1) Introduction – what is the report about and how does it intersect with your positionality? What do you want to change and why? How does it relate to your academic practice?
In this report I will reflect on the limitations of in my initial attempt (second draft) at an intervention. I will show where it did not deliver on the task set and will try to reflect on the reasons for it. I have drafted a new intervention since. But I am going to focus on the learning and feedback from the second draft of my first attempt here.
In this first attempt (with Padlet), I was trying to do too many different things at once. Therefore, perhaps not delivering on anything, satisfactorily.
In terms of my professional practice as an archivist, I strongly want to make archives much more inclusive places. I have found them very intimidating spaces in the past, and occasionally, I still do. In addition legacies of colonialism, exploitation and political power are still with us in Western collections. They persist also in the policies and practices in archives.
But everyone has archives whether they recognise them as such or not, building awareness of this is a start to change things. In my initial attempt, I did not fully follow the instructions we were tasked with in terms of considering a particular intersectional experience (Crenshaw, 1990). And so will try to reflect on the limitations of this and how to make changes in the future.
2) Context – what is the (teaching/learning support) context for the intervention? What practice, course or department are you in and what is the proposed utility of this intervention?
I work in the Archives and Special Collections Centre at the University of the Arts London. The initial intervention was an attempt within one of our existing teaching activities. Specifically, our one-off teaching sessions within courses. We introduce students to our service and what an archive is. We raise awareness of archival bias to consider when researching (Rolph-Trouillot, 1995). The sessions tend to be 1-2 hours.
Sometimes course cohorts can be very large, e.g. 50, or even 100 students. The usual structure starts with 30 mins delivery within slides to the whole cohort. Then we run handling sessions with archive materials. Students are split into smaller groups to access archive material directly.
We introduce the concept of archival bias in the talk, and then the handling activity may also build on it. I hoped to enhance what we already introduce in the talk, by introducing a group activity around this involving case studies, rather than just delivery from slides. I also thought using padlet could help to facilitate this.
I aimed to encourage active learning (Hughes et al) in the group discussion activity. I introduced sharing roles of note taking, and reporting back. This way, students could help each other to listen and digest the discussion.
3) Inclusive learning – why is inclusion/inclusivity important within your discipline? What is the rationale for your intervention design (based on relevant theory)?
We welcome interrogation of our archival resources for bias. In this way, we want to encourage inclusive and critical research practice, in our students. Historical sources can only ever show you a partial view, or record, of an event. Highlighting archival silences asks us to consider the evidence: whose perspective it is from, who it is for, and who it is serving. Teaching can be a space where we can question the “authority” of the archive. (Grout, 2019)
I did not develop my rationale for my first attempt. I focused my design on different pedagogical theories for group activities and discussion. This, I considered, the necessary basis for inclusivity. But also was trying to do other things with my intervention at the same time.
Reflecting on my intervention if it were aimed to help students with ADHD:
Active learning and group work are recommended (Hughes et al., 2022) for students with ADHD to process information. I also wanted to create a structure and chunk information. (CADDRA, 2020; Hughes et al, 2022). Guidance says students with ADHD may find organisational apps and concept mapping tools (CADDRA, 2020) useful.
Also, assigning roles within the peer group (Tyrone, 2020; Hughes et. al, 2022) was so students with ADHD don’t feel they have to take notes at the same time as listening to the conversation. The padlet was also as a record of the conversations. An asynchronous learning tool (Hughes et al., 2022). I did not explain this very well in my initial intervention.
4) Reflection – what supported your thinking in deciding on this intervention? What feedback did you receive from peers/other colleagues? What were some of the key decisions? Did you encounter any challenges? Did you identify any potential risks?
I provided case studies in the delivery with a range of social justice issues (race; language/culture; sexuality and health). But the intervention did not clearly centre one intersectional student experience.
As I reflected in my blog on Race, I tried to address too many potential experiences. This may have served none. Or, worse. in its attempt at ‘balance’, from a CRT perspective, perhaps I even supported ‘systemic whiteness’ (Bradbury, 2020).
I should have focussed on ‘Challenge 3’ around attention, but been more specific: for students with ADHD. I should then have intersected it with another student experience.
It is thus ironic I may have struggled to focus on one of the key instructions of the intervention. To take up this task. Tim fed back by focusing on a particular intersectional experience/need, we may also help other students as well. This aligns with the Social Model of Disability approach (Oliver, 2004), taken up more recently in the ‘Universal Design for Learning’ (Hughes et al., 2022).
In Garrett’s account (2024), of Black and/or racialised Phd students’ experience at university, one student struck me. She felt her Black identity was relatively centred but felt excluded by her neurodivergency. Or rather, their intersectional identity was erased.
My other aim in the original intervention was to integrate/intersect with the work of a colleague, around using Padlet. This aimed at helping participation for students who find it difficult to speak in class. But this is an example of where my original intervention did not prioritise the focussed need in question.
From an ADHD perspective, Padlet might be beneficial in many contexts. However, in this case, there could also be a risk. In integrating with the group activity, it might place more of a load on executive function. Switching between the group discussion and writing on the Padlet could be challenging. Working on paper, or engaging hands-on activity, away from electronic devices, might be better. In presentation with peers, they agreed.
Active learning and group work is important for all students, including especially students with ADHD (Hughes, et al). However, my focus on this, rather than intersectionality, might reflect something Leah Cox has observed in her research. She gathered experiences of teaching ‘pedagogies of discomfort’. Teachers tended to state concerns about the internal ‘dynamics’ of the student group, rather than reflect on their own feelings/positionality. (Cox, 2025).
Engaging creative learning is also a recognised strategy for ADHD students (ADCET, n.d.). Particularly relevant as we are in a creative context. I don’t think my original intervention was creative enough. Tim noted the ‘fragmenting’ experience of ADHD (See also, Hood, 2018). He encouraged me to also consider how the form of the intervention might reflect or ‘dramatise’ the experience of ADHD. Which was something I tried to do further in my more recent idea.
I am hoping that the recent intervention might speak more directly to aspects of Black identity too. I am conscious of my own positionality as white here and without lived experience. But also, it is burdensome on those with lived experience only, to be tasked with making systemically ‘white’ spaces more inclusive.
5) Action – How do you propose that this intervention be used and what might this mean for your personal academic practice and your work context?
I am disinclined to use the original intervention as it is. But working on it and receiving feedback will help me to develop alternatives in the future. I would like to consider the new intervention I drafted as something to build on. It has come out of reflections and further thinking, reading and listening in this unit, since the initial intervention.
a) How to better centre ADHD
Students with ADHD may experience fragmentary memory and attention. They may experience impulsivity and the need for new things. They may benefit to do something with their hands. (Hughes et al, 2020; ADCET, nd; CADDRA, 2022).
In feeding back on the original intervention, Peers offered useful suggestions. These included introducing novelty, with each new round of activity, to keep students engaged.
Peers also suggested re the structure of the workshop, that it could allow, for ‘chaos’ in the centre. With the beginning and end more structured.
Tim recommended I look into ‘Patchwork’ methodology (Cattaneo, 2014). It is a creative way of helping students engage in writing exercises.
These recommendations inspired the new, collage-based intervention. But somehow writing it also brought me adjacent to examples of ‘pedagogies of discomfort’.
I think I was also informed by looking at contemporary art archival practices. Exploring chaos, rather than ‘order’ might be a way of challenging power relations in institutional archives. It might also be a way of moving beyond ‘critiquing the silences’ (paula roush, 2016). This might help to centre other sorts of experiences, such as loss, dislocation and trauma, which might also, intersect with ‘Race’.
In terms of the provocations, I sought to weave together different forms of archival/memory loss. Starting with key traits of students and adults with ADHD, acknowledging how traumatic these can be, but also looking at other traumatic experiences of chaos and dislocation as well. I then sought a way through the activity, to re-integrate things.
Part of me is still quite nervous about gauging how much discomfort one can introduce in a one-off session about archives. On the other hand, one could argue that it might be helpful if we deliver this as ‘outsiders’ into a course. Then students are free to digest the session in within their course and with their regular tutors afterwards. I am still not quite sure!
I do also think some of the elements of my initial Microteach, from the first term, on drawing, with archival/museum objects. This could have been developed further with an inclusive frame. Elements I think would engage with ADHD experience, through hands on creative work. That workshop was also about archival bias, but less explicitly so. The aim was, through drawing, to encourage participants to consider their own positionality when describing and listening.
b) Further centring Black Students
I had some other wonderful suggestions from Peers about how better to intersect with Black student experience.
I will also add these to our resource lists for future interventions.
Peers also encouraged me to engage more deeply in a rich number of contemporary decolonising approaches to the archive (roush, as mentioned above, might be one, but there are others).
Peers also encouraged me to remind students that everyone has an archive of some kind, whether they consider it that way or not. We do this, in other areas of our teaching, but I had not centred in my original intervention.
One suggestion was to consider Indigenous practices such as ‘Potlatch’ (a gift giving ceremony). I conscious of not wanting to “appropriate” this practice inappropriately, given my own positionality as a white western archivist within a European institution. But it is something I would be curious to learn more about. There are many investigations considering community archives as challenging institutional archival practices as well. (Zavalaa et al., 2017)
Another was contemporary thinking around the ‘Black Body as Archive’. To investigate artists who may have explored this (Marima, 2024). We do introduce students to artists who do this kind of work, but I will gather more resources on it for the future. Again, I do not have lived, embodied experience. So, I feel I can guide people to resources. Alternatively, I will look for opportunities to collaborate with practitioners with lived experiences, on these topics.
In September, 2025, my colleagues and I will be working with the Decolonising the Arts institute on a set of workshops to reflect on archival practices. I hope that this work will not only inform our archival practices but also our teaching going forward.
I might also try to explore “chaos” with something more celebratory or mas/carnivalesque. As an alternative to centering around trauma. Equally, I don’t want to shy away from attempting pedagogies of discomfort. The other thing I wonder about the new intervention is whether it is still focussed too much on group dynamic. I am not sure.
6) Evaluation of your process – what have you learned from this process? If you were to implement it, how would you know if it’s working?
The process of writing the original intervention felt something like a description of writing a traditional student essay when it,
‘…tend[s] to be ballasted with information and copious references to stock sources… the urge to convince the assessor that the learner knows something about the main areas of information is disastrous.’ (Cattaneo, 2014).
The feedback however has been helpful. I am a kinaesthetic learner, I learn through doing. Like many of our students. So whilst I was frustrated by the limitations of my initial intervention, perhaps I had to write it and receive feedback to learn.
Perhaps I was experiencing resistance to the assignment as well, on some level? And working through that, with the feedback was part of the process? Possibly. I do think I genuinely missed something that might have been an attention issue to begin with. But it is also possible I was resistant to the dealing with intersectionality/ my own positionality, out of feelings of discomfort, or alternatively, because sometimes I choose to articulate my commitment to a fairer society in different frameworks.
I was more focussed on the dynamics of the classroom initially, than my own feelings/positionality. Have I resolved that with my second attempt/new intervention? I am still not quite sure. I think it does have potential to be more engaging than the first. I think it potentially does speak to aspects of ADHD and Black student experience, whilst conveying in a hands-on way, something of archival bias. But I am not quite sure. I worry it is also to ‘head-on’ in dealing with trauma. I still not comfortable with putting it out there, but it is an attempt at trying something different.
In terms of gauging its success within the classroom, I have found so far that feedback forms, for example, are rarely that helpful. I feel you must judge by how the conversation goes with the students in the space, and the work that is produced. Sometimes it is hard for us to see the results due to the one-off nature of our sessions so we so rely on verbal feedback from students and course tutors.
- Conclusion – what are your key observations and reflections regarding this process, your positionality, and your practices?
I want to remove barriers wherever I can to learning and find new ways to engage students with different lived experience to my own. I am from a creative background, even though I have had to learn academic and administrative coping strategies to survive. In many ways these have constrained the elaboration of my creative capacities. But I am sensitive to the vast privileges I have had to develop these coping strategies. I want to approach students with as much conscientiousness and care as I can, who have not had these privileges. I value the opportunity to think creatively about how to make teaching more inclusive. I think there is still much to do within my context to make our teaching more inclusive. I think that partnering with others with different expertise, as well as educating ourselves (/myself) more, is necessary.
I also realise I need to look after myself better (particularly in terms of the day today differing demands in my work schedule). In this way, I will be in a better position to engage/focus appropriately (whether it be on assignments, or in the classroom), with care, for others. I struggle sometimes to set boundaries for myself, say yes to too much, this leads to overwhelm and overstretch, and then care-less-ness. I am still learning this, but can keep trying to do better.
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