Year-on -year first-year undergraduate students are introduced to the university library and the wider information landscape to which it is a portal in Welcome Week at start of the academic year. These sessions, comprising tours and ‘information landscape’ sessions offer students a first engagement with their subject librarians and the print and e-resources and special collections.
A body of literature has developed critiquing the front-loading practice of delivery of critical library skills sessions at the outset of undergraduate careers. Much of this accounts of a traditional lectured-centred, passive learning approach predominating and suggests the timing of delivery determines consequent information retention problems. While these accounts are largely anecdotal and lack the empirical data of longitudinal studies, they ring true to library teams across UAL. In reviewing studies of transition to university and engagement with information literacy Charlotte Barton (2017) characterises the typical fresher student as exemplifying the Dunning-Kruger effect i.e. they are unaware of their ignorance of the field and consequently over-estimate their skill level. The data we collect on follow-up 1-2-1 information literacy sessions with individual students has convinced us that for whatever reason (lack of preparation; overwhelming torrent of information in first weeks) persisting with this delivery mode is ineffective.
A minor adjustment to our first engagement with students was trialled in Welcome Week 2025. LCC Library switched its delivery of the tours and collections component of inductions a fair-based format drawing together Library staff, Academic Support, Language Development and representation from across Student Support Services. Multiple models for delivering induction sessions noted in Barton’s survey were ostensibly invested in moving students toward active learning but these initiatives allowed no student initiative or voice to emerge e.g. students reading questions from cards, filling in worksheets to follow a tour.
Fig. 1. LCC Library Fair 16 September 2025.
Our switch of mode reminded me of the fair atmosphere of Freshers weeks in decades past, excepting professionals rather that peers were touting for interest. We laid out our wares (assistive technology, special collections, student made works…) and encouraged handling and questions and posed questions to the subject groups as they engaged. As we structure our course support on subject specialisation (i.e. librarians have designated courses) the programming of course groups to visit the fairs was managed individually to ensure relevance, with wider services in attendance throughout. My colleagues and I reciprocated student interest with mini-talks on the history of the college, printing techniques, favourite collections items… While we gathered no empirical data on the fairs our review meeting noted: ‘The sense was that the fairs were a better induction for the students to the space than a tour and that, overall, the interactions we had with the students had more depth and were of a better quality.’ Although the follow-up ‘information landscape’ sessions were delivered in the usual mode we noticed greater engagement having already had the opportunity to impart subject knowledge and enthusiasm – unfortunately this in no way relieves the problem of information overload and poor retention.
The alternative of delivery of information literacy sessions at the point of need is also offered though we are concerned that initial session has setting an off-putting tone by the time this comes around. New digital self-led modules has been developed, we are monitoring take up. I intend to develop some shorter alternative induction sessions featuring an active learning approach informed by the content of the PG Cert.
Reference List:
Barton, C. 2017. Exploring the experience of undergraduate students attending a library induction during Welcome Week at the University of Surrey. Journal of Information Literacy, 11(2), pp.105–117. Available at: https://journals.cilip.org.uk/jil/article/view/322/294. [Accessed 17 March 2026].
Image List:
Figure. 1. Clarke, G. (2025) LCC Library Fair 16 September 2025 [Photograph].
For at least fifteen years the LCC MA Publishing programme has invited the LCC Library Collections lead to make a presentation of works from the LCC Printing Historical Collection and deliver a class to illustrate the history of publishing in the west. The strength of the collection is in showing how the book has evolved, been influenced by social and historical factors and shaped by key practitioners in the various fields of printing technology and book production. For the last three years I have delivered this talk making minor adjustments year-on-year from the the maximalist approach outlined in the inherited lesson plans / book lists. I intend now to adapt to a more focused chronological account of how individual titles can represent key changes in material, social, literary and publishing culture.
Fig. 1. Current reading and motivational mug. Clarke, G. (2026)
My colleague’s evaluation of my teaching this class confirmed my concern that my custom of over-fast delivery together with a compendious selection of works shown may have proven exhausting for the students. I reflect here on strategies planned for adapting this talk to one which I hope will encourage active learning in class, pique student interest in the research possibilities of the collection and impress on them how book and manuscript traditions still shape book-making and publishing. My training and inclination encourage that this is best realised by shaping a chronological narrative engaging fewer works that represent key changes in publishing history – emplotment, as Hayden White (Vann, 1998) terms this storytelling technique. A recent model for such emplotment / narrativising is Adam Smyth’s The Book Makers, my challenge is to convey in 60 minutes something of the sweep of change Smyth covers in 350 pages.
My intention is to incorporate Vygotsky’s ideas on scaffolding and modelling to the revised class. My introductory remarks will form a conceptual wrapper caveating that such narrativising may simplify historical events into literary tropes, scaffolding comprehension of a centuries long tradition. Thereby the class may reflect on and consider alternatives to my critical positionality. Further scaffolds will be a glossary (definitions shown on screen and on a hand-out) of terms included in the class or likely to be met in follow-on study and my posing guiding questions before demonstration (modelling by describing my thought process) of key morments of cultural shift.
Not all students seem to grasp the relevance of the class. In the learning outcomes I will reference how the creative attributes of storytelling, connectivity and communication (derived the UAL Creative Attributes Framework, CAF) are embedded in the teaching and offer a model to be applied to their research and professional practice with the potential to enhance their employability prospects.
I want to impress on the students how an understanding of visual and material qualities of the works presented are evidence of the shaping effect of trade organisations, economic demand and material availability (Gants, 2004). I will show a slide diagram of this circuit of industry – author, typographer, illustrator, printer, binder, bookseller, reader – asking how it could, with minor adjustments, describe the publishing world today – students can add post-its to overlay the projection.
For a class of c.30 it is not feasible to give equal access as students crowd in to view works, slides are a poor substitute. I intend to use a visualiser (adjustable rostrum camera set-up) to stream to the screen my engagement with various works. The final 15 minutes of the class will be scheduled to allow the students to study and handle individual items and complete an object based learning task based. A plea for an extension of the class to 90 minutes will be made.
I account here of a collaboration I worked on with the LCC Changemakers programme to deliver an exhibition based on the LCC Global South Photobooks Collection that ran over Summer 2024 in the LCC Library. The purpose of the Changemakers is to effect change to racial inequalities in UAL, this is principally achieved via collaboration with academic staff on the development of decolonial and anti-racist curricula and teaching practices. The appointed Changemaker, Saranya Satheesh, made a post on the project summarising the workshop activity she facilitated. I reflect here on the the dynamics of co-creation and instructional design suitable to this practice.
This Global South Photobooks initiative was conceived of by Prof. Paul Lowe to establish the practice of using photobooks from the majority world for teaching and learning to raise student and staff awareness of the richness and diversity of non-western photographic production. By Sping term 2024 the collection included sections curated by photographers Roi Saade (Middle East and North Africa), Monica Alcazar Duarte (Latin America) and Fikayo Adebajo (West Africa). These capsule collections were regularly being issued to staff for use in the classroom.
Fig. 1. Discussing exhibition sequencing and layout with the Changemaker volunteer group. Satheesh (2024)
Given the timescale (three workshops over a month) we had to stress the exploratiory nature of the project, though basic learning outcomes were defined as participants gaining an understanding of:
traditional curatorial practice
positionality and interpretation
writing decolonial exhibition text
This openness is neatly summarised by Thomas-Hughes et al (2025): ‘training in this context was not about teaching a group of people how to do something, rather it related to facilitating a space where collaborators could collectively share their skills and interests, interrogate the aims of the research.’ Early on we established that in dealing with sensitive political matter and expressions of our various cultural backgrounds a spirit of enquiry would prevail over judgement. The inclusive language of From Safe Spaces to Brave Spaces (Arao & Clemens, 2015) would have been a useful guide here.
Following the workshops the group selected Roi Saade’s section of the collection and the theme of ‘home’ – possession, dispossession and repossession of ‘home’ being a motif repeated across the works in this section. Given its political currency and the broad range of cultures it embraced the section posed challenges for the group concerning their right to speak for others and their licence for political comment. The group being of diverse identities and homeplaces suggested to me that an autoethnographic response to the works would offer a nuanced reflection on the subject matter and platform student voices in the mode of the PhotoVoice projects we have previously run.
The fundamental difficulty of such an open process is the unpredictability of the outcome, securing student commitment in these circumstances proved difficult and attendance was inconsistent. Although the group selected all the images only three committed to written responses (Appendix 1). Saranya’s pusuing feedback after each session allowed us evidence that the learning outcomes were being met. Curation requires careful deliberation toward meaningful sequencing, layout and captioning – the two-hour sessions (Co-design & collection engagement; Sequencing; Critical exhibition writing) did not allow for a sufficiently deliberative approach or iterative development. While I believe the instructional design of the project respected of Benjamin Bloom’s taxonomy of learning (Cardiff Metropolitan University, 2026)., moving though a hierarchy of learning objectives from from basic recall up to complex creation a longer lead time (term 1: introductory workshops, theme selection; term 2: curation) would have created a more inclusive facilitation of learning and time for reflection. The constrained schedule risked the students experiencing split attention and cognitive overload (Society for Education and Training, 2026).
Reference List:
Arao, B. & Clemens, K (2015). ‘From Safe Spaces to Brave Spaces: A New Way to Frame Dialogue Around Diversity and Social Justice’. In L. M. Landreman (ed.), The Art of Effective Facilitation. Stylus Publishing, LLC.
Thomas-Hughes, H., Barke, J., & Clayton, A. (2025). Working With Students as Co-Researchers; a Reflection on Process. Journal of Participatory Research Methods, 6(2), 325–332. https://doi.org/10.35844/001c.129350 (Accesed 15 March 2026).
These three student reflections on photobooks from the Middle East section of the Global South Photobooks Collection were included in the exhibition guide, number indicates position in exhibition sequence. Introductory remarks are my own or quotations from publishers’ blurbs on the books, student text given in italics.
In the Shadows of the Pyramids by Laura El-Tantawy (2021)
‘A first-person account exploring memory and identity. With images spanning 2005 to 2014, what began as a look in the mirror to understand the essence of Egyptian identity expanded into an exploration of the trials & tribulations of a turbulent nation. The result is dark, sentimental and passionate. Juxtaposing the innocence of the past with the obscurity of the present, the book is an experience, edited to look like a one night’s encounter. A peaceful and tranquil day suddenly turns violent and chaotic, it’s claustrophobic, until a new dawn rises and there is hope again.’
To many, home is the bigger things like the presence of a safe physical and mental space, but I think it also includes the little things that stimulate our senses. This image shows the consequences of civil war, specifically the Tahrir Square protests in Cairo – leading to the Arab Spring uprising.
The photographer gives us a glimpse of the chaos of it all when she travels back to her homeland for a holiday before the civil unrest erupts and it’s through her eyes that we witness the intense and gradual loss of innocence, wonder and nostalgia of the idea of home to her.
The image to me depicts neutral expressions hiding concerned thoughts behind the men’s faces due to the displacement and chaos in their lives and the temporary settlements behind them representing home through more abstract themes such as displacement, compromise, resilience and compassion.
I chose to write about this image as the feeling of eroding safety in one’s own country due to an increasingly unjust governmental practices and control feels more and more closer to my home in India. It is an increasingly pressing concern of mine and this image reflects the escalation of those fears.
Although I don’t mean to, by any measure, to state that I fully comprehend the feelings of the citizens and the intensity of the situation, the image makes me empathetic to their pain, admire their resilience and share feelings of hope with the artist about the country’s future.
Co-curator: Abhilasha G K
Disquiet Days by Bruno Boudjelal (2009)
Disquiet Days / Jours Intranquilles charts Boudjelal’s 11-year inquiry into his origins, his identity and his unknown family, set against the background of an Algerian state in the process of turning its citizens against each other and abandoning them to their own resources.
There is something magnetic about these images. This moment of movement and laughter, of people caught mid-conversation or mid-thought. Their faces pull me in. I find myself wondering about them—their relationships to each other, their stories, the walls behind them that hold memories I’ll never fully know. Shot in monochrome, the image slows me down. It strips away distraction, drawing my attention to texture and light. The fold of the shirt, the glint in their eyes, the outline of their smiles. But it also makes me wonder: how would this feel in colour? Would it change what I feel? Or would it shift what I notice?
Boudjelal’s diary entries throughout the book are as intimate as the images. Reading them, I felt as though I was gently stepping into his mind, into his uncertainty, hope, fear and longing. His words and photographs come together to create a space that feels layered, unresolved, and deeply human. His journey to Algeria, to meet his family that he never truly knew, feels like travelling to the present of his past. Though I haven’t experienced that exact sensation, I can relate to the gap between what we imagine home to be and what it becomes over time. In that gap lives both nostalgia and disorientation.
Now, living far from where I grew up, I notice how my sense of home has expanded. First it was my house, then my city. Now it’s the idea of my country. Distance does that. It stretches what we mean when we say home, turning it into a mosaic of places, people, and moments that don’t quite fit into a single definition. Boudjelal’s work made me pause. Not just to reflect on where I come from, but on what I carry with me. It reminded me that home is not fixed. It shifts and mutates, just as memory does. And sometimes, looking back becomes a way of finding where we stand now.
Co-curator: Srushti Hirde
And Yet My Mask Is Powerful by Basel Abbas, Ruanne Abou-Rahme (2017)
This book documents visits to 10 of the 500 Palestinians villages razed in 1948. The authors return to the site of destruction “as the very site from which to cast a new projection that palpably evokes the potential of an unrealised time, not bound by the here and now of colonial time… The project uses the trips taken by young Palestinians to sites of destroyed Palestinian villages as an avatar to think about the possibility of using the site of wreckage as the very material from which to trace the faint contours of another possible time.” See: https://baselandruanne.com/
I felt as if I was eavesdropping on someone else’s memory. The handwritten notes scattered across the surface, overlapping with the photograph and those red dots. It feels like stumbling upon someone’s journal left open, catching glimpses of their internal process of remembering and searching.
When I think of home, I think of turmeric under my mother’s fingernails, ginger tea on a monsoon evening, scents that mean I’m safe, I belong, I can come back anytime I want. But for them, it’s the cactus, the smell of wild fennel, trails of wild asparagus that leads them to the remains. These wild plants that just refuse to die, refuse to let people forget. There’s something heartbreaking about that. The strongest connection to home has to come through the smell of things that survived, not things that were cared for.
I keep coming back to the cactuses that can regenerate from the smallest remaining piece. It challenges the idea that erasure is complete. It makes me wonder if that’s what home becomes when the physical place is gone: not a location you return to, but something you have to regenerate from whatever fragments survive. Like how these young people treat destroyed sites as “living fabric,” camping and singing in spaces that officials want to fossilize as archaeological sites.
What is home when it exists only in memory, in stories, in the persistence of a cactus that refuses to be entirely erased?
What is home when it has to be this stubborn, this determined to exist?
