3.0 Programme Outline

3.1 About Teaching Within

The Shades of Noir Teaching Within programme was created by Aisha Richards, founder and director of Shades of Noir, now the Center for Race & Practice Based Social Justice. As an evolving programme, Montana Williamson now (2018) leads the programme with support from Angie Illman, both graduates of the TW programme. However, Richards designed Teaching With as a bespoke initiative that responded directly to the Arts Student Union campaign UALSoWhite (2015) as well as the minimal increases to meet UAL’s ambition in 2015. This campaign articulated through data that academics of colour were sorely under-represented at UAL and went on to share potential contributing factors to the retention and degree classification of students of colour being low. UAL students are not alone in their race and ethnicity related UK protests as student campaigns such as ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ at Oxford University (Grove, 2016), ‘Why is My Curriculum White?’ at University City London (UCL, 2014) and most recently ‘Decolonise the Institution’ at the Royal College of Art (Royal College of Art Student Union, 2017) have also taken place. It is also significant that the TW programme is being delivered at UAL, the largest subject-specific art, design & communications institution within Europe.

At a basic level, the TW programme is an opportunity to recruit and train high achieving and socially conscious academics to support cultural change within the sector of art, design and communication in higher education and the wider societal context. However, it also presents opportunities for applications of antithesis as to the rhetoric that there are not enough skilled people of colour to recruit for creative academia. This programme creates the opportunity for the University of the Arts London to work with 20 creative practitioners who have little to no experience of teaching. We see this working relationship as mutually beneficial for all stakeholders who engage in the programme and see this as an opportunity for emotional investment (Ioanide, 2015) in social justice work.

3.2 Aims

Shades of Noir aimed to achieve the following through this programme:

• Advance further good relationships between UAL and alumni and creatives of colour

• Increase the amount of academics of colour within UAL

• Impact the recruitment, retention and progression of academics of colour within this institution and across the sector

• Develop further clarity on the experience of academics of colour within UAL

• Build steps to remove barriers to entry, minimise practises that may be prejudicial to progression and further develop an environment that retains these academics

• Consider the relationship between student experience and academic diversity

• Review the impact of diverse staff involvement during staff development activities

• Continue to advance social justice within UAL.

3.3 Structure

The resources to accommodate ongoing cohorts have been agreed upon by UAL’s senior management teams. Given the scale of this institution, this programme has achieved wide sector change with the programme being the first intervention of its kind and most successful to date at UAL. There has been interest from across and beyond the sector to adopt this process.

• Gems Shadowing - The Group for the Equality of Minority Staff (GEMS) Academics have offered to be observed and shadowed for 1 to 2 hours by new participants on the TW programme.

• ​Fact Not Fiction - This is a pre-teaching course that all TW participants will take part in. It is a two-day course and is a great first step in reflecting on your teaching practice.

• Course Shadowing - You will have up to 4 hours to shadow academics teaching on the course you will be allocated to teach on as part of the programme.

• Workshops & Independent Modules - Shades of Noir also provide a series of workshops and tutorials throughout the year to cover Inductions to UAL, Teaching Workshops and PgCert Support.

• Teaching - All TW participants are expected to teach at the University of the Arts London on allocated courses that have signed up to the programme. The teaching allocated within this programme is 36 hours per course on an Associate Lecturer contract. This means that all participants have the flexibility to be part of the entire process on a course, including assessment.

• PgCERT - The postgraduate certificate in Academic Practice is a year-long course, which offers training in developing understanding and the application of theory and practice for academics working in Arts HE.

Cohorts run over periods of 18months as follows:

• TW1 - 2016-18

• TW2 - 2017-19

• TW3 - 2018-20

• TW4 - 2019-21

• TW5 - 2020-22

• TW6 - 2021-23

Each cohort receives an extensive amount of support and is encouraged to connect with each other to build networks, develop and extended supportive community and share opportunities.

3.4 Evolution

A strength of the programme has been that it continues to inform, evolve and elevate. We have incorporated a robust system where we gain feedback from previous cohorts that supports us to recalibrate our processes to improve for future phases.

Some key developments include the following:

• TW1 - Radical Recruitment- no interviews, acceptance that all who apply from 4 communities are more than capable (Shades of Noir Graduates, GEMS, Tell Us About It Graduates and the BAME talent day participants

• TW2 - Prospectus - the development of a programme wide prospectus that contextualises the programme including challenges

• TW3 - Workshops & Independent Modules - a series of learning activities that scaffold the cohort throughout their studies and teaching

• TW4 - Fact Not Fiction - A specific two-day introduction to teaching that contextualises Art & Design HE, institutional culture and the beginnings of centring social justice pedagogy. This replaced the Teaching & Learning Exchange course ‘Thinking Teaching’.

• TW5 - Guaranteed Interviews - Introducing recruitment practices that allow for a guaranteed interview scheme for all who applied. This built of wider Shades of Noir work and practices in this area

• TW5 - Digital Delivery - An adaptation of teaching and learning for online environments as well as developing space for cohort members to learn and refresh their digital skills. This was informed by Shades of Noirs online consultancy provisions

TW6 - MA Applicants - Introducing formalised Ten MA Spaces. Before Phase 6, the MA has been completed by a small percentage of our TW academics. In TW3 we had two TW graduates engage and complete the programme. This has been a success and a further two students were added from TW5. The statistical data has shown that this process has been useful and an autonomous way to give back to the existing community.

3.5 Recruitment

Throughout phases one to six we have developed and evolved a process that allows us to recruit applicants who meet our criteria of working towards an anti-racism and social justice framework. Research indicates that these individuals (predominantly people from marginal communities) are used to challenges and racialised barriers to gain access to spaces where they continue to be marginalised; UAL and academia at large are no different (ECU, 2009). This was initially supported by a recruitment practice that accessed individuals that were known to the institution as high achieving alumni and or existing UAL staff in non-teaching posts and/or creatives with an existing relationship with UAL. Over two hundred people are invited to participate and take up one of the twenty spaces per cohort, through several established communities. However, since 2019 this has evolved online with Shades of Noirs framework.

As mentioned above, Shades of Noir has developed a guaranteed group interview scheme to support the scale of applicants to minimise marginal recruitment practices. This process is structured with collaborative activities that centre on race and social justice. An extensive team of academics and students then holistically assess who to invite for an individual interview as part of stage two. As part of this process, we consider the significance of lived experience, transferable skill and recognise where candidates have not been afforded the same opportunities as others based on their intersectional identities/inequalities. Additionally, for those who are unsuccessful in their application process, we provide aftercare and feedback with a view that they might want to reapply next year.

3.6 Mutual Benefit

A significant part of our programme's ethos centres on the mutual benefit we can provide each other as a community. We ask each individual to consider the mutual benefit of participating in the programme and the privileges that come with each space they occupy. TW participants have access to a purposeful network and are encouraged to immerse themselves in pedagogical theory. The feedback suggests that for many the programme is life-changing and the investment that the Shades of Noir team makes in each participant is purposeful, challenging and impactful for many. Parts of the programme we have developed aim to create change and support to manage inevitable conflicts and a necessary factor towards culture change.

Creating proactive change within a sector requires both vision and courage. This space is unique and unprecedented in its ambitions and outcomes. The TW academics are the extensions of Shades of Noir and as such expected to practice social advocacy and take active steps in building on stories and shaping legacies. The narratives of this programme and its community are unique, it is in this innovative critical application of social justice that the evolution of the programme continues to drive change and paves the way for those that will come after in the programme, Shades of Noir and the wider institution.

As part of the participation in this course, we require each TW academic to engage in the following:

• Submit one piece of work to two different SoN Terms of Reference Journals;

• Share their anonymised positive and negative experiences which will form case studies for use in training initiatives created by Shades of Noir;

• Participate in ongoing TW archival work where needed, via either video, interview, and/or Q&A sessions.

TW participants continue to benefit, with some going on to secure roles on their placement course, most within UAL, several access further degrees such as the MA in Academic Practice and benefit from funding and research opportunities.