Welcome to Light Bites, an occasional podcast from Leeds Institute for Teaching Excellence
at the University of Leeds.
Episodes will be hosted by members of the Light team.
And we'll be showcasing the scholarship of teaching and learning from across the university.
Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Light Bites.
I'm your host Dave Riley, Research and Impact Officer at Light.
In this episode upcoming, I interviewed Laura Loyola-Hernandez, who is a lecturer in the
School of Geography and the Programme Lead for BA Geography.
Laura has recently completed her Light Fellowship, Community-Based Pedagogies to Diversify the
Curriculum.
And in this interview we talk all about it.
I've re-recorded the opening segment here, mainly because I bashed the mic a few times
unintentionally in the original recording.
But whilst we're doing this and have the opportunity, Laura would also like to clarify that the
name of the artist that she collaborated with to produce the amazing poster about sense
of belonging that she speaks about in the interview is called Nicole Marie Burton and
not Anne Marie Burton.
Anyway, here is the conversation that I had with Laura.
Hi Laura, how are you today?
Hi, I'm okay.
Thank you so much for having me.
That's alright, you're welcome.
So just to start, can you just tell us a little bit about your fellowship?
Like what is the broad synopsis?
So my fellowship was 12 months and it was really working with students to understand
how they feel a sense of belonging and unbelonging being students that feel marginalized by being
at university.
So how that experience has been and how that has impacted their time at university, their
learning journey and their progression throughout the course of uni.
Cool.
And what methods did you use to investigate that?
So I use, so we, the fellowship consisted of working with students in two workshops
and one focus group.
But in the first workshop, I did something called an alphabet attack.
So this is something where you might have a topic in hand.
So for example, one of the words or prompts that I used was university and then students
together have to go through the entire alphabet and then think of the, you know, write the
first word that comes to mind that's associated with that particular word.
And then we use those posters that they did and I had four words as prompts.
For the second hour of that workshop, they had to, so I use a technique called the Lego
serious play and it's when I asked students, what would your ideal university look like?
And I brought a bunch of my kids' Legos that I had in the house and they had to build everything
from the ground up, from the little people, the Lego people to the building.
So what that would look like.
And then I left the room just to leave them to negotiate and have these conversations.
And then I came back and then they kind of explained what it was, but it was really interesting
because it brought up a lot of conversations that really can't translate physically.
So for example, should there be a VC in our university?
What would that look like?
So that's the one activity.
Another thing is I did a lot of artwork.
So I brought art supplies and students, I said, if money wasn't an issue, what would
you, one ideal event organized by the university look like?
And you know, some students came up with like a music festival around like having workshops
as well around feminism and capitalism, the environment.
Others had, you know, festivals, environment festivals.
So it was really great to kind of engage with students as to what they want.
But also it led to interesting conversations about like staff workloads and like staff
doing this, a lot of these type of events in a voluntary basis and whatnot.
And then finally I did a technique called body mapping, which is a technique used by
a lot of Latin American feminists to understand in ways that traditional maps can't our relationship
with a particular space.
So you basically trace the person's body in a big piece of paper and ask questions in
this case around the university.
So you know, how do you get to university?
What are the spaces where you feel most comfortable at university?
And for example, some of the students drew hearts, not hearts, sorry.
They put the student union where the heart is.
And then when they had more intense conversations, let's say around climate change and how they
felt a bit uneasy of the university inviting certain, you know, companies for career fairs,
they put it in the stomach.
So it just, it really was mediums to allow students to explore their like contradictory
experiences at uni.
And was all this done in one session?
No, no.
So I've had, I had three sessions with them in around three or four months.
So they weren't like continuous.
We also did a black history walk on campus with Heritage Corner, which is if anyone can
go to their walks by Joe, who works really closely with the university.
And that was just a really nice experience to do with students because we just learned
so much.
You know, that the university has a lot of like abolition history that we just don't
know about.
And then the final activity to close the fellowship was I organized a community conversation around
climate change and climate activism.
And we had a short documentary and we had the director here and then we had some community
activists as well.
And it was open to the public.
So it was really great to kind of end the community led pedagogies project with the
entire community.
And that was, that was like an open forum or?
Yeah.
Open forum.
Anyone even outside the university could come.
We had tea and coffee and cakes.
And it was just a really great way to close the fellowship.
Yeah.
It's really innovative methodology as well.
And I've got a question.
How do you got, you described in a very rich data set there.
So how do you sort of like bring that together to produce some conclusions?
So for me, it was really important to be clear with students when they would be recorded
and when they wouldn't, because I wanted these conversations to happen in a really organic
way.
So I only recorded them when they had finished doing all the like the university and the
posters and it was more, I recorded their reflections on what they have done.
Because I didn't want it to be kind of really extractivist and invasive.
But what I've done afterwards was obviously I tried to document as much as I could, particularly
the university, the Lego university, because I had to take it apart.
So I then, I basically just had all this rich material from the recordings, but also in
conjunction with what students made, because I really do see this as a co-production with
students.
They were really the ones that dictated, for example, the codes, you know, what were the
key things that I was going to look for.
It just really emerged in an organic way.
How did they dictate the codes?
Did you ask them specifically?
No, so it just, it was just things that kept coming up.
The weather, it's this, so for example, I'm now doing the proofs for an article based
on this project.
One of the strands of the analysis is the complex contradictions that come with working
and studying in what's called the no liberal university.
And this just emerged out of not only the conversations I had with students, but also
the material itself.
So for example, one of the posters that we did in the alphabet attack with the keyword
was university.
And they had some really lovely words like community, like decolonization, inclusivity,
but they also had like really contradictory words towards that, like xenophobia, oil investment,
stress.
So they themselves without actually telling me this is what you should be coding, it just
really came in a really organic way.
This leads me on to the next question.
So what, and you've touched on it a little bit, like what were your findings from your
research?
So one of the findings that I wasn't really anticipating that was surprising is because
most of the students that participated felt marginalized, particularly they were students
of color.
They were issues around neurodiversity.
So how even within the university, there's still a lot of restraints and stigma that
come from being neurodiverse, but especially being a person of color that has neurodiverse
issues.
Because when we have mostly these discussions around flexibility, accessibility issues,
they're mostly centered around white students and their experience has been compounded by
the fact that they're not only racially minoritized, but also some of them are from working class
backgrounds.
So that's a finding that I hadn't really envisioned, but it's given me a better perspective
in what we could do.
And the second one that I also wasn't really envisioning was the importance of the physical
space.
So where the university, but also the schools, where they feel they belong and they don't
belong has a massive influence on their learning and overall experience at university.
Where do they belong?
Where do students belong and where don't they belong in the university?
That's a really interesting point.
I think, as I said, one aspect was the physical, so how welcoming or not is a particular space
or how they perceive it.
But a lot of it as well was, do they feel represented by the staff body?
Some of them don't because they don't see staff that look like them.
Others were just building that sense of community and they have managed to do that, but outside
of the restrictions of going to lectures, going to seminars, going to practicals, it's
how they've built that community with them friends.
That's really what has kept them thinking, well, actually I do belong here.
Very, very interesting.
Something of space, something about physical, but you also talk about more abstract.
My next question is about the outputs that you might have had from your fellowship.
Well, obviously I know about what you've been doing with your cool outputs, but can you
tell the audience for us?
Yeah.
I mean, well, I've written an article.
I'm hoping it comes out in the next couple of months, but one of the biggest outputs
I think I've had with this is a poster that I've done in collaboration with Ann Marie
Burton, who's an artist.
The poster is called Who's Uni.
It's available at the Light website.
It really is a reflection of the dialogues I had with students throughout the project.
The poster is meant to almost be a vehicle or a tool for staff, for students, for activists,
for just anyone really to incite conversations around maybe difficult topics.
In the poster, there's stuff around having to work more because they can't afford to
buy food at university, which is increasingly more a reality for our students, but also
for staff.
There's stuff around climate change, about how feeling a bit complicit about learning
about climate change, but then having really difficult conversations around who invests
in our university, for example, about how to generate a sense of belonging of students
that might not necessarily feel like they belong, but they do.
That's one output that I've had.
The poster is available to download online.
If people want a hard copy, they can always get in touch with me.
I've been really, really lucky that I have a really supportive head of school who has
embraced some of the practical ideas or pilot ideas.
I'll just talk about one.
We now have a community shelf in the reception area of our school.
It will eventually be filled, but it has now board games, it has mind games, it has mindful
art coloring stuff.
The idea is just another tool to generate a sense of community for students to feel
welcomed.
We're now in talks in the school to have what we're calling a community pantry, which is
basically a food bank in recognition that if students are hungry and staff are hungry,
they can't really work or learn.
We have to come together as a community to remove the stigma of that.
While we work on more structural ways in which we can change that, we also need to offer
practical, simple, quick solutions to support people that are having a difficult time under
current circumstances.
Cool.
I think you sort of might have answered my final question a little bit there.
But I would say about this post, about the post of the Who's Union poster, obviously
we think it's a fantastic output.
We've shared it through all of our channels.
If you're watching this, sorry, if you're not watching, you'll be listening to this,
then it will be shared on our Twitter.
It's on our team space and it's on Laura's page on the Light website as well.
So I do encourage you to have a look.
And also, if you're thinking about doing a Light fellowship, this is the kind of creative
output that you might want to produce.
So that's really, really good.
Final question is, and I think the community shelf might fit into this too, but what impacts
have you had or continuing next steps since the end of your fellowship, which was a couple
of months ago of time recording?
Yeah.
So I've really tried to pilot some activities that emerge from the students themselves in
a way that I just, I didn't want to finish the Light fellowship, write some articles,
which are important, but then just kind of leave it in a really abstract way.
I wanted there to be a connection and that in a way in which students might benefit,
but also staff.
So one of the things I've done is also, I'm going to start to implement using the Who's
Uni poster in one of my classes and see if it does anything to help engage these conversations.
I've mentioned the community shelf as well.
I'm also working with education engagement to see ways in which we can help each other,
I guess, because a lot of the students had really fantastic stuff to say about education
engagement and that they were really key in creating the sense of community, particularly
for marginalized students.
So I'm hoping that I can work more in a better way with these amazing people to generate
a sense of belonging that includes everyone while recognizing our differences and celebrating
them.
Well, that's great.
And we obviously at Light, we're really, really proud of the work you've done, Lara.
So we'd like to thank you for that.
I just want to say thank you to the Light staff, especially Raka, who has been instrumental
in helping me organize stuff and Dave as well, who's answered so many questions over email.
Really appreciate that.
Thank you very much and thank you for your time today, the podcast.
So that's the end of our latest Light Byte.
We'll see you in the next episode.