PG Cert 1 of 4
Brooks (2008) is a highly readable and relatable piece of work that emerged from the HEA’s Subject Centre for Art, Design & Media. The 24 Subject Centres were national networks that were extremely valuable in improving teaching and the student experience in the disciplines through publications, events and conferences. They closed in 2010 (HEA, 2010).
I chose to study the above piece by Brooks. It caught my attention because it’s about Art, Design and Media, my specialisms. As I studied Graphic and Media Design around this time (2006), it’s interesting to look back on the pedagogies of this era.
I’m going to reflect on the specific essay ‘Could do Better?’: students’ critique of written feedback by Kate Brooks (Brooks, 2008).
A comment that really struck me was the following one:
“One-to-one discussions are really valuable…they motivate and engage you emotionally. A few words of encouragement face-to-face can make all the difference between dropping out and staying.” (Brooks, 2008, p. 4)
This quote has really resonated with me as I’m doing this essay as an EC, for the first time I’ve had to apply for one and I haven’t studied since my MA in 2010. I had a tutorial yesterday with my tutor Carys and I really related to this piece of student feedback from the report because her face-to-face encouragement and feedback has got me back on track. I have found studying in this much more digital era, with two children in tow, incredibly difficult, and it has really made me comprehend the difficulties that today’s students face—with the distraction of tech like Instagram, TikTok and reels (Ophir et al., 2009), alongside in-person socialising and their digital alter egos competing for real life attention. As designers, you are encouraged to have a strong visual, digital persona, so the amount you invest in this often affects your profile and therefore job opportunities (McRobbie, 2016).
While I find written feedback useful to refer back to, the positive experience of face-to-face (or ‘screen-to-screen’ on Teams as it is now in 2025) is a way more positive experience in my opinion. I found the colloquial feedback from the students humorous:
“It seems that students are telling us here that they want the opportunity to have the comments explained to them, and perhaps the chance to discuss or debate the mark – as one student put it, ‘the chance to air my grievances!’” (Brooks, 2008, p. 6)
I teach on the DPS (Diploma in Professional Studies), so I constantly compare the learning outcomes in education to how relevant they are to industry. I believe that “the chance to air my grievances!” is what I’d call a ‘wash-up’ session in industry. Therefore, I might run my feedback sessions in more of an industry format.
This would look like: Action: written 360° feedback from all the teams on the project or assignment, and then a group discussion of ‘what went well, what didn’t, what we could do better next time’. This would teach them what to expect in a formal working environment (Boud & Molloy, 2013).
Rather than airing grievances, which comes across as quite entitled, I’d encourage them to set up a ‘ways of working’ meeting to discuss how they’d prefer to work in future—again, drawing on practices more common in professional settings (Kolb, 1984).
In conclusion, I feel that the national subject centres were in fact really valuable from both a personal and industry perspective. From a personal point of view, the 24 Subject Centres were extremely valuable in improving teaching and my own student experience in the disciplines through publications, events and conferences. I think it’s a shame they closed in 2010, as I often encourage my students to engage with a range of design events—from the London Design Festival, Nicer Tuesdays, Design Biennale, and Venice Biennale, to conferences like Glug and SXSW. This year, we engaged our DPS students with SXSW in collaboration with Canva, which has been an invaluable learning experience (Canva, 2025).
Bibliography
- Boud, D. and Molloy, E. (2013) Feedback in Higher and Professional Education: Understanding it and doing it well. London: Routledge.
- Brooks, K. (2008) ‘Could do better?’: Students’ critique of written feedback. York: Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Art, Design and Media.
- Canva (2025) SXSW x Canva: Student Collaborations in Design Education. [online] Canva. Available at: https://www.canva.com/ [Accessed 30 Jul. 2025].
- HEA (2010) The end of the Subject Centres. Higher Education Academy. [online] Available at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/ [Accessed 30 Jul. 2025].
- Kolb, D.A. (1984) Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
- McRobbie, A. (2016) Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries. Cambridge: Polity Press.
- Ophir, E., Nass, C. and Wagner, A.D. (2009) ‘Cognitive control in media multitaskers’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(37), pp. 15583–15587.
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