As I am also an archivist from the same team at UAL as Hannah Grout, when she was writing her article. Grout’s argument (2019), aligns with the teaching and archival work that I help to support on a day to day basis. Her own thinking has helped to shape the teaching that our team delivers. We have embedded into our delivery, some of the challenges of archival bias. Of course, we can find ways to do more. Perhaps particularly around who we reach in terms of our audience. And how we might involve students in the future shaping of our collections, see Pardue (2023).
When we are helping students to develop research skills, we encourage critical reflection on sources. Including, of course, archives. (Albeit it is also important to note that what is meant by “research” at art school can be something quite different to that in other subjects. (See Orr and Shreeve, 2018).
In ASCC teaching sessions, particular emphasis has been brought to the two aspects that Grout highlights. Firstly, archival absences when institutional archives reflect wider societal inequalities. Who gets represented, who is missing, erased or ignored. (See also Michel-Rolph Trouillot, 1995). [For example, we hold very little contextual information on the pictured functional object we hold from the David Usborne collection, other than that the collector has identified it as ‘African Currency’. Where in Africa was this used? By who? How did David Usborne collect it?]. Secondly, the biases present in how archives are arranged, described and interpreted. An archive description can give the appearance of ‘objectivity’ when in fact it is highly mediated by the describer. It can re-produce biases from the original archival record, or it can be a product of the archivist’s own bias. The act of description and interpretation of the record produces something new. This will affect how it is recieved by the researcher.
One of the ways we raise awareness of this is through “object reading” (See, for example, Willcocks, 2023). I do not remember doing this during my own education. Though looking back on it, I may have been encouraged to think in this way on some occasions, for example when doing a “close reading” of a work of art. So for me, it has been an example for me of “learning through teaching”. I have gained a better understanding of it through leading pre-planned sessions using it. Following the work of Judy Willcocks and others, Object Reading is a very dominant methodology at UAL. As I understand it, it emerged from material culture (C.S. Pierce and others). It enourages students to inspect a given artefact in different ways. Through doing so, the aim is to develop the student’s critical thinking skills.
I think I might want to come back after this session to consider why it has become such a large part of UAL teaching. I can speculate on many very good reasons why. I myself, when running these sessions, can see the benefits. However I am also curious to explore what other methodologies one might bring in to encourage students to think critically. And other ways to respond to archives, as well.
Alternatively, the college archives themselves have a vast record of past teaching practices. These may well show the biases mentioned above, and need to be critiqued for this. However, it might also help to historically situate our current practices better, or see where things have been attempted in different ways in the past. This might enable better critical understanding of our present moment. For example, the recent return to vocational or ‘apprenticeship’ teaching, or emphasis on ‘maker’ rather than ‘artist’, may itself have emerged through social justice demands for more inclusive teaching. But these do actually have antecedants in earlier moments of art school teaching. How might we make sense of this?
Another way of introducing the challenge of archival bias, has been to introduce students to the theoretical principles underpinning traditional archival practices. This equips students to navigate collections. It also helps to consider how information about collections shapes our understanding of them. What it reveals, what it might obscure. We get students to thinking about how an archive has been structured (arranged and described). Arrangement and description is a highly mediated and mediating process. which past and present archivists contribute to.
These things are both vital. However there are potentially many more ways one could approach archives and archival research critically. Exploring these is something I am interested in. There is, however, a limit to what can be transmitted within many of the single, stand-alone sessions we teach… to be returned to!
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‘African Currency’ UAL Digital Collections Platform, https://digitalcollections.arts.ac.uk/object/?code=tms:DU_280 (Accessed 17 January 2025). Collection Reference: DU_280, David Usborne Collection, UAL Archives and Special Collections Centre.
Grout, H. (2019). ‘Archiving critically: exploring the communication of cultural biases,’ in Spark: UAL Creative Teaching and Learning Journal, 4:1, pp.71-75
Orr, S. and Shreeve, A. (2018). Art and Design Pedagogy in Higher Education: Knowledge, Values and Ambiguity in the Creative Curriculum, Abingdon: Routledge
Pardue, L. (2023). ‘Correcting the Record’, Into the Archive, UAL Archives and Special Collections, Available at https://www.arts.ac.uk/students/library-services/special-collections-and-archives/stories/correcting-the-record (Accessed 17/01/2025)
Trouillot, M-R. (1995). Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Boston: Beacon Press
Willcocks, J. and Mahon, K. (2023) ‘The potential of online object-based learning activities to support the teaching of intersectional environmentalism in art and design higher education’, Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education, 22(2), pp. 187–207. doi: 10.1386/adch_00074_1.