responded to the main theme of 'rethinking academic impact'. They drew upon documentary artefacts from their teaching practice on BA Illustration, using these as a provocation for discussion around the challenges of academia and pressures to be 'impactful', but also strategies to be hopeful. Their talk highlighted the importance of compassion, vulnerability and play as humanist tools that help foster unique learning communities where students are truly at the centre.

The conference saw colleagues from the school (and wider) share important insights from their teaching practice with academics and researchers from across the world:

• Kiff Bamford, Mary Ikoniadou and Liz Stirling presented Tear It up and Start Again: Issues of (non)Representation, a paper which discussed a collaborative project where students and staff on BA Graphic Design were active participants of a much-needed process of decolonisation
• In her film para-lab: A Para-Academy for Cross-Disciplinary Exchange and Learning, Annie Carpenter discusses para-lab, an organisation that creates alternative learning environments, which resist outcome-driven, quantifiable research and instead create longitudinal encounters which encourage reflection
• Ben Dalton (along with Beccy Watson, Carol Osborne and Emily Ankers) presented In Leisure as in Academia: the Entangled Maintenance of Collage Collectives, a paper which outlined how collective collage-making in spaces of leisure can promote wellbeing, social justice and build community
• Tara Langford (with Adam Gibbons) put forward Present Continuous: Liberation Strategies in the University, a presentation which outlined how Nonviolent Communication (NVC) techniques can facilitate opportunities for community building, curiosity, and dynamic reflection
• In her paper Co-Designing Graduates: Optimising Graduate Employability through Co-Design, Lauren Moriarty discussed how a co-designed toolkit with students and staff from BA Product Design supported creative graduates' employability

Delegates from the conference will be given the opportunity to develop their papers into proceedings, and selected writings will be curated into an edited volume by colleagues from BA Illustration, due to be published by Routledge later next year.

The conference took place on 19th November, you can view the schedule on the AMPS webpage and also watch highlights from the presentations on the AMPS YouTube channel.