As a female technician between the age of 25-35 years old, native to the UK within the 3D workshop, I understand how it operates from that specific perspective but I lack understanding of what it’s like within the workshop for a student not in that position. I want to understand more about their experience when entering the 3D workshop and how their background, culture, race, religion, disability and gender affect their learning within the workshop environment.
With a vast percentage of the students we see in the 3D workshop not speaking English as a first language, I want to recreate our paper and online resources. I will focus predominately on the laser cutting file preparation resources which we have online on our website/Moodle and we print off to have as paper versions in the workshop (see below for reference). We get a large amount of students misunderstanding the resources independently and they need translation which the technicians are spending a lot of time repeating the instructions rather than helping students who are struggling with the actual process of laser cutting.
I want to use data from Dashboard and the language development team at UAL to discover where our students are from and which languages would be the most beneficial to translate our resources into. Translating language can be difficult to do accurately, so I will also develop resources that require less text and more graphics to allow a wider range of students to effectively learn. I am hoping my results will not only show developing my resources will improve the learning of students whose first language is not English, but also those students with neurodiversity’s such as dyslexia and those that are more visual learners.
Some challenges to overcome may include translating the resources incorrectly, finding the correct data that applies to the intervention, being sensitive to the needs of the students and being inclusive to all. This means not choosing one culture or language over another, avoiding presumptions, lookism and racism when providing the resources. Lastly, I will try to collect feedback from the students and my colleagues around the resources, this may be difficult during busy periods but will be very beneficial in developing the best resources I can.
References:
Crenshaw, K. (1991) ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,’ Stanford Law Review, 43(6), p. 1241. https://doi.org/10.2307/1229039.
Noel, L.A and Paiva, M. (2021) ‘Learning to Recognize Exclusion’ Journal of Usability Studies, Vol.16, Issue 2, pp 63-72.
Dr. V, Odeniyi. (2022) Reimagining Conversations with Multilingual Students, UAL Decolonising Arts Institute publications and podcasts series https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/eprint/18697
M, Oliver. (1990) THE INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL MODELS OF DISABILITY Paper presented at Joint Workshop of the Living Options Group and the
Research Unit of the Royal College of Physicians