The ‘Mark to Material’ CPD workshop, delivered through UAL’s Insights outreach programme, set out to explore how process-led, inclusive textile practices might reduce barriers to creativity in classroom settings. Working with twenty-six secondary school art and design teachers, the session focused on playful mark-making and material exploration, but what unfolded went far beyond a skills workshop. It became a living inquiry into how educators experience freedom, confidence, and community within creative practice.
While my initial plan was more structured, I quickly found that allowing activities to merge organically created a richer sense of engagement. The atmosphere, supported by music curated by my assistant Oliver (a former student ambassador), was informal, lively, and collaborative. The playlist he chose (Raye, Florence and the Machine, Bodyguard soundtrack) seemed to frame the rhythm of the room: energetic, confident, but with space for reflection.
This freedom to diverge from the planned structure mirrored my own learning about facilitation. As Gray and Malins (2004) suggest, practice-led research often involves “reflective conversations with materials, participants, and context,” where structure serves as scaffolding rather than prescription. In this spirit, my “overambitious” plan evolved naturally into something more interactive and responsive.
Throughout the session, I worked alongside Oliver, who documented interactions, group discussions, and body language. His observational notes, alongside my own impressions, became part of a triangulated dataset that included pre- and post-workshop questionnaires and group reflection transcripts.
Before reading Oliver’s notes, I recalled the group as fully immersed and upbeat. His perspective largely confirmed this but added nuance: he noted quiet hesitations, participants observing before joining in, and moments of peer reassurance. His positionality as a recent UAL graduate offered both proximity and distance, close enough to understand the pedagogy, but removed enough to see things I could not as facilitator.
Oliver also played an active creative role, curating work on the walls and photographing artefacts with sensitivity to process rather than outcome. The collaborative act of documentation itself became an ethnographic layer, what Kara (2015) terms “creative reflexivity”, where “the act of recording becomes part of the research narrative.”
References
Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2023) “Thematic Analysis: A Practical Guide.” London: SAGE.
Gray, C. and Malins, J. (2004) “Visualizing Research: A Guide to the Research Process in Art and Design.” London: Routledge.
Harris, A. (2020) “Creative Ecologies and the Future of Education.” Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kara, H. (2015) “Creative Research Methods in the Social Sciences: A Practical Guide.” Bristol: Policy Press.