Blackpool and The Fylde College Scholarship Review 2023

P A P E R S

Plastic Pandemic: A Green Criminological Investigation into the Ecological Impact of Covid-19 Carrie Lee page 10

The Actor as a Tourist in a New City Michael Holdsworth page 18

reflective

Drive Thru’: A Collaboration with Stephen Clarke Aaron Tonks page 66

‘Reader, I married him’: Love, Marriage and the Development of Realism in Jane Eyre Lauren Watson page 70

Influence, affluence and expectations: a study on the corresponding factors impacting on the aspirations of children Lisa

Welcome to the Scholarship Review 2023

Helen Fogg Director of Higher Education

Welcome to the 2023 edition of the Scholarship Review. This publication is one of the mechanisms through which staff at Blackpool and The Fylde College (B&FC) can disseminate their research and scholarship outcomes and to share these with the cohesive, self-critical academic community.

The review opens with Carrie Lee’s paper entitled “Plastic Pandemic: A Green Criminological Investigation into the Ecological Impact of Covid-19”. It examines the increased use of single-use plastics during the Covid-19 pandemic and the notion that plastic is still seen as a protector rather than a polluter.

Our second submission comes from Michael Holdsworth, with an essay called “The Actor as a Tourist in a New City”. The essay is a series of musings and translations born from Michael’s attendance at the S Word Symposium in Prague in November 2022. Michael views his trip from two perspectives; being an actor and a tourist and his essay is the result of this intersection.

The next submission is from Sara Shotton, with a paper called “Perceptions of Academic Preparedness: Exploring the personal and organisational factors that contributed to preparing mature students academically in the first semester of a Foundation Degree”. The paper is born from following the experiences of three students as they progress through the first stages of a Foundation Degree. The paper highlights the need for a strategic and evidence-based approach to support the needs of mature students.

Robert Sims has co-authored a paper with Abhijit Karnik titled “Investigating the emergence of strategy in VR based reflective tasks”. The paper discusses the novel opportunities that VR presents for enhancing inquiry-based learning in education. The authors conclude that developments in this area of computing can allow students to remain active learners rather than passive.

Our fifth submission is from Paula Smithson, who provides a reflective paper titled “The Dark Side of Printmaking”. Paula examines print as a platform of multiple dimensions that links between the traditions of handmade print and the use of new technologies. Paula fuses her own experiences working with the medium with research methods and industry accepted practices and technologies.

Carolyn Foy’s paper is titled “Performance Management and Control”. The paper is split into two parts, with the first investigating the role of financial control in organisations and the value of this system as a performance assessment approach. Part two looks specifically at the financial performance of Amazon.com in 2022 from an investor’s standpoint.

Aaron Tonk’s paper is titled “Drive Thru’: A Collaboration with Stephen Clarke” and reflects his time curating photographs from Stephen Clarke that were taken during a visit to San Diego in 1986-87. Aaron used VR technology to construct a virtual gallery and his paper also explores how complex relationships between artist and curator can be.

Our next submission is from Lauren Watson, called “’Reader, I married him’”: Love, Marriage and the Development of Realism in Jayne Eyre”. This article looks at the portrayal of love and marriage in Jayne Eyre and compare it to how these concepts were represented more generally in the 18th century. It argues how the novel represents the societal, cultural and philosophical changes seen between the early 18th and mid-19th century and how character and plot illustrate these changes most clearly.

Lisa Gayton provides a research paper titled “Influence, affluence and expectations: a study on the corresponding factors impacting on the aspirations of children”. The research looks at primary aged children’s aspirations and the factors that influence this complex area. A study was conducted that looked at 16 children and their parents across two schools that varied socioeconomically, and the findings were used to draw conclusions.

Finally, Seamus Fox provides a Research Proposal, titled “Developing a new working methodology based on principles of digital game narratives to transform immersive theatre, focusing on Neil Druckmann’s The Last of Us franchise”. The research proposal seeks to answer several points, including: “What are the differences and similarities between immersive theatre and digital gaming?” and “How do audience members align with specific narrative perspectives?”.

We hope you engage with and enjoy this 2023 edition and that it motivates you to consider writing for the Scholarship Review in the future.

The Editorial Team

What we do

The Editorial Team oversees and approves the content of each annual edition of the Scholarship Review. This entails reviewing, checking, editing, amending and refining papers submitted for publication each year. We meet to discuss papers, articles, features and think pieces and case studies and feedback to authors on how to enhance their papers.

Our remit also extends to the promotion of scholarship and research within the B&FC academic community, and encouraging and supporting staff to publish the outcomes of their research activities. In the forthcoming year we will be working more closely alongside the Senior Tutors Scholarship and Research.

Who we are

The Editorial Team is chaired by Helen Fogg, HE Director who works closely with Senior Tutors Scholarship and Research (S&R): Fraser Hatfield, Senior Tutor S&R (Maritime Operations), Françoise Peill, Senior Tutor S&R (Society, Health & Childhood), Rachael Leitch, Senior Tutor S&R (Leadership, Management & Lifestyle), Seamus Fox, Senior Tutor S&R (Blackpool School of Art), Lee Holroyd, Senior Tutor S&R (Computing and Digital Technologies), Lucky Ishaku, Senior Tutor S&R (Engineering and Science).

We would also like to thank Aidan Eaves, Assistant HE Academic Registrar for his input and support.

First row (left

Helen Fogg, Fraser Hatfield, Françoise Peill and Rachael Leitch Second

Seamus Fox, Lee Holroyd, Lucky Ishaku and Aidan Eaves.

to right):

row (left to right):

Plastic Pandemic: A Green Criminological Investigation into the Ecological Impact of Covid-19

Carrie Lee

Abstract

Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, single-use plastic (SUP) became crucial to healthcare workers and the public, resulting in significant amounts of waste. Since there were no alternatives to SUP and society adopted a ‘throw-away culture’, ecological health was inevitably set to deteriorate. This study provides a critical review of plastic usage throughout the pandemic. It gathers public opinion on both use and comprehension of plastic and the environment and establishes the link between ecological and human health. The findings conclude a change in the items consumed throughout the pandemic. However, since SUP is still widely used, it confirms that the general notion of plastic is that it serves as a protector rather than a polluter.

Introduction

The severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS-CoV-2) is the precursor to the potentially lethal COVID-19 virus. In December 2019, a novel coronavirus strain that had never been seen in humans was discovered in the Chinese province of Wuhan. The primary source of transmission is respiratory tract fluid droplets that are typically larger than 5 micrometres in size and are released during speech, coughing, sneezing, or breathing (Duguid, 1946). With infection rising at an exponential rate, the primary aim became to protect the public health system from becoming overwhelmed, thus introducing the national lockdown during which healthcare workers were outfitted head to toe in personal protective equipment (PPE), including gloves, aprons, masks, and visors. Though what began as a worldwide health disaster swiftly became a social, economic, and environmental concern, the subsequent PPE shortages exposed the vulnerability of the underfunded yet overwhelmed public healthcare system (Cohen, Rodgers & Van der, 2020).

Prior to COVID-19, single use plastics (SUP) were mostly viewed as a polluter; but, as a result of COVID-19, their main position shifted to that of a protector, resulting in less emphasis on the environmental impact. This disregard has been exacerbated by the withdrawal of various national and state-level agreements on the use and consumption of plastic (HM Government, 2018). Each covid test strip, is made up of around 10g of plastic. Therefore, if every child and adult in the UK was testing twice a week, there would have been more than 1000 tonnes of plastic garbage produced per week - enough to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool in less than a month (Dunn, 2021).

Green criminology is informed by a variety of ideas and views, including ‘Eco-feminism,’ a term established by Françoise d’Eaubonne (1974), which uses gender to examine human-nature relationships (MacGregor, 2006). Non-human victims are rarely deemed attention worthy since they are rarely seen as victims of crime. Environmental, ecological, and species justice are three types of justice that are proposed from an eco-justice perspective as a notion of “equal victimhood,” but the concept of differential victimisation informs the idea that

some groups are more likely to experience environmental risks and harms, including indigenous people, ethnic minorities, and women (White, 2018). According to Raty and Carlsson-Kanyama’s (2010) study on environmental harm, men are more prone to engage in environmental harming behaviours (Wyatt, 2020). This study looks at how people acted toward SUP during the pandemic, with the goal of predicting how this may have affected the environment. Although the study and research were conducted in the UK, it is crucial to keep in mind that eco-crimes and the pandemic are global problems. As a result, there are times when making references to other countries is necessary to clarify and support the points raised. It aims to increase public awareness of a subject that hasn’t received enough attention, and endeavours to provide recommendations to prevent prolonged damage to the environment as this will only exacerbate another multiplicity of problems (Hatton, 2020).

Literature Review

Subsequent analysis revealed that the first positive covid test result came from a 75-year-old woman from Nottinghamshire on February 21, 2020. Unfortunately, it’s thought that she was also the first person in the UK to pass away after getting the virus (Roberts, 2020). To prevent the NHS from becoming overburdened, the UK went into national lockdown shortly after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on March 11. With tougher laws in place and increased infection rates, the need for sanitary conditions became unavoidable (WHO, 2020). For the healthcare industry to achieve a COVID-19-free environment, items like single-use masks, gloves, aprons, hand sanitizer, and visors became necessary; however, the demand for PPE was largely driven by the introduction of mandatory face masks in public places worldwide, which caused price increases and shortages throughout the world. This resulted in Chinas’ daily manufacturing rate increasing from 20 million to 110 million (Burki, 2020).

Single-use face masks typically feature three layers: an inner layer made of soft fibres, an inner layer made of a melt-blown filter, and an outside layer made of coloured non-woven fibres (Fadare & Okoffo, 2020). Melt-blown filters, which make up the majority of the mask’s filtration system and are constructed of polymeric materials like polypropylene (PP), polyurethane (PU), and polyethylene, are effective at blocking particulates (PE). These materials, however, cannot be recycled at conventional recycling facilities due to their design (Potluri & Needham, 2005; Konyn, 2020). This frequently results in inappropriate disposal. Waste frequently finds its way to open waters due to improper disposal and environmental factors like wind and storms; it is predicted that a face mask left in water might take up to 450 years to organically decay. While there is a danger to marine life during this period, such as turtles being tangled or whales ingesting, there is also another less evident issue. Due to climatic conditions and natural breakdown, plastics in water transform into microplastics, which are pieces smaller than 5 mm (Schmidt et al., 2018). These are regularly consumed by aquatic species, leading to human ingestion through food and water but also to air inhalation (Wright & Kelly, 2017). A recent study by Cox et al indicated that one source of swallowing microplastics is through fruit and vegetables cultivated in contaminated soil, while sugar, salt, alcohol, and bottled water also exhibited traces of microplastics ranging from 0.03 MPs/g to 0.44 MPs/g (Cox et al, 2019). With the increase in plastic trash, particularly disposable PPE containing PP and PE plastic, this problem will worsen.

Several observational studies have found a connection between microplastics and airway inflammatory response, which has symptoms that are very similar to those felt by textile industry workers who work near materials like polyolefin, polyester, and acrylic fibres, despite the fact that there is currently little evidence to support this association between microplastics and human harm (Prata, 2018). Additionally, data shows that the chemical toxins used to produce plastics are extremely dangerous, including associations to respiratory disease, cancer, lower fertility, and birth defects (Landrigan & McGlade, 2021). Environmental risks are thought to be responsible for 23% of premature deaths, according to a study by WHO that looked at how 85 of the 102 major diseases are linked to environmental factors that can be avoided (Zarocostas, 2006).

Green criminology is an interdisciplinary theory that adopts a variety of theories and perspectives, such as Eco-Feminism and Marxism, to examine the ecological crimes and harms that are frequently minimised and ignored in mainstream criminology (Nurse, 2017). For orthodox criminologists, the key argument revolves around the criminal justice system, resulting in a fundamental discussion over whether green crime should be dealt with by core agencies such as police, or whether the crime is beyond the purview of core agencies. Lynch and Stretesky (2014) highlight the view that environmental harms and crimes, such as pollution, pose a serious threat to human survival, and hence call for ecological justice on non-human animal and environmental harms (Lynch & Stretesky, 2014).

The green movement and Marxism are combined in the theory known as ecological Marxism. Contrary to environmentalists, eco-Marxism centred its theory on Marx’s critique of capitalist production from 1845 and championed the notion that human production alters the natural environment (Dagmang, 2019). Although PPE has been essential, some would contend that the increase in productivity is reliant on capital creation, which is harmful to the environment. The use of SUP had been heavily debated prior to the pandemic, and some countries had passed and implemented legislation outlawing use. For instance, the legislation required large retailers and supermarkets to start charging for carrying bags in 2015 since large supermarkets in England gave out more than 7.6 billion bags to customers the year before. Similar figures show that this number fell by more than 80% by 2020, proving the effectiveness of the charge. Unfortunately, COVID-19 saw the suspension of this law and others because of potential transmission problems. (HM Government, 2020; Lewis, Verghese, & Fitzpatrick, 2020). Due to safety concerns surrounding stores, a lot of individuals also chose home delivery, which led to more packaging and the use of carrying bags. Because many firms had already begun using alternatives to SUP following the ban, according to Silva et al., lifting the bans may have been premature. This is because science shows that the SARS-CoV-2 virus can survive longer on plastic than on materials like cardboard (Silva et al, 2020). It is still unexplained why wearing one’s own clothes or shoes would have a lower risk of viral transmission than utilising reusable shopping bags.

Methodology

This section offers an understanding to the approach from an epistemological viewpoint, providing an account of the process used to obtain primary data, and resonate the strengths of the applied research method. Also considered here are the methodological and pragmatic considerations, along with the validity and reliability of the data collection method.

There are two key paradigms which can be applied to data collection – interpretivism and positivism. This research is designed to obtain primary data through an inductive approach as it seeks to develop existing theory. By using a questionnaire, with a combination of open and closed questions, a wider understanding of the issues surrounding the usage of plastic throughout the pandemic can be obtained, correlating this to secondary sources to support and so strengthen the validity of this.

This research method favours quantitative data since it is thought to provide a measure of dependability and validity, which defines the overall effectiveness of the investigation. This study would be simple to duplicate, giving it high dependability. By trusting the participants to answer honestly, the validity of the research is likewise high, however as previously said, this is dependent on the participants’ honesty. As a result, an additional research design would be advantageous to triangulate the data.

To achieve a random sample of replies, the questionnaire was distributed on social media platforms. This method was chosen over opportunity sampling to improve the findings by achieving greater generalisability and so

providing a realistic representation. The questionnaire was open for one week and received 112 replies. Because this is a small sample size, the representation cannot be compared to that of the general population.

Findings

Analysis determined that participant 105 submitted the questionnaire without answering any questions, resulting in erroneous data. As a result, unless otherwise specified, the data presented is based on 111 individuals.

Basic demographics were initially collected from participants. These determined over 50% of participants were aged between 18-34 years old, 84.7% of which were female and 23 of which worked in the healthcare industry, the additional 88 participants were of varied occupations.

On a linear scale with a rating of 1-5, the participants were asked to rate how they would describe their knowledge about the affect and impact plastics have on the environment. 45 people selected number 3 showing they felt their knowledge was neither strong nor weak.

It was important to consider how SUP habits had changed throughout the pandemic therefore a pre and post pandemic question was produced.

Figure 1 - Table to show SUP prior to Covid

Figure 2 - Table shows SUP usage since the height of the pandemic

Prior to the pandemic, plastic carrying bags and beverage bottles were the two SUPs that were used the most frequently. The results demonstrate a considerable shift in behaviour, with nearly half of people who used plastic carrier bags and drink bottles before the outbreak currently using them. However, hand sanitizer and PPE have increased by more than 100% when taken together.

This work has identified a research gap in the relationship between ecological damages, specifically microplastics, and human health, indicating that this needs to be investigated further.

Conclusion

This study provides a critical analysis of plastic use throughout the pandemic. Due to COVID-19, PPE inevitably evolved into a form of life-saving protection, which is consistent with research showing a change in the types of plastics being utilised. This implies that a mindset has developed where sustainability in healthcare is not a top priority because it is believed that plastic has turned into a protector rather than a polluter (Hatton, 2021). A significant amount of plastic garbage was also produced as a result of the absence of recycling facilities; much of this debris is improperly disposed of and ends up being burned, dumped in landfills, or buried, all of which are harmful to the environment. The idea of sustainable plastic is frequently disillusioning because 91% of plastics are not recycled, and those that are frequently only have a limited number of recycling opportunities. The majority of plastics are non-degradable, which means that they breakdown over time rather than composting as was previously said. Microplastics are produced as a result of this, endangering both marine life and human health through inhalation or tainted food (seafood, vegetables, fruit). The ‘throwaway culture’ that has been developed throughout the epidemic presented an ideology that the transmission risk lowered, despite the knowledge of the negative effects associated with plastic. However, it must be argued that a reusable shopping bag cannot possibly present a greater danger of transmission than one’s shoes or clothing.

According to the research, women are more concerned about environmental issues than men. This could, however, be suggested due to a significantly higher rate of females filling out the questionnaire. It is recommended that the study be repeated using a representative sample of 50 males and 50 females to ensure equal sample bias, as this would provide more information that is more representative and, therefore, more valid. Additionally, subject to time restrictions, a semi-structured interview with one male and one female would offer extra qualitative data that could be triangulated with the statistical results, strengthening the data presented.

Green criminologists continue to be concerned about environmental issues and work toward ecological justice. Eco-Feminism, environmental movements, and studies, including the demographics of this study, all demonstrate a significant gender disparity in environmental concerns, with women leading the way. The globe is engaged in a plastics battle that calls for everyone to be accountable for their consumption and disposal, businesses to commit to extra plastic reduction programmes, and governments to establish supportive policies. There is still hope for a better, greener future with these improvements.

While the Covid pandemic is still among us, it is no longer at the forefront of the average day, and nearer to being a period in history. Although damaging, the degree of the ecological damage is still unknown. In order to be ready for similar situations we may face in the future, it is crucial to look for alternatives to SUP.

References

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Cohen, J., Rodgers, & Y. van der M., (2020). Contributing factors to personal protective equipment shortages during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prev Med, P.p. 141, 106263. Available at <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ypmed. 2020.106263> [Accessed 25 January 2021]

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Dunn, D., (2020). ‘Climate crisis last on agenda in G20 summit conclusion’. Independent. 23 November. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/climate-change-g20-summit-conclusion-b1760492.html [Accessed 11 February 2021]

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Cox K.D., Covernton G.A., Davies H.L., Dower J.F., Juanes F., & Dudas S.E. (2019). Human Consumption of Microplastics. Environ. Sci. Technol. 53: P.p. 7068–7074. doi: 10.1021/acs.est.9b01517.

Dagmang, F. (2019). Amplifying Laudato Si’ With the Science of Epigenetics. 21. P.p. 1-20.

Fadare, O. O., & Okoffo, E. D. (2020). Covid-19 face masks: A potential source of microplastic fibers in the environment. The Science of the total environment, 737, 140279. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.140279

Hatton, G. (2020). Plastic waste in the pandemic. RSA. Available at: <https://www.thersa.org/comment/2020/11/ plastic-waste-in-the-pandemic> [Accessed: 28 January 2021]

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Landrigan, P., & McGlade, J. (2021). Why ocean pollution is a clear danger to human health. The Conversation. Feb 1. Available at: <https://phys.org/news/2021-02-ocean-pollution-danger-human-health.amp?__twitter_ impression=true> [Accessed 21 February 2021]

Lewis, H., Verghese K., & Fitzpatrick L. (2010). Evaluating the sustainability impacts of packaging: the plastic carry bag dilemma. Packag Technol Sci. (23). P.p 145–160. Available at: <doi: 10.1002/pts.886> [Accessed 27 January 2021]

London: HM Government.

Lynch, M.J. & Stretesky, P.B. (2014). Exploring green criminology: Toward a green criminological volution. Ashgate, Farnham.

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The Actor as a Tourist in a New City

Michael Holdsworth

This essay is a series of wistful musings born from provocations, new translations and exciting discoveries made whilst attending The S Word Symposium in Prague in November 2022. In this capacity I am young in my research career, this being my first physical conference and marks my first year of PhD study. In addition, I am a lecturer specialising in acting technique to first year students on an undergraduate course. Finally, I am always an actor, having trained at a Conservatoire nearly twenty years before moving into teaching. Despite my long absence from the stage, the sensibilities of the actor/artist lie deep within me.

Running parallel to my visit to the city of Prague for the symposium, I am also a sight seer, an excitable tourist stumbling with wonder through that beautiful, labyrinthian city. In this essay, these two viewpoints intersect and the roles of actor and tourist merge together with a sense of wanderlust. This alternative perspective brings a nuance to the practices and details of the actor’s processes when working on a new role. In this essay, both actor and tourist are united together through their process of discovery and exploration (the actor in a role, the tourist in a city) and analyses the nature of their intent behind these actions.

For many, the opportunity to submerge ourselves into a new character in a full production, (due to practicalities and opportunities) can at times be quite rare. Whilst doable in the imagination, the real meat and bones of the actual practice is lost. Our thoughts must be put into action and sadly we can’t be in a new play every day. The viewpoint of a tourist is a somewhat easier mantle to assume. The tourist in a new city is lost and must make discoveries to establish their way around. Whilst we may not be fortunate enough to travel as much as we like, we are readily arriving at new places and figuring out our way around.

Through the process of not knowing our way around a place and “figuring it out” a window into the actor’s process of discovery is opened.

In her keynote address, author, researcher, pedagogue and Stanislavsky-expert Maria Shevtsova informs the enthusiastic attendees that the long used terminology of Given Circumstances is no more, gone, out. The symposium shook.

It has not specifically gone as it was never there to begin with. It was a mistranslation and then a misunderstanding. A misunderstanding which has been built upon, as it integrated itself into the traditions of year-on-year drama teaching. In its departure, thanks to new and more accurate translations and with better understandings of Stanislavsky’s world view, we have a new term: Proposed Circumstances.

The previously-used term of Given Circumstances refers to the information provided by the author, text, director, etc. about the play and its contents, material which informs character and action. Bella Merlin describes it as “all the data you can glean from the script plus the physical conditions of the actual production as determined by the director and the medium.”1 Taken as an extreme, this interpretation of Given Circumstances can be burdensome to the actor, when the sheer weight of all information to consider is far too great and stifling to the actor’s inner creativity.

However, there is nuance in the translation of circumstances as being proposed and not given. There is a change in

the offer that is being made. They are no longer given and therefore taken, they are offered, and by that same token they can be rejected. The actor does not have to take them, as it’s an offer after all. This altered view is not entirely new, but it was hiding in plain sight. As Merlin states, it is “not about acquiring a whole list of facts and figures; it’s about appealing to your IMAGINATION, to your ‘personal creative feelings’ and then stimulating your desire to get up and act out the script’s drama.”2 Over a decade ago (Merlin wrote this in 2009), the nuance is visible when she says that the circumstances gathered must be those that appeal to the imagination of the actor and which then springboard us into action.

The same role in the hands of different actors contains elements that appeal differently to each individual performer: the nuance of “proposed circumstances” was with us all along; it was just missed.

With this realisation, new questions emerge: if they are proposed, can we reject them? Ignore them? What happens to the proposed circumstances that are rejected? Can we simply go around ignoring the ones we don’t like? How many and how much can we reject? The answers to these questions lie, unsurprisingly, in the action itself, in the act of proposing. Circumstances are proposed, I may reject them, but despite this rejection the offer still occurred, and the things in the offer are still present even if I have decided not to engage with them.

Returning from the symposium, bustling with all the thoughts taken from it, I returned to my own classrooms where I unpacked what I had discovered to a group of bewildered first year students. Silence, confusion and tension as my excitement and expectation did not meet their targets in the way that I had hoped. Until one student, who until recently had struggled with formal education but who clearly finds a resonance with Stanislavsky’s thoughts, offered:

If I asked someone to marry me and they said no, they rejected me…But I still proposed. I can’t just pretend it never happened (well, I might try). They and I will always know it happened, it will always be there between us and anyone else that knew about it. It’s not like the person I proposed to ceases to exist because that course of action isn’t continuing. It will continue to affect me even though it’s not taken up.

The class visibly sighed as conceptual thought shifted into a resounding understanding from all, accompanied by exclamations of “Ok, I get it now.”

My student’s offering stayed with me and allowed me to consider the dynamics of Stanislavsky’s thoughts through a different lens. While the student opted for dramatic analysis through the prism of a relationship, my recent experiences travelling offered me a different perspective on the notion of being offered something and rejecting it. As I did so, like falling down a rabbit hole, I began to see other connections and the analogy gave me a different perspective on Stanislavsky’s thoughts to creating a role and exploring a production.

Before attending the symposium in Prague, I was fortunate to have time to explore the city. Some time, but not much. There was a limit on my time and so I could only see a few of the city’s offerings, but not all of them.

I landed at Prague Airport full of the enthusiasm and anxiety of arriving in a new city. I wanted to enjoy myself, I wanted to learn new things and experience what Prague had to offer. This actor was a tourist. Just like the tourist in a new city, the actor is a visitor to the world of a new (to them) play, coming to it from the outside, not from within. Everything is new. Stepping into the rehearsals of a play opens infinite possibilities of a new script, with actors, props, sets and costumes; a collection of unknowns that will shape the course of the action into a final performance. This feeling is just like a tourist encountering everything new a city has to offer them.

Ahead of my travelling I did my homework to ensure I was a prepared traveller. I checked maps, I researched bus

routes, tube stations, took pictures of maps on my phone. I was ready. Despite this, I still felt an unnerving anxiety brewing in my gut as I took my initial steps out of the airport. Things seemed somewhat familiar, I had rough ideas, but nothing was certain. As I boarded the airport bus hoping that I was going the right way, within myself there was a transitionary state of being: I had an idea of what I was doing whilst feeling entirely vulnerable and very unsure.

The transition from understanding what I was doing and where I should go, to actually doing it, was a big one, and it required confidence and faith. But most of all it required action. The actor is a tourist who can plan and plan, but the joy is in the doing and not the thinking. From reading the play an actor can make choice after choice about all the wonderful things their character is, what they will do, what exchanges with other characters will occur, etc. But all of this is merely conceptual. It does yield some benefits – the actor may understand what is going on – but it is not till the work is tested in action that the true discoveries and experiences can be made. As Knebel summarises: “The playwright gives us only dialogue, only words. We have to create everything else.”3

Upon arriving at my hotel, I dropped my luggage, took out my tourist map that I had picked up from the concierge, and spread it open across my hotel bed. The city, laid bare in this manner, made its propositions of all the places I could go to: tourist attractions, museums and exhibitions, restaurants and bars, parks and shopping centres. This map for the tourist was akin to the play’s text for the actor: full of dialogue, plot twists and turns, passionate exchanges between characters and endless considerations for the actor’s imagination to draw upon.

The city’s offering was staggering and seemingly endless. It was clear that there was far too much to take in in the few days I had. It crossed my mind that I could cram in as many places as possible, dashing from attraction to attraction, trying to see them all. If I did this, undoubtedly, the experience of each place would be diminished, because I would be engaging with them in a rushed manner. Potentially, visiting them would have very little impact on me or none at all. I didn’t know what to do. As absurd as it sounds, I was apprehensive about getting my stay wrong. The actor is a tourist who is scared of getting get it wrong. I am reminded of the actor who we have all seen and maybe even been, the ones “who are mortally afraid of making mistakes […]. A timid actor needs only to make a tiny slip and he is already lost.”4 This self-consciousness in the actor is the death of creativity and freedom. It closes the actor into themselves and they become unavailable to the offerings that are being made their way. The only cure is self-belief, a faith in their work, the need to “develop the self-control to be unafraid of making a slip into falseness, then he can instantly return to the path of truth.”5

If I resisted the rushed and haphazard approach of cramming all the city had to offer into a single visit, and instead only selected a few attractions, surely, I would have a more satisfying experience with the places I engaged with. But how could I account for the opportunities offered by those places that I would miss out? In these unvisited locations, who knows what treasure trove of discoveries I could have uncovered. I was at a loss. Where do I start? Where do I go? There was simply too much to see, and I was left dumbfounded by the limitless offers the city was giving me. The problem of “infinite possibilities” was all too real and I felt lost about where to begin. The actor is a tourist with too much to do. As an actor, this conundrum is all too apparent. How many of us have felt excited when the first rehearsal of a new project is about to begin, but also all the anxiety induced thoughts that accompany it: How about this? What about that? What if this happens? But if we do that, we won’t be able to do this. How often have we thought “that’s a nice idea, but save it for another time?” Up until the point where the full company is about to begin the practical work, all we have is the script and our thoughts, and only the brain has been used. Starting a production is like staring at a mountain that looms over you and you have the intention of climbing it. It is daunting, there is too much…all we can do and should do is climb. As Shevtsova affirms, “Stanislavsky concluded that the stumbling block was the table work, which

exercised only the brain and reason, making actors passive, whereas the antidote was ‘immediate action’, physically engaging from the very start.”6

So I picked a direction and set off into the city; I acted, I began to climb the mountain. And I immediately felt better. Certainly, some of the anxiety of uncertainty remained, but it was dissipated by the action of “doing.” I was exploring. I was engaging with the city. To be clear, it wasn’t so much a direction, as in “I shall head north.” This was more of a direction of travel, an overarching theme to my city exploration. As I was to attend a conference on the second day of my visit, and being in my first year of PhD study, I decided that academic pursuits would set the tone for my sight-seeing agenda: museums, galleries, exhibits, etc. I gave myself a task: I wanted to learn more about the city and find potential resonances with my research. I had a problem to overcome and I had something to do. The actor is a tourist who must “do.” Amidst all the details of a production and its text it is easy to become overburdened, lost, and so we must “do.” Sharon Marie Carnicke highlights Stanislavsky’s thoughts here: “He recommends that the actor ask how the given circumstances at the opening pose a problem. Name that problem with an adjective or an adverb, and then ask what the character might do to solve it. [. . .] Your answer is your verb!”7

As soon as I was in the city with this new sense of purpose I felt alive. This was different to the sensations I had experienced when I had timidly journeyed from the airport to the city centre. This was an excited sense of adventure. Now I had a plan of what I could do or wanted to do, not what I had to do. It did not matter if it failed as I was certain that discoveries would be made all the same. I had destinations to visit, dictated by my tourist map, and I had multiple ways of achieving my task. The actor is a tourist who must make choices and put them into action. By making choices in relation to their actions, the actor creates a concept of what they may attempt to do, and the character’s will is put into physical practice. Through the process of etudes in Active Analysis these actions can be explored in the rehearsal, without risk: “It was like a controlled experiment in which the variables […] were always controlled by the text.”8 The spirit of discovery, of finding nuance about the characters can be placed at the forefront of the actor’s thoughts. This process removes the call to have a perfected performance from the start. Through this approach there is room to explore, encounter infinite possibilities and the fear of failing is removed. There is no failure in the rehearsal process; only discoveries. By identifying the through-action the actor’s creativity and imagination are sparked into being and doing emerges more readily: Active Analysis “showed the actors the direction that their actions were to take and the direction in which the cumulative actions of the whole play were going.”9 Through this methodology the actor can be confident with their direction of travel and a stumbling block is lifted. The fear of failure is eased.

I started simple: elimination. I ruled out the offerings that did not spark my curiosity or resonate with my interests. I had no need of the cannabis shops and, as for the bars, I do not enjoy drinking alone; so, they were off the list. I would not be visiting them.

Yet, despite their removal, I was still aware of them. They still featured in my experience and still impacted my behaviour. I discovered them as I walked through the city to my other destinations, and I was still curious about them. I peered in through shop windows and open doorways. My behaviour was affected further when I walked home late at night past those that had partaken or overindulged in the substances on offer. I walked quicker to get past groups. I crossed roads to avoid people that had had a bit too much to drink or smoke. I stuck to well-lit streets to escape the fears being concocted in my overactive imagination. I avoided the darker roads, roads which I would have opted for during daylight without a second thought.

Despite my rejection of the bars, clubs and cannabis shops, they were still there in the city. Their impact upon the people engaging in them was still in the city. Preventing my direct engagement with them did not remove them from my visit, and the same can be said about their impact on my experience.

There were other places that did not make my list of “things to do.” These rejections were not based on some form of preference but on practicality. I simply did not have enough time. But just like the bars, clubs, and cannabis shops, they remained in my experience. I still looked for them whilst on my way to my chosen places. When I did encounter these rejected places, either on purpose or by accident, I was interested. They sparked my curiosity and fuelled my desire for another visit to the city. If they’d been enticing enough, they may have swayed me, I might have gone in and tried to squeeze more into my stay.

In this vulnerable state of being new to the city and of wanting to learn more, I was open to everything the city offered me; the good, the bad, all had an impact. The actor is a tourist who is affected by everything, even the things they chose not to explore. The vulnerable actor, desperate to get it right, often shuts themselves off into a self-protective state where they become unreceptive to what the scene and their partners are offering them; thinking that by doing their own thing, forcing feelings, generating clichés, and generally ignoring others their work will somehow be good. This is a state of self-preservation which ironically is harmful to the actor. In keeping themselves safe actors miss out on all the joy on offer in the scene. It’s a harsh manifestation of Freud’s “reality principle,”10 where they go along rejecting everything on offer to protect themselves, rejecting every new possibility that would lead them to the great performance they seek. It’s some form of twisted, self-fulfilling prophecy: “I wish to be good so I shut myself from others, control every aspect of my performance, do not trust myself, do not trust others. . . .I do not let go to the moment.” And so, the prophecy comes to fruition.

In my own classes Bella Merlin’s words of “Block nothing…Force nothing…Hurt no one”11 have become like a mantra to students exploring work. There is joy to be had and discoveries to be made by following this ideal. Suddenly, everything is available, the scene is full of proposals and each one becomes a springboard to the creative state. The insecure actor who decides to “hide away in their turtle shell”, resisting and rejecting what is happening in front of them, is harmful to their creativity as they ignore all the beautiful moments happening before them. As Stanislavsky puts it, the actor has to lay “the total bestowal of all his powers on the transient ‘now’, without a thought of how he will act and sustain himself until the fifth or sixth act”12 –a true sense of being in the moment.

And so, I adventured through the city in search of my goal, a museum, where hopefully I could learn, and in the process responding to everything the city offered me.

I got lost. A lot.

My tourist map with its bird’s eye view of the city and neatly organised colourful shapes representing the local landmarks bore little-to-no resemblance to the mad labyrinths of buildings that loomed over me. I dashed into a tourist’s information centre and picked up a new map. Despite being the same city this map bore little to no resemblance to the first. I found myself frantically comparing one map to the other, while standing in suspension, not moving, not doing anything but looking at two maps with no clue what to do or where to go –“the stumbling block was the table work.”13

Worse still, when asking directions from locals, they too were confounded by my cheap tourist map and my poor attempts at communicating. No doubt my lack of Czech beyond the word “hello” did not help matters. Despite their generosity as they tried their best to help me, I mostly ignored their helpful directions generated by their (accurate) gestures (Block nothing) instead straining (Force nothing) to try and communicate verbally through every snippet of language I could muster. If only I had been present with them and truly received what they were offering…I would have reached my destination much sooner.

But through this process of losing my way and then finding it again, I grew more and more confident. I began to

recognise landmarks, I entered shops, I spoke to whoever would talk to me and very slowly I built a familiarity with the city. Each new attempt to find my way became the process I undertook to familiarise myself more with the city. Every wrong turn still yielded positive results that were used to build an understanding of the city and eventually lead me towards my desired destination.

In turn, these discoveries made navigating the city the next day far easier. It didn’t matter if I didn’t know how to get somewhere, as I had knowledge of other nearby locations, which I could use to help me get closer. I knew which streets were to be avoided and which were entirely dead ends.

My map, which by this point was already showing considerable signs of overuse, was being used less and less. By the second day, it had been thrown away entirely and now my experiences of the city were my guide. The actor is a tourist who will make mistakes and will be better for it. In fact, they won’t make mistakes at all. They will have experiences and make discoveries as they move towards the intended goal: the creation of the character. The word “mistakes” belongs to the vulnerable actor who has a perception of what is right or wrong. There are no mistakes in the processes of truly being open and present within a scene, only discoveries that we make along the way that leads us to our creation.

Carnicke offers a far more encouraging and more accurate word than mistakes: drafts. After an etude she instructs her students: “Please read for the facts again, make whatever adjustments in your map and your verbs that you think might get you even closer to Shakespeare’s text, and try another etude. As Knebel taught, multiple etudes function as successive ‘drafts’ of the scene’s performance.”14 My own explorations of the city as a tourist, getting it wrong and getting lost, was exactly what Carnicke describes; they were drafts to help me find my way. If I hit a stumbling block I checked my bearings, spoke to a passer-by or went back to the map and then had another go, similar to what Shevtsova says that “if they were wide of the mark, the actors had to come back to the text to check what, exactly, their characters had said in the ‘proposed circumstances’.”15

The nuance between actor and tourist suffers here a little; the tourist knows where they are trying to get to, as it is a definite place that exists. However, this same approach within the rehearsal room is very harmful and limits the actor’s exploration. Being all-too aware of the destination you wish to arrive at results in a tendency to ignore any other discoveries on the path to get there, as a student of Carnicke’s explains when discussing objectives: “‘objective’ makes me thinks about how the scene should turn out and so encourages results-oriented acting.”16

As the tourist, I recognised that my movement through the city began to change dramatically as I became more knowledgeable about the location. Day one, as I truly explored, was full of discoveries. I stumbled upon all sorts of things that weren’t contained within the maps. Interesting alleyways, curiosity shops and great places to eat that were tucked away from the hustle and bustle of the main streets. I bumped into an exhibit that hadn’t made my list of “things to do” and was pulled in by it. I lost hours there, but they were valuable and enriching hours that resulted in experiences that stayed with me.

By my third day, I knew how to get to where I wanted to go. I set off with purpose and arrived efficiently at my destination. I remember little of the walks taken that day. I made no discoveries. My journeys were dull, but I got to where I wanted to be. As a tourist, I had enjoyed myself much more when I was exploring and finding my way. The adventure was filled with more life when there was a problem to solve; the problem of “how do I get to where I want to be in the city without knowing the place or speaking the language?”

The actor is a tourist who needs discoveries not destinations. The rehearsal room is a truly magical place where creatives work together to solve the problem of the production. There is so much joy in those initial

stages where we do our “working out,” particularly if we can be brave and trust in the processes rather than race to the product (the overall character or the final production).

There is a real danger that being too “objective” oriented can make us too mindful of the result we are seeking when we are in the exploration stages. We are still too mindful of what we are hoping to achieve or bring out with our performance. Carnicke’s thoughts enforce this and offer that by swapping the word objective with “‘problem’ makes the most sense […] [as] ‘objective’ looks to the end result and thus can short-circuit the actor’s journey from problem to solution.”17 But through problem solving we experience creation, as we create the solutions to our character’s predicament.

On day one of my touristic excursion around the city I sought out a particular museum that I thought might resonate with my own research interests. It took several hours to find it. However, upon finally reaching my destination, I was rewarded. I was greeted by a warm man with such a welcoming smile that it seemed to me that he recognised a soul who had overcome great hardships to get there. Not only did I have a sense of enormous achievement in finding the place, but I was also overwhelmed by the wonders inside. My curiosity was rewarded with answers. I must have spent hours in that exhibit; absorbing everything, being deeply moved, and ultimately learning from it.

Despite my complete immersion in this place, it struck me how different my experience of the museum would have been had I brought my young son along. I suspect it would have been a frustrating experience filled with complaints of boredom, quickly pursued by tantrums and demands of leaving for somewhere else that spoke more keenly to his needs. No doubt the city would have met this need as its offer of things to do was vast. It seemingly had infinite proposals of things to do.

But had my son been there, he would have been distracting. He would have taken my attention. My experience of this wonderful exhibit would have been diminished. The actor is a tourist that gives himself over to the circumstances of the scene. The external factors of life that exist outside the moment of the scene are distractions that will only limit your ability to be truly present with your partner and the proposed circumstances existing around you. This is spiritual, in that we are entering into a communion with the scene and its inhabitants: “It is helpful to seize Stanislavsky’s meaning by thinking of the work being made as a transcendent entity to which everyone involved had to submit.”18 This idea of submission is a multi-layered process, as it involves shedding the life of the actor that is external to the scene, as well as the actor’s “ego,” as Shevtsova points out: “Stanislavsky’s ‘submit’ is telling, since it suggests that he was well aware of the push-and-pull and drive for prominence and brilliance of powerful ‘creatives’.” 19

After the museum I continued seeking out other places that had made their way onto my list of “things to do.” Surprisingly not all of my selections rewarded me in the same way. Several places that I thought would hold interest turned out to be dull or did not hold my attention long. I found myself going through them quickly. Suspecting I had engaged with them incorrectly, I went round again. I did my best to be open to their experiences; I submitted. But still nothing.

After a few quick photographs, merely to document that I was there before being immediately relegated to my phone’s camera roll, probably never to be seen again, I was done. And upon returning from my trip, I have neither looked at the pictures again nor discussed the experience with others, unlike my other encounters. Yet despite this, the time there was not wasted. The experience was enjoyable, but not profound. I still had experiences, I still made memories, and the encounter with something that didn’t work still helped me to make better choices the next day. The actor is a tourist who will make choices, not all of which will be successful. Unsuccessful choices are not mistakes; they are the drafting process that help us to find our way in the rehearsal room towards our

creation of the character. The actor can access this sense of released accountability to their own drafts through the process of Active Analysis, and be much the better for it. Released from the notion of error and the restrictions of immediately working with the text, they become free, creative, and playful. The actor, through submission to the forces working around him (the proposed circumstances, the problem), and in communion with their partner, becomes electric:

[T]hey really listen, they really respond, they catch every nuance, they sense every movement. They are playful, alert, open in a childlike way, and up for the adventure of performance. They don’t care about ‘getting it right’ (whatever that might mean) – because in exciting performances, there is only one way to get it right, and that’s to respond to what’s happening here and now, right in the moment of interaction.20

Merlin’s idea here on the “adventure of performance” aptly describes my initial journey through the city when I was seeking out the museum and then exploring it like a treasure cove. I was having an adventure and exploring. The next few tourist stops I visited had lost this sense of adventure and became places I had to go to. I had become too objective oriented, too focussed on the end result and not on the process of discovery. I needed to submit again to the joy of discovery.

And so, I did. And I had a wonderful time.

My attendance at the Prague symposium marked the first time that I travelled alone. Previous holiday experiences had always been with family, friends, or partners. This time I was alone. Despite this, I was never lonely, and I never felt bored. As I walked the city I spoke to strangers. I asked them for directions and in most cases they were warm towards me. They were joyous and helpful. They went out of their way to help me, and we chatted about the city and places they recommended. It became obvious that the city wasn’t just the buildings and its roads, but the people too.

At the symposium I embraced the possibilities of the new people I would find there. I resisted the urge of hiding away under the veil of insecurity. I started conversations, shook hands, hugged, laughed heartily, self-doubted myself severely and was moved when new friends became passionate. I lived freely and was receptive to the interactions born from meeting new people, people who I hope to meet again.

If I’d allowed my insecurities to get the better of me, if I had shot down the offerings from the new people, been more reserved and closed myself off, I most certainly would have felt alone. In one terribly insecure period of my life I would have behaved that way. I would have missed out on so much; my experience and the lasting effects of this trip would have been diminished. These interactions with new people enriched my time in the city and required me to be open and willing to the infinite possibilities provided by other people’s offerings. The actor is a tourist whose experience is shaped by their interactions with others.

It can be so tempting for the actor to exist within themselves. The way we reflect on an actor’s work is partly to blame here, as we refer to an individual actor and their role within a performance. We often singularly judge their merits, when in fact so much of it is shaped by their interactions with the wider experience: the text, the other actors, the creative team. It is easy to see why an actor may become insular. Instead, the actor must take courage and look to things outside themselves. They must have “immense focus and vulnerability, but it also requires a desire to take from your partner all the information they are offering both consciously and unconsciously.”21

The protective actor, who limits their presence for fear of judgement or failure pulls away from the ensemble.

They resist the call of collaboration and are harmful not only to their own practice but also to the work of others. For the ensemble to work creatively, the individuals within also embody their highest creative state. “Time and again he [Stanislavsky] referred to the necessity for nurturing individuality for the sake of the actors’ own abilities and for the highest potential of the ensemble which in his view, could not be realised without the development of individualities in concert, as equals among peers.”22 In this sense, and to ensure that they contribute to the collective, the actor is required to be in a constant state of development, as the person working on and developing themselves as an individual and as an artist. Stanislavsky’s idea here transcends the rehearsal space and moves into a philosophy for daily life. Shevtsova’s words in conversation with me resonate profoundly here: “Stanislavsky’s thoughts are more than performance, they are a worldview.” If we want a better world, we must be better individuals: present, open, brave and willing.

I left the city full of the rejuvenation that comes from a break away from the normal routine. Normally, the effects of such a trip stay in our system for a few days, then quickly dissipate when faced with the challenges and stresses of everyday life. But as this particular visit to the city (as well as attending the symposium) focussed on the development of my artistic and academic self, I am hopeful that the loss will not be experienced. I left with a stronger understanding of my own practice as well as my own sense of self. I was eager to seek out more enriching experiences. I buzzed with the excitement of wanting to put into practice what I had discovered.

A few weeks after my adventure, when writing this essay and reflecting on my time in the city, I am pleased to say my hopes proved correct. Whilst the struggles of life may have worn down my spirit and left me tired to my core, my artistic flame burns bright. My enthusiasm as well as my practice as a lecturer working with developing actors in training has improved tenfold, and quite noticeably, so has my confidence. The actor is a tourist changed by their experiences.

But my time in the city (and at the symposium), however impactful, was ultimately too short. Perhaps if I could have stayed longer, a week, month, even a year rather than just a few days, I might have lost my sense of wonder and enthusiasm and grown restless and weary, closed off to the exciting opportunities the city was offering me. Or, perhaps more favourably, a new change would have occurred. Maybe I would have shifted away from the persona of a tourist and evolved into a person who was much more attuned to the city, someone who is now a part of it as opposed to someone on the outside looking in; someone experiencing rather than observing. Less of a tourist who was simply passing through, and more like a resident feeling at home. The actor is a tourist who grows and changes with those around them.

The acting profession is often lonely as actors move from one job to the next. Rapport building over the course of a project is dashed as the production ends and a new contract is taken up. There is an evident boon to actors who can stay together longer, those that can form a company: “As Stanislavsky saw it, ensemble playing worked best when it worked consistently, and this was reason enough to believe that ensemble theatre should be a permanent group and endure over the long term.”23 Through this longevity a sense of ease and comfort is created, enabling more security and in turn a stronger foundation for creativity and risk taking. Most importantly actors can grow as individuals whilst growing together. “Stanislavsky well knew that duration allowed actors to grow and change as everyday human beings as well as artists, since their body, spirit and successive emotional inner states, in short, everything that they were becoming in the flow of life, were integral to the process of acting.”24

It is inevitable that my time in the city had to come to an end. The visit ended just like every rehearsal process and every production run must eventually close. The curtain must fall for the last time, the audience go home, and eventually the ensemble often ceases and its actors go their separate ways.

Just like the tourist who has been altered by the city, the actor has been changed by the play, particularly if they

were willing to give themselves to it. The text and artistic team made their proposals, and the actor has offered theirs in return, responding with their own offerings. And through this process something new has been made and the act of creation has occurred. These two forces, the text and the creatives, have met in the middle and created the experience; in the tourist’s case, a holiday away with infinite possibilities, and in the actor’s case, life on stage without limit.

And once the dust settles and time moves us on, the only real evidence remaining to prove that the experience was real, the only lasting things, are the souvenirs, photographs and notes that document what happened. But these trinkets are superficial and do not capture the true significance of what took place, what has been learned and what has changed. The true experience is retained in the body. The traces of the experience live on in the passion of our discourse with other people, our new lines of enquiry with our thoughts and our renewed practice in the rehearsal room. Unlike the souvenirs we took that now gather dust on a forgotten bookshelf, these embodied practices live on, impacting and changing those we encounter through our continued practice and (perhaps sentimentally) our existence. I believe Maria Shevtsova was right; it is more than acting, it’s a philosophy, a worldview.

And so, the actor is a tourist who is eager for more…but for now, the actor is a tourist with very tired feet.

Notes

1 Merlin, The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit, 67; emphasis in the original.

2 Ibid., 67.

3 Knebel quoted in Carnicke, Dynamic Acting Through Active Analysis, 96.

4 Stanislavski and Rumyantsev, Stanislavski on Opera, 10.

5 Ibid., 10.

6 Shevtsova, Rediscovering Stanislavsky, 175.

7 Carnicke, Dynamic Acting Through Active Analysis, 112.

8 Shevtsova, Rediscovering Stanislavsky, 176.

9 Ibid., 177.

10 Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, 17.

11 Merlin, The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit, 314.

12 Ibid., 28; emphasis in the original.

13 Shevtsova, Rediscovering Stanislavsky, 175.

14 Carnicke, Dynamic Acting Through Active Analysis, 116.

15 Shevtsova, Rediscovering Stanislavsky, 176.

16 Carnicke, Dynamic Acting Through Active Analysis, 112.

17 Ibid., 116.

18 Shevtsova, Rediscovering Stanislavsky, 8.

19 Ibid., 8.

20 Merlin, The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit, 209.

21 Ibid., 209.

22 Shevtsova, Rediscovering Stanislavsky, 10.

23 Ibid.,10; Emphasis in the original.

24 Ibid.,10.

Notes on Contributor

Michael Holdsworth is a lecturer, researcher, performer, and producer based in Lancashire, United Kingdom. For the last fifteen years he has worked as Programme Leader for the BA (Hons) Acting and Musical Theatre programmes at the Blackpool School of Arts. Michael is currently undertaking a PhD at Lincoln University exploring the intersection between the Musical Theatre Chorus and the Crowd Phenomenon, Mob Mentality and Group Behaviour in the development of a new pedagogy. This journal essay marks his first publication.

Bibliography

Carnicke, Sharon Marie. Dynamic Acting Through Active Analysis: Konstantin Stanislavsky, Maria Knebel, and their Legacy. London, New York, Dublin: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023.

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. London: Penguin Classics, 2002.

Merlin, Bella. The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit. London: Nick Hern, 2009.

Shevtsova, Maria. Rediscovering Stanislavsky. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Stanislavski, Constantin and Pavel Rumyantsev. Stanislavski on Opera. London: Routledge, 1998.

Perceptions of Academic Preparedness

Exploring the personal and organisational factors that contributed to preparing mature students academically in the first semester of a Foundation Degree

Sara Shotton

Abstract

Adults who return to education often do so to upskill and improve their employment prospects. However, many mature students fail to finish their courses and most students who drop out do so in the first year. This project explored the experiences of three learners as they progressed through the first stages of a Foundation Degree (FD). With the use of semi-structured interviews, the students described their transition into university and revealed how a combination of personal and organisational factors prepared them for academic study. The findings illustrate the importance of the university’s support strategies in the early stages of a programme and the positive effects of student- centered pedagogy. Finally, this research highlights the need for a strategic, evidence-based approach to meeting the needs of today’s mature student. It is anticipated that the impact of the findings will be seen in the future retention and achievement of this demographic.

Introduction

The Widening Participation agenda has significantly increased access to university for non-traditional students, including mature learners, who may be unprepared for the intensity of academic study and may lack the necessary academic skills, causing them to withdraw from their course (Hillman cited in Weale, 2018). Knox (cited in Burton, Golding and Griffiths, 2011) states that this agenda cannot be seen as a successful strategy if the students it targets do not complete their qualifications. In addition, Osborne (2003) states, ‘improving access is one thing, ensuring progression within and beyond HE is another’ (Osborne cited in Fragoso, 2013, p. 1). It is reported that many adults who return to education may be impacted by a range of intrinsic and extrinsic barriers. Some students may face psychological barriers, such as a lack of confidence in their ability and a fear of failure. These characteristics are classified as a dispositional barrier, which Cross (Cited in Osam et al., 2017) suggests may only be overcome by self-determination and resilience.

The students who volunteered to take part in this research project are sports students who have chosen to undertake a Foundation Degree to improve their employment prospects. Degrees in sports coaching are designed to provide students with academic theory of fundamental concepts so they may align their practice with theoretical perspectives, such as the taxonomy of learning and social and psychological development (ibid.). In addition, students are encouraged to develop a professional perspective by understanding and demonstrating reflective practice.

Motivations, Barriers, and Attitudes

Taking a degree is a way to improve career prospects however, Ross-Gordon (2003, p.44) suggests that ‘although adults will respond to external motivators, such as a job promotion, the most potent motivators are internal’.

However, regardless of the initial motivations; it is reported that adults who return to education, do so following a complex process of contemplation and decision making, where the value of gaining an HE qualification is balanced with the challenges they may face (DfE, 2018). During this stage, individuals must also ensure they have the practical skills and emotional tenacity to undertake a degree (Topham, 2015).

Evidence shows that dropout rates are reportedly higher in the first year of study than at any other point (Weale, 2018). Davies (cited in Burton et al., 2011) identifies three key barriers faced by the mature learner: organisational, institutional and dispositional. Institutional and organisational barriers are classified by Osam et al. (2017) as the difficulties students encounter navigating the universities’ policies and procedures (Goto and Martin, 2009). A dispositional barrier is defined as the individual’s lack of preparedness for HE and is often due to a lack of understanding of what academic study involves (Ozga and Sukhnandan, 1998; Haggis and Ouget cited in Burton et al., 2011). Although each barrier presents a challenge to progress, dispositional barriers can affect an individual’s self-belief and confidence (ibid.).

Misra et al. (2000) found that many students reported the pressure to meet assessment deadlines was a major challenge. As Reisberg (2000) explained, students often feel overwhelmed by their workloads and become stressed (Reisberg, 2000). This type of stress can also be caused by a fear of failure as Garland (1993, p. 191) explains, the fear of failure is associated with ‘adult pride’, a dispositional barrier, where adults may fear failure to the point that they withdraw from their course. In addition, Nonis et al. (1998) found that poor time management was a major cause of stress in students. This study found that high achievers are more likely to suffer from stress due to their desire to succeed, thereby linking a student’s attitude to their work with a predisposition towards stress (ibid.).

A key factor in preparing students and retaining them is how well they engage with the academic process (Harris, 2008). Taylor and Parsons (2011) suggest that there is no clear agreement on a definition for student engagement as it can be noted in; academic, cognitive, intellectual, institutional, emotional, behavioural, social, and psychological domains (ibid.). However, it is the fundamental relationship between the teacher and student that Dunleavy and Milton (2009) identified as essential to engaging students in the academic process. This research highlights the importance of positive student-teacher relationships to enable students to build self-confidence (ibid.). In addition, a feeling of belonging to their university, reported by Chapman (2013) as a necessary factor in student engagement.

Research Methods and Methodologies

This project set out to answer the following questions:

• Do mature students feel adequately prepared to meet the requirements of the first semester assignments?

• In what ways do universities prepare new students to make progress in the first semester?

• Do students think there is sufficient time, in semester one, for them to meet the assessment requirements?

• What additional factors influence student preparedness?

Methodological Rationale

The focus on the student experience suggested a bottom-up perspective would be appropriate as this allowed me to study the impact of wider systems on the participants’ experience. In addition, I determined inductive reasoning as a suitable approach for the research as this allowed me to explore the information presented and identify the key

themes emerging from the data (Cohen and Crabtree, 2006).

The focus of the study stems from my understanding of the factors that affect students early in their study programmes. Hence, the research method was deemed suitable for this project as I was interested in knowing the personal opinions, feelings and experiences of the participants which Cohen and Crabtree (2006) state, can be achieved with the interpretive approach.

Data Analysis

As this project took an inductive approach, it seemed natural to adopt thematic analysis as the tool for analysing the data. Braun and Clarke’s (2006) approach to thematic analysis involves a step-by-step process of generating codes and identifying themes and patterns. As I began to critically engage with the data, I noted two broad categories dividing the participant responses into either personal or organisational factors.

The following six themes, identified from this research are consistent with the available literature and therefore, suggest a correct interpretation of the participant’s voice.

• Previous educational experience

• Family influence

• Organisational support

• Attitude to higher education

• Tutor support

• Peer support

Previous Educational Experience

A key finding was the impact of the previous educational experience and qualifications the students had, before embarking on the FD, on the students’ confidence, self-perception of ability and preparedness. A lack of academic skills is described as a dispositional barrier, a lack of preparedness that impacts on the confidence and self-esteem of the mature student (Garland, 1993). Participant A felt a sense of self- efficacy and confidence in her ability, having successfully passed three A-Levels:

‘I didn’t struggle with the academic writing, not to blow my own trumpet but I am able to do that because of A-Levels and GCSEs’ (A).

Participant B left college before he had completed his level 3 qualification and he described how unprepared he felt he was at the beginning of the programme:

I have always been very practical and very good actually out there doing rather than sitting in the classroom in silence and sort of struggled with that quite a bit and I got pretty nervous of coming into it’ (B).

Research shows that A-Level students (like A) tend to be more confident about undertaking a degree (Havergal, 2015). In contrast, B described himself as a kinesthetic learner and as someone whose self-efficacy was in a practical context, not in a classroom environment. The third student in this study had no prior academic education, except through compulsory schooling, to the age of 16, in her home country. Participant C has resided

in the UK for 15 years and speaks English fluently. C reports that, although she believed she had the necessary skills, she was unprepared for this level of study.

The students involved in this study talk about feeling anxious, stressed and unsure at the start of degree therefore, during this transitional period, it is recommended that institutions should aim to reduce the stress on students with carefully designed and specific interventions (ibid.).

‘I took the ‘Early Start’ Course in the summer because I thought it would help me prepare for the course (C).

Research shows that mature students are reportedly more aware of their abilities and more likely to accept offers of help and support (Topham, 2015).

Family influence

A key theme for two of the students was the support of their family and partners in helping them to adjust to academic study. Coleman (cited in Legewie and Thomas, 1966) states that the family is the most important factor in academic achievement.

Although the primary aim of this project is to identify preparedness, the influence of family may be a factor in mentally preparing and motivating a student. Factors such as; aspirations, wanting to gain an academic qualification, work ethic, understanding the effort required to achieve a degree and the normalising of degree-level education, family members with professional jobs, and HE qualifications, were highlighted by both A and B. The third participant in the study did not mention either her parents or her partner during the interview. Rather C discussed intrinsic factors such as enjoyment, interest and a love of writing.

Organisational support

As previously mentioned, in the literature review, the early days at university are crucial, and the various strategies used by universities to induct and further support new students during this time, are paramount in ensuring a positive experience and retention. However, these strategies cannot succeed if the curriculum itself does not allow enough time for students to make the transition into academic study (DfE, 2018). The participants described the limited time to prepare for their first assignments and achievement evidence, for previous cohorts of level four students, suggests that the expectation for a student to develop all the necessary skills in the first semester is challenging.

Another factor mentioned by two of the students, was three assignments, for semester one modules, that were due within the same week, and this was described as stressful and problematic. In addition, the issue of stress, due to time constraints, is reportedly a key characteristic of the students who drop out of their courses (Nonis et al., 1998). Participant C states that she was unable to combine work and university and therefore, decided to leave her job to concentrate on her degree. This finding supports research by Osam et al., (2017) who reports that women find themselves with conflicting responsibilities and often need to decide to leave work to fulfil their family commitments while they are studying.

Higher Education Learning Mentors (HELMs) are a team of staff who work with students to provide a range of support in a variety of settings. Students can access HELMs support in group; 1-1 settings, online, and through technology such as Teams (North College, 2020). The findings suggest that this holistic provision is an effective way of preparing new students as it removes some potential, logistical barriers. The students described how the

HELMs team came to them during lectures to discuss progress and provide them with the opportunity to ask for individual help and support.

The participants described the positive impact of the HELMs team who came to sessions thereby removing the need for students to find them. The team had a clear structure to the session and a less formal offer of specific 1-1 help and guidance. The students discussed how their motivation to succeed and attitude to studying prepared them to take on the challenge of HE. B discussed his attitude to the course from a work ethic perspective. Mature students are reported to be more committed and serious learners and are often sacrificing other areas of their life to study.

Peer Support and Group Cohesion

When individuals bond a sense of task and social cohesion is formed and this provides an additional level of support, which all participants reported as helpful (Tuckman, 1965).

I feel like there is a good team ethic from the group’ (B).

Research into group dynamics by Tuckman (cited in Smith 2005) states that Individuals go through a process of development, from their first meeting to a final stage of effectiveness. The stages of group formation are known as; forming, storming, norming and performing. When individuals come together, they progress through these stages as part of a bonding process which ultimately leads to group cohesion (ibid.).

‘I think everyone now feels comfortable in the class because we all know each other, and we are all quite close we speak to each other so it’s not just tutor support I can got to anyone and ask them if they have got anything that can help with this assignment and the majority of them will be like yes here’s an article or whatever’ (A).

A sense of belonging was found by Chapman (2013) to be a major factor in the development of student engagement and retention. In this case, the participants recognised how valuable team cohesion is to individual success and progress.

Tutor support

‘I struggled a lot with the theory side of things. (B)

Anecdotal evidence suggests that some students’ express difficulty in grasping abstract concepts (Shotton, 2019). Gershon (2013) describes this difficulty as troublesome knowledge. Student B described how he was introduced to concepts that presented him with a new way of thinking, or in this case, a new way to view coaching through a theoretical lens (Meyer and Land, 2003).

All participants stated that tutor pedagogy was fundamental to their progress. The ability to organise concepts and develop strategies to allow students to understand is essential in student-centered teaching (ibid.). The participants state that they are ‘impressed’ and ‘surprised’ by the skills the teachers have. The participants described how the tutors used a student-centered approach and adapted their pedagogy from the start of the programme and in doing so they actively engaged the students. According to Bain (2004), the knowledge and strategies the students described are the skills of outstanding teachers.

A described the need for early formative feedback to help her to improve her work However, two of the participants did not mention the benefit of feedback and this may be due to their lack of academic knowledge. Young (2000) states formative feedback plays an integral part in student development and therefore, should be understood in the learning process.

Discussion and Conclusion

This research project found a combination of personal and organisational factors helped to prepare students academically. These factors influenced the students’ confidence in their ability and how they developed the knowledge and skills necessary to complete academic work. Personal factors are those characteristics that influenced the participant outside of the university and played a subconscious part in their psychological, intellectual and emotional preparation. The personal factors found to be instrumental in preparing new students were presented in the themes of previous educational experience, family influence and attitude to HE. These themes were further divided into positive and negative factors depending on their efficacy.

Organisational factors are identified as the strategies and initiatives the university adopts to support and guide students. the key themes were identified as the specific pedagogy used by lecturers to deliver complex topics and the in-house strategies the university has created based on the situational and institutional needs. The key themes were analysed according to their positive and negative influences, to identify key areas of strength and areas for future development.

This research project found that the university has effective initiatives to support students in making the transition into HE. Some external factors were addressed through in-house initiatives, such as the ‘Early Start’ course where students could experience at firsthand how it feels to attend a lecture and find out about the skills required at university. However, this opportunity was not taken by all the participants and the reasons for this point to timing. It would, therefore, be reasonable to assume that more students would attend this preparation course if it was offered on alternative dates and times.

Tutor pedagogy and individualised teaching were found to be effective in preparing students. By creating studentcentred environments the new students were able to bond with teachers and develop positive student-teacher relationships (Dunleavy and Milton 2009).

The early days are reported to be a period of transition and adjustment and therefore, a robust approach to the timing of assessment deadlines is needed to ensure that new students are not overburdened and put under undue stress (Lam and Pollard cited in Fragoso, 2013).

Recommendations

This project explored how academically prepared mature students felt they were during the first semester of a FD. The findings suggest that the students felt well-prepared by the university regardless of the influence of external factors. However, additional issues highlighted in the data suggest that there is a need for the university to be more strategic in its approach to supporting students as this would enhance the current provision. Therefore, to address the findings of this project five strategic measures may be realistically implemented by the university:

• Timely HELMs activities

• Alternative dates for preparation courses

• Pre-course online academic preparation workshops

• Strategic curriculum planning

• A revised assessment submission schedule

Conclusion

As a researcher and teacher, I was interested to discover where the students situated the concept of preparedness in relation to themselves, the organisation and their tutors. The rationale for the project was based on current research that reports mature learners as being more likely to drop out of their programmes in the first year of study. Therefore, identifying the reasons why mature students drop out may help universities to plan initiatives that address these factors. The impact of successful strategies would be seen in improved retention and student experience.

The research identified five recommendations to address the findings. These strategies resulted from the negative issues reported by the participants and present an opportunity to enhance early student support. Some strategies are simple adaptations to the current provision, for example, ensuring the HELMs team delivers timely resources. However, other strategies involve developing pre-course resources that would allow students the opportunity to engage with academic study before their course begins.

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Investigating the emergence of strategy in VR based reflective tasks.

Robert Sims - School of Computing. Blackpool and the Fylde College, United Kingdom, Abhijit Karnik - School of Communications and Computing, Lancaster university, Lancaster, United Kingdom

Corresponding Author rs@blackpool.ac.uk

Keywords: Virtual Reality, Education, Reflective tasks, Inquiry-based learning

Abstract

Virtual Reality (VR), as part of the wider Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) space, presents novel opportunities for enhancing inquiry-based learning in education. VR provides an immersive 3D space for the reflective process of individuals to emerge unhindered in the form of spatial patterns. Abstract reflective tasks like mind mapping are central to inquiry-based learning and scaffolding strategies. Mind mapping has been proven to be an effective pedagogical tool by reducing cognitive load and allowing students to make associations between information objects that aids recall. This paper investigates the emergence of users’ strategies towards constructing mind maps in VR through an exploratory user study (n=24). Our results show that users approach the task of mind mapping through two distinct strategies - sequential and grouping. We characterize and classify these previously unreported strategies both qualitatively and quantitatively. We discuss the implications of these strategies on the design of future VR mind mapping tools in both single user and collaborative contexts, and from an application designer and educators’ perspective. Allowing these strategies to emerge unhindered, such as through shared and private workspaces and other recommendations, will ensure students remain active learners rather than being passive. We recommend that future implementations of VR mediated collaborative mind maps include design considerations that support both strategies.

1 Introduction

VR has the potential to significantly impact education and specifically students’ engagement in the learning process (O’Connor and Domingo, 2017). This engagement is in part facilitated by VR being able to offer pseudo-physical interactions (Moehring and Froehlich, 2005) with objects and allowing users to interact with and manipulate objects within a 3D space. Advances in VR technology have made low-cost VR headsets more accessible. Low-cost VR devices such as the Oculus Go, open-sourced Google Cardboard and Meta Quest 2 are untethered and consequently more manageable in a traditional classroom environment. These devices have the potential to be a core element for delivery of teaching and learning by educational institutions. These devices can support TEL (Cox et al., 2004) and flipped learning (Burden et al., 2015) strategies, which allows students to learn core concepts outside of the classroom.

We chose the reflective task of mind mapping, specifically spider-diagrams, as a prime candidate for a topic agnostic VR-based application. The spatial information organization aspects of the mind map are suitable for VR-based interactive manipulation. Prior research shows that traditional 2D mind mapping supports effective learning (Abi-El-Mona and Adb-El-Khalick, 2008) leading to improved educational outcomes. The open question

for VR-based mind mapping, given the additional spatial dimension available for use, is how the environment can better support the users engaged in reflective learning. By identifying and understanding individual behaviors associated with the information organization process, we can refine the role of VR in supporting this process. The individual behaviors, resulting from the users’ information organization strategy, can better inform the design of applications about the affordances necessary in a collaborative environment.

Recognizing individual strategy is a key element to managing conflict, a prime criterion in collaborative spaces (Olaniran, 2008). CSCW (computer-supported co-operative work) research has shown that territoriality emerges during collaborative working in groups (Avery et al., 2018). Additional research (Tang et al., 2006) has identified the need to support users in their specific way of working during a collaborative activity. When collaborative mind mapping is carried out on tabletops, the collaborative exercise results in specific patterns of communication and strategies for managing conflict (Jamil et al., 2017). These arise due to the need to control shared pieces of information (e.g., images, keywords, relationships) and their relative positions.

Our research question is thus twofold. Firstly, we wish to identify behaviors or strategies that emerge when participants construct a mind map through a VR mediated application. Secondly, if unique behaviors or strategies emerge, what are their implications when considering collaborative mind mapping in VR? We answer these questions by conducting an exploratory study to identify and quantify the presence of individual behaviors or strategies in a learning setting using VR-mediated mind mapping.

2 Background

The motivation for this paper is to understand how students’ learning behaviors and strategies emerge in a VR-based mind mapping environment. As an emerging application space, there are very few VR mind mapping applications that support interactive reflection and information organization. Currently, we could only identify two commercial products (VR-AR-Corp, 2018; Coding Leap LLC, 2019). While these products can help with the qualitative aspects of the study, they do not support the instrumentation necessary for the quantitative aspects. We used an alternative proof-of-concept VR mind mapping tool called VERITAS (Sims, 2019) as it allows data collection of user interactions in real-time and via log files. The useability of this tool is validated in a previous study (Sims and Karnik, 2021) and our study aims to build on this previous work to contribute to the understanding of mind mapping in VR as a whole.

2.1 Technology-enhanced inquiry-based learning

Inquiry-based learning, a form of active learning (Pedaste et al., 2015), is a pedagogical approach that can be applied across domains and topics. Inquiry-based learning aims to trigger the advanced cognitive processes of application and analysis. Inquiry-based learning is key to stimulating students’ desire to learn (Kirschner, Sweller and Clark, 2006) through interest (Wade et al., 1993) or active engagement in a cognitive activity (Schraw and Lehman, 2014) such as mind mapping due to situational interest (Linnenbrink-Garcia et al., 2010). Scaffolding is one of the key strategies of effective inquiry based learning (Sandoval and Reiser, 2004). Scaffolded inquiry-based learning allows learners to discover information semi-independently of the teacher and/or classroom.

2.2 Mind mapping in pedagogy

Recalling and managing disparate elements of information are recognized as learning tasks with a high cognitive load (Tergan, 2005). Mind maps can alleviate this cognitive load by allowing the learner to interact with a graphical representation of ideas and their relationships (Davies, 2011). The learners can engage in reflective tasks that otherwise might be too complex for them to manage given their current abilities. Specifically, learners can offset difficulties commonly ascribed to natural limitations of working memory and its capacity (Ying et al., 2014).

It also develops students intrinsic motivation by enabling them to understand complex topics and relationships, improving their sense of competency (Mento, Martinelli and Jones, 1999). Mind mapping is well established as an effective pedagogical tool (Ying et al., 2014). Mind maps are implemented as an abstraction of the knowledge from the environment where it is applied. Cognitively, mind maps are closer to how the human mind organizes the information than how the information is applied. A study by Abi-El-Mona and Adb-El-Khalick (2008) found significantly higher conceptual understanding in students who utilized mind maps to explore scientific topics. In addition, research has shown that students engaged in mind mapping tasks are active participants with the teachers being facilitators (Buran and Filyukov, 2015), which aligns well with the aforementioned inquiry-based learning paradigm.

2.3 VR-based mind mapping

VR-based educational applications are not new. They are commonly used to simulate real-world tasks, like clinical protocols (Ruthenbeck and Reynolds, 2015), using specialized environments. In engineering, research has demonstrated how Building Information Modelling and evacuation planning can be facilitated by VR ((Hilfert and König, 2016)) and VR applications like Construct3D (Kaufmann H. Schmalstieg D. Wagner M., 2000) allow students to experiment with their own ideas. These domain-specific applications have their benefits, but they are not generalizable to other subject areas without significant modifications. Mind mapping is an excellent candidate as it is subject agnostic. It also adapts easily to the VR-medium as it is an information organization activity and VR provides an interactive 3D environment for spatial organization of virtual content. The use of virtual 3D collaboration spaces is known to help with spatial organization of information (Bochenek and Ragusa, 2004). Other reasearch (Arvanitis et al., 2009) has shown that virtual environments can assist students in visualizing abstract concepts and complex visual relationships mediated through other related immersive technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR). However, VR-based mind mapping is less understood as an activity itself since very few commercial examples (VR-AR-Corp, 2018; Coding Leap LLC, 2019) are available. VERITAS application.

3 Implementation

3.1 VR Platform Requirements

We selected the Oculus Go as the test hardware. The Oculus Go is a 3DoF (Degrees of Freedom), untethered and affordable unit. Within the intervening time between this study being conducted and presented, additional lower end devices such as the Meta Quest and Pico Neo have become available and the Oculus Go has since been sunsetted (Oculus, 2020) although it remains usable as a legacy device.

3.2 System Overview

in visualization of tile movements by users using the sequential strategy. Note how grouping visualization is denser than the sequential one.

A full system description, design justification and implementation walk through is available in the VERITAS user study (Sims and Karnik, 2021).

Figure 1 Mind mapping using VERITAS. (A) Initial ‘carousel’ of interactive tiles, (B) completed “War of Roses” mind map with animated links showing directional relationships, (C) visualization of tile movements by users using the grouping strategy showing increased tile movements, (D) contrasting difference

4 Experiment

4.1 Methodology

We approach the research question of investigating the presence of strategies through a controlled exploratory study. The study is intentionally performed in a single-user setting. The aim is to control the unmitigated effects of conflict within the collaborative activity and study the individual strategy in isolation. Our hypothesis is that if individual strategies exist, we should be able to identify and classify these by observing individual users as they perform the mind mapping task in VR. To such effect, we collect data for analysis through quantitative and qualitative means. As a spatial positioning task, the mind map provides quantitative metrics like task completion time, interaction error rates and spatio-temporal information related to individual elements of mind map. Video recordings of the activities are further used to generate qualitative metrics such as completeness of the resulting mind maps and mind map patterns. Thematic coding was conducted to identify differences and similarities between participants so that behaviors could be classified and categorized.

4.2 Task

The task was a mind mapping exercise using a topic provided to the participant as a one-page document. Three topics were selected by sampling unrelated subject areas – the animal kingdom, web technologies and historical events. We setup the mind mapping exercise in VERITAS for each of these topics. Participants were instructed to organize and connect tiles containing text and pictures (see Fig. 1B). Text included keywords and numerical values like dates. Pictures represented physical entities (i.e., animals, people or objects) and illustrative entities (i.e., maps, actions or symbols).

4.3 Apparatus

We used an Oculus Go VR headset for the study. The default factory settings were retained for the purpose of the study, including brightness and volume. The headset has a fixed interpupillary distance (IPD) of 63.5mm accommodating users between 61.5 to 65.5mm IPD. The headset stored runtime application logs and videos.

4.4 Participants

Participants were recruited from Lancaster University through an open call via mailing lists and student forums. The experiment was conducted after acquiring the requisite ethical approvals from the FST Research Ethics Committee with each participant being required to provide informed consent.

Twenty-four participants consisting of twenty males and four females participated in the study. While this does present a gender imbalance, it is simply an artifact of the open call for participation and the study commencing on a ‘first come – first served basis’.

4.5 Procedure

The experiment was run as one continuous session of 30 minutes. First, each participant completed a short demographics questionnaire (age, gender, VR familiarity). Each participant was assigned a pre-selected topic to balance participation for each topic. The participants received a short introduction session to familiarize themselves with the controller and the apparatus and completed a short tutorial inbuilt to VERITAS. Once comfortable, the participants read through the provided information sheet that covered details of the topic. The participants were instructed to build a mind map using the provided tiles and based on the text they had just read. Due to the open-ended nature of this activity, the participants were told to stop once they were happy with the mind map they had produced. Once they finished, they completed the questionnaires and provided feedback on their experience.

4.6 Measures

4.6.1 Video Coding

The video feed of the VR space was captured to obtain a participant view of what was visible on the headset. Video coding analysis of these videos was carried out by two independent coders. The coders looked for patterns that indicated a preferred strategy of organization of information in the mind map. The video coding analysis of the task revealed a between-subjects factor. All relevant measures were then analyzed as a between-subjects design.

4.6.2 Task Metrics

VERITAS logs each controller input along with the relevance to the state-model of the interaction workflow. If the controller input was invalid for the current state, it was logged as an error. The position and size of all tiles are logged at a periodic interval. These logs allowed us to extract useful data like task completion time, error rates and position tracking for tiles.

4.6.3 Questionnaires

Participants completed a standardized User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ) (Laugwitz, Held and Schrepp, 2008) designed to measure user experience of interactive products, a standard Simulator Sickness Questionnaire (SSQ) and were given an opportunity to provide open-ended feedback.

5 Results

The quantitative analysis of the collected data was performed using SPSS 26.

5.1 Cohort Identification

We performed a thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006) of the twenty-four task videos. The objective was to identify distinguishing features which could be interpreted as differing mind mapping strategies. Two coders looked at the way the participants interacted with the tiles and how they approached the mind map creation activity. This helped identify two distinct behavior patterns. The first approach was named grouping. A grouping participant dragged tiles out of the carousel and organized them into small, related groups until the carousel was empty (Fig. 2A and 2B). They then rearranged the tiles spatially before creating the links (relationships) between the tiles (Fig. 2B). The second approach was named sequential. A sequential participant dragged a pair of tiles from the carousel and immediately created a link between them, before dragging another tile from the carousel that was related to the first two tiles and created a fresh link (Fig. 2C). This cycle was repeated tile by tile until the mind map was complete and the carousel empty (Fig. 2D). These observations were made independently during the video coding step by the coders and there was no disagreement about the code (sequential or grouping) assigned to each participant creating two distinct cohorts. The styles were distinct and no blended style was observed.

To characterize the cohorts quantitatively, the coders recorded the timestamp when a clear gestalt grouping of

Figure 2 Two distinct patterns of building the mind map. (A) User ordering tiles first before, (B) creating links when all tiles are roughly in position. (C) User dragging tiles from the carousel one at a time and D) immediately linking the last two tiles.

three or more similar tiles (e.g., cats, computer languages or battles) emerged in the video. Next, we extracted the timestamp from the system logs to identify the point where the participants created their first link. These event timestamps for link and group creation were normalized using the individual task completion time (100×event_ts/ activity time), allowing us to compare the relative position of the event (link/group) within the overall activity. The timestamps were tested using the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) test with a consistency, two-way random effects model. A high degree of reliability was found between the two coders’ measurements. The average measures ICC was .967 with a 95% confidence interval from [.924, .986], F(23,23)=30.42, p<.001.

Next, we used one-way ANOVA, with between-subjects factor as “cohort” for analysis of the two events - first linkcreation time and first group-creation time. We found a statistically significant difference between the two cohorts for both first group creation (F(1,23)=15.99, p<0.05) and first link creation (F(1,23)=4.59, p<0.05), thus quantitatively validating our visual observation that the two cohorts had different strategies for building the mind map. The grouping cohort created the first group significantly earlier (µGG=16.61%) as compared to the sequential cohort (µSG=43.25%) in the activity timeline. Conversely, the sequential cohort created their first link significantly earlier (µSL=24.90%) compared to the grouping cohort (µGL=40.10%). Thus, the factor of cohort informed our further analysis of the task metrics. We explored the possibility that the topics selected for the mind map activity could present as an experimental confound. We ran the above tests with the topic as a factor and found no statistically significant difference to suggest that the topic was a factor.

5.2 Cohort Based analysis

5.2.1 Quantitative Metrics

Having established the two mind mapping strategies, we analyzed the quantitative metrics with the additional between-subjects factor “Cohort” with two values, “Grouping” and “Sequential”. For all the following tests, we used one-way ANOVA, with between-subjects factor as cohort.

We did not find a statistically significant difference between the two cohorts for mean task completion times (F(1,23)=2.38 p>0.05). We analyzed the spatial volume usage using three different metrics. We computed a bounding box volume for the entire activity per user using the maxima of positions of all the tiles along each axis in Unity units (uu3). There was no statistically significant difference between the sequential cohort and the grouping cohort means as determined by one-way ANOVA (F(1,23)=2.461, p>0.05) for bounding volume. Both groups made similar use of the volume which extends beyond the default starting viewport volume. This matched our observations during the video coding analysis step. Next, we looked at how much tile movement was performed by the user. We computed two values per user: a) the total distance travelled by all tiles; b) the distance travelled along the z-axis only (depth). Here, we found statistically significant differences for total distance (F(1,23)=8.39, p<0.05) and also for z-axis traversal (F(1,23)=5.16, p<0.05). In both cases, the grouping cohort moved the tiles more

Figure 3 Cohort comparison for 1st Link and Group Creation (A) and tile movement (B).

(µGD=89.8uu, µGZ=25uu) than the sequential cohort (µSD=55.7uu, µSZ=15.8uu). These results are tabulated in Table 1 and displayed in Fig. 3. Using the logged tile position data, we created a 3D visualization to illustrate tile movements (Fig. 1C and 1D shows a composite of five participants in each cohort respectively). The plot displays the movement of every tile for each user. The time (t) spent by a tile at each location is represented by a shape enclosed in a sphere of diameter = log10t. The visualizations match the tile related quantitative metrics and qualitative observations.

5.2.2 Qualitative Observations

We observed that completed mind maps followed one of three styles – radial, tree or star (Fig. 4). These styles were spread across both cohorts (grouping and sequential), with radial being the most common style with twelve occurrences, seven for tree and five for star. These styles are consistent with completed mind maps seen in other traditional mind mapping activities.

5.3 Questionnaires

5.3.1 UEQ

We wanted to see if the strategy in creating the mind maps (i.e. sequential or grouping) influenced user experience, building on previous studies (Sims and Karnik, 2021). We used one-way ANOVA, with between-subjects factor as cohort. We found a significant difference for the attractiveness (F(1,23)=12.58, p<0.05) and stimulation (F(1,23)=6.81, p<0.05) metrics between the two cohorts. For attractiveness, the sequential cohort rated the application significantly higher (µSA=2.08) than the grouping cohort (µGA=0.96). For stimulation, the sequential cohort rated the application significantly higher (µSS=2.00) than the grouping cohort (µGS=1.32). These results are displayed in Fig. 5.

5.3.2

SSQ

The SSQ responses did not highlight any significantly elevated (moderate or severe on the SSQ) discomfort or any type of nausea.

Figure 4 Hierarchical organization styles used by participants, (A) Radial, (B) Tree and (C) star.

6 Discussion

In this experiment, we wanted to see if interesting mind mapping strategies would emerge when mediated through VR. We found promising outcomes and discuss their implications in general next.

6.1 Mind mapping Strategies

6.1.1 Identification

Through the analysis of the task, we identified the emergence of two previously unreported distinct strategies for organizing the mind map: “grouping” and “sequential”. This answers the first part of our research question, ‘what behaviors or strategies emerge when participants construct a mind map through a VR mediated application’. These strategies showed clear visual differences in how the task was executed by participants. The grouping cohort created groups of related tiles first and re-organized these groups before creating their first links. The cohort worked linearly, extracting tile pairs from the carousel, and then defining the relationships immediately. Quantitatively, we identified significant differences in first link event (Sequential ↑), first group creation event (Grouping ↑) and translation distances (Grouping ↑). Surprisingly, this did not increase the TCT (NS), the bounding volume (NS) or even errors (NS) for the grouping cohort. Qualitatively, the mind maps created by both cohorts were complete, of similar quality and utilized the full spectrum of available interactions. We also found significant difference in UEQ ratings for the attractiveness and stimulation metrics (Sequential ↑).

6.1.2 Explanation

We propose that the emergence of the two distinctly different styles of engaging with mind maps is a result of differing use of epistemic versus pragmatic actions (Kirsh, 1994). The grouping cohort performs grouping of tiles as an epistemic action. The grouping cohort sampled and built parts of the mind map, with frequent revisions and rebuilds, to explore how things fit better. In contrast, the sequential cohort used a cumulatively locked down approach. Kirsh et al. (Kirsh, 1994) originally identified that the main goal of epistemic actions is towards optimizing input. In our case, task completion times did not differ significantly. Thus, we propose that the observed epistemic actions focused on supporting pedagogical synthesis of the mind map, i.e., supporting the primary goal of recalling the topic’s content while building the mind map.

The variance between the average scores for two UEQ metrics (attractiveness and stimulation) between the two cohorts is an interesting observation. The grouping cohort scored the attractiveness and stimulation positively but lower than the sequential cohort. There is no obvious correlation to any of the other relevant metrics. The only

Figure 5 UEQ Metrics: A = Attractiveness, P = Perspicuity, E = Efficiency, D = Dependability, S = Stimulation, N = Novelty. UEQ scale range is [-3, 3] but is truncated due to absence of negative values. For A and S, significant difference was found between the two cohorts.

indication comes from the free form feedback collected in the previous VERITAS usability study (Sims and Karnik, 2021). In querying the results from that study, user comments indicate a significant number would have liked to have been able to move groups of tiles at once. While the significance of these comments was not apparent in this previous study, the emergence of the two strategies in this current study provides context for these comments. It suggests that not allowing or enabling users to construct the mind map in a way that is most efficient for them leads to a significantly reduced user experience. These scores highlight the need to understand individual strategies for task execution in order to provide all the required affordances. Otherwise, the users adapt as best as possible, but the overall attractiveness of the application is lowered.

6.1.3 Generalization

An interesting area for future work would be to see if these strategies emerge in other mind mapping activities. The difference in the two strategies could create conflict when individuals from both cohorts work together in a collaborative mind mapping activity. The conflict resolution would require conversation related to spatial positioning of the mind map elements. We see evidence of such conversation being reported by Jamil et al. (Jamil et al., 2017). Future work can definitively confirm the hypothesis that the strategies are inherent to individuals and independent of the medium.

6.2 Design Implications

To answer the second part of our research question, ‘if unique behaviors or strategies emerge, what are their implications when considering collaborative mind mapping in VR’, we need to consider previous CSCW research, educational perspectives and application design.

6.2.1 Paragogy and Collaboration

The current scope of VERITAS, as a single-user mind mapping application, was essential to allow individual strategies to emerge. However, mind mapping is commonly carried out as a collaborative activity among peers. Peer-based collaborative learning or paragogy is commonly associated with inquiry-based learning and thus mind maps. Designers of collaborative mind mapping applications need to carefully consider our observations in their design. The naïve approach of offering a shared environment with different view-points is no longer a viable option. While the awareness of the actions of the collaborator is required, a whole new design approach is needed to display the mind map to the users.

The two mind mapping strategies, (grouping and sequential) that we identified, reveal challenges. When VERITAS is implemented in a collaborative environment, the two strategies may work well together, with users naturally mediating control to allow for their distinct strategy to continue unhindered. However, it is equally possible a user employing the grouping strategy may face disruption in reflection due to a competing user applying the sequential strategy or vice-versa. Unlike digital tabletops or paper-pen exercises that consist of a shared space and single perspective, VR headsets can operate independently of each other while supporting ‘one-world, multiple perspectives’, but the designer needs to look beyond merely supporting separate personal and shared workspaces. The variety of mind maps built by the participants provide an insight into the information organization process. While the space mediates the organization of information, the correspondence of spatial coordinates to individual tiles is loose. This can be leveraged by a design wherein the tile positions in each user’s view are loosely coupled to their positions in another user’s views (i.e., if a user moves a tile to a new location, this change doesn’t need to be reflected exactly in another user’s view or the movement is replicated on a ‘diminished’ proxy). Interesting design choices need to be made when the collaborative discussion focuses on such a tile or when the relative spatial position of the tile becomes relevant to the structure of the mind map. An ideal implementation would allow both strategies to flourish on their own without hindering the reflective paragogy it is meant to foster. One possible outcome can be visually dissimilar but pedagogically similar mind maps. The implementation would also account for the hardware-imposed constraints of VR headsets that restrict the natural communication through face-to-face

interactions and make contention issues harder to manage. The designer can leveraging existing work to virtualize face to face interactions through avatars (Piumsomboon et al., 2018) to facilitate non-verbal communication and introduce elements that increase situational awareness (Benford et al., 1994).

In addition to these finding being useful for designers of collaborative VR mind mapping applications, they are also useful for educators. Now that these behaviors are known and identified, educators can ensure any application they procure or utilize encompasses and facilitates these behaviors. Interactions that occur naturally ensures active learners do not become passive learners through frustration and disengagement. Learning activities can also be tailored to ensure such behaviors are catered for.

7 Conclusion

In this paper, we investigated how VR based mind mapping can support emergence of individual mind mapping strategies. Using a proof-of-concept VR mind mapping application, VERITAS, we identified the emergence of two distinct mind mapping strategies, grouping and sequential, through our user study. Our findings of the mappingstrategies have implications for future research into VR-based mind mapping in educational settings, especially for collaboration-based paragogy.

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The dark side of printmaking

Paula Smithson

This Reflective Practice Paper examines print as a platform of multiple dimensions, providing an essential link between the traditions of the handmade print and the use of new technologies. Exploring the potential of scale using photopolymer intaglio type printing, using the material capabilities of the printed surface to connect what is viewed and experienced. I will reflect on my experience of this medium along with the research methods, practices and technologies. More directly this body of work considers ideas around re-interpretation and a repositioning of traditional printmaking skills and processes as part of a wider cross-disciplinary art practice. Large Intaglio plates incorporate photopolymer technology to offer a view combining digital interpretation with the traditions of the hand created mark and printed Intaglio surface resulting in a re-imagined vision linking digital aesthetics.

Themes explored within my work have a key focus on human form, inspired by my interests in theatre, performance, Commedia de’lla arte and the carnivalesque. The current body of work is concerned with performance, in particular spectatorship. I am interested in the tension and atmosphere during circus performance and how the space becomes charged, particularly the effect the aerialists’ feat has on the audience and how

This body of work explores the psychological impact performances have on the audience and how members of the public place themselves in the position of the performer; in particular how the aerialist exhilarates this by incorporating purposeful and well-practiced mistakes. The pandemic deprived audiences from the tension and immersive experience; equally performers were starved of the rapture and applause. This was at the forefront of my thoughts as ‘The Big Kid’ circus was stranded in my hometown of Morecambe throughout the entirety of the first lockdown, further encouraging me to expand my research and practice on this theme as a post pandemic voice.

Prior to studying MA Illustration at Manchester Metropolitan University my practice focused on screenprint and collagraph often combining the two. My proposal for the MA was to future proof my practice and teaching career by digitally upskilling, as a result I spent very little time in print but embraced the opportunities of the digital environment to make props for short films. During this time I attended performances to draw on location, including Blackpool Tower Circus, The Big Kid Circus, Circus Mondao and the Moscow State Circus along with immersive performances at Carnivals.

Post MA, I combined digital and analogue techniques to produce plates and positives for printed outcomes, at times deconstructing and reconstructing to make small books and dioramas, not satisfied the work I was making at this time effectively communicated the concept. Therefore, in November 2019 I moved to the dark side of printmaking to up-skill in etching using copper sulphate solution and Photopolymer Intaglio type printmaking as a way of communicating the concept more effectively. Working on small plates of A5 format and a scale of 10cm x 10cm. Having some relatively early success with this medium encouraged me to embrace the process further and I proceeded to explore colour combinations and multi-plate prints.

“…empathy for the performer generates the accelerated pulse…” (Simon, 2014)

In March 2020 remote working and social distancing set in. Devoid of access to workshop facilities during the pandemic and lack of social interaction I looked to reach out to the on-line community and entered a number of creative challenges through social media and on-line exhibitions including the IPE #12 Print Exchange and the Mini-Print exhibition in Kazanlak, Bulgaria. Having access to a portable etching press in my home studio enabled me to maintain some level of momentum by continuing to print the small plates I made before lock down, however, it was clear these would not sustain me through the entirety of lock down so I was drawn to embracing new technologies more readily for image construction.

Drawing and material investigation are fundamental to my practice, I work from direct observation and memory with a focus on the human form. Traditional methods of image making continue to play a vital role within my practice; I enjoy materiality and media experimentation, painterly marks, ink washes and marks left on surfaces from ink tubs within the printmaking studio have all been explored when creating recent positives for print. The use of digital tools continue to gain momentum within image making, along with laser cut paper stencils, the aim is to combine analogue and digital technologies to create multi-layered positives to expose to a single plate or to create multi-plate prints. I continue to embrace interaction with the physical surface combined in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.

The liberation of being able to return to the printmaking studio post-lockdown, with access to the large-scale presses, encouraged me to embrace new challenges. In discussion with lead artist and research associate at Art Lab Contemporary Print Studio (Tracy Hill) as to how I would move the project forward and set new goals for increasing impact within the work, led to the decision to increase format. I proceeded to make the decision of scale based on the notion ‘how big can I go?’ Restrained only by the size of the largest developing tray, the width of roll film for printing positives and the bed of the press. The size of the developing tray being 90cm x 90cm, so with an allowance of 5cm either side of the plate I ordered plates at a scale of 80cm x 80cm. Here-in lay the challenges ahead. Upon receiving my beautifully cut large scale plates of 80cm x 80cm,I set about sourcing Photopolymer only to discover the maximum width of approximately 60cm. As a result I concluded that piecing the polymer would be the only option, if I were to continue to work at this scale. Embracing the possibility of further enhancing the aesthetic of the plate I chose to resemble lines within the original positive and in some way capture this essence when cutting the polymer film. More recently, I have been informed that the manufacturers changed the specifications of the film and previously supplied at a scale of approximately 1metre.

Another challenge I did not factor in was paper size, with many mould made papers having a limit of under 80cm width meant I either needed to source extra-large sheets or work off the roll, storage of large paper becomes an issue so the roll seemed to be the better option for initial artist proofs.

I proceeded to explore the possibility of colour and colour combinations, initially exploring blue black, the colour I had used in the small test plates. However, at scale this did not translate as effectively so I proceeded to experiment with alternatives, moving to the opposite spectrum of red-black which was more effective particularly with the addition of red for the inner circle. I felt this decision had a significant impact on how the image read as the inner glow of the print began to communicate an essence of danger and uncertainty.

Satisfied with the choice of colour, I was now keen to exploit the capabilities of photopolymer to investigate the limitations and boundaries of this medium. Much of the developments within my practice-based research have been a chain of events with one experiment leading to another led by material investigation or an aesthetic sensibility. I started to research layering two positives to expose to the screen but as they were both relatively consistent in opacity this just resulted in the image merging together as one block.

I continued this experiment creating layered Intaglio types discussed by Keith Howard in Non-Toxic Intaglio Printmaking (1998) by re-laminating a previously exposed plate with an additional layer of polymer film and expose a second positive to see how these combined together when printed. The results were interesting and presented a shift in aesthetic and more abstract quality. I experimented with inverting the positives for some of the experiments this was not as effective as using two positive images together as there was insufficient imagery to expose to the polymer film.

As all restrictions and social distancing lifted, the circus stranded in Morecambe during the first lock down returned. The performance was sold out and the audience anticipation and tension within the big top was greater than before. Perhaps this was due to audiences being starved of live performance or perhaps my skewed memory? The circus returned with a more vibrant and dramatic performance and received rapturous applause from an attentive audience. The vibrancy of colour within the big top and the combinations of soft and hard light had quite an impact on me. Returning to the printmaking studio post performance, inspired, I started to consider the significance of colour further and the impact colour would have within print.

In addition to being inspired by the colours of the circus, the colour of the polymer film was an interesting addition to the choice of colour used to ink the plate. These two observations led me to explore the potential of the addition of blue ink, in particular Turquoise Lake to the mix. In addition to considering the colour of ink I also considered the impact of the choice of paper would have on the resulting aesthetic. I proceeded to research paper experimenting with stark white through to soft cream, there was a significant shift in how the image read through the slightest subtle change in paper colour, the clash of turquoise and red were muted on the softer shades and did not yield the more unsettling effects they had on white paper. I referred earlier that I initially started using paper off the roll,

this was partially influenced by storage and cost. However, more in-depth research and discussions with paper suppliers led me to select the Bread and Butter Edition paper.

Not completely satisfied with my newfound knowledge and hungry to exploit the possibilities of photopolymer even further I chose to introduce another layer of complexity to the process by exploring the potential of replacing the stochastic screen to achieve a more distressed tonal quality. This led me to generate my own stochastic screens, my thoughts were to create multiple lines in close proximity and overlapped to somewhat replicate the stochastic screen. For this I produced a number of experiments I started with a small-scale aluminium dry point plate where I created multiple scratches over lapping lines in different directions, multiple layers of masking tape again working at different angles, grain mark resist film using multiple lines in Indian ink and permanent drawing pen. This was a huge learning curve, as I had to achieve an accurate density of tone. The initial results yielded varied and at time strange qualities of marks when printing the plate. The line quality for the permanent drawing pen and Indian Ink with dip pen on grain mark resist film as they were inconsistent, however, they were interesting and an area I will revisit eventually. The dry point was more effective and offered a more consistent tone, the early experiments with masking tape were not so successful as I left too much ink on the plate and the printed result offered insufficient tonal range when scanned and printed as a positive.

Undeterred at this point with the results, I proceeded to re-make the dry point and masking tape, this time using a scale of A3 for the plate to enable more effective scaling up when scanning at 600dpi. After consultation with a researcher in this field I proceeded to remove much more ink from the plate resulting in greater tonal differences within the printed image. The scanned print needed further attention in Photoshop to ensure the exposure highlighted the greater tonal range within the image. Following exposing, developing and printing the plates, the results were particularly interesting and offered a varied aesthetic.

In summary I have returned to the printmaking studio with a revitalised and more challenging project that has led me to re-align my practice, take greater risks and be more adventurous in my expectations of myself. I continue to explore photopolymer as a medium of expression, setting new goals to exploit the potential and possibilities. All things considered with hindsight I may not have chosen to work to the chosen scale but in conclusion, my knowledge of the process and my experience has led to more exciting and innovative results.

Bibliography

Simon, L (2014) The Greatest Shows on Earth: A History of the Circus. Reaktion Books

Howard, K (1998) Non-Toxic Intaglio Printmaking. Printmaking Resources

Gale, C (2006) Etching and Photopolymer Intaglio Techniques. A&C Black

Adam, R & Robertson, C (2007) Intaglio: The Complete Safety First System for Creative Printmaking. Thames & Hudson

Performance Management and Control

Carolyn Foy Introduction

Part one of this report will investigate the role of financial control in organisations and evaluate the value of this system as a performance assessment approach. Financial controls are an important function of an organisation. Managers can evaluate expenditure, profitability and cash flow as well as forecast and manage resources. The aim is to plan, evaluate and coordinate financial activities to achieve the goals and objectives of the business. Part two of this report will evaluate the financial performance of Amazon.com using the 2020 Annual reports published in February 2021. The evaluation of this performance will be from an investor’s standpoint.

Part One

Financial Control

According to CIMA (2022), financial control is the policies and procedures used by the firm to ensure the validity and accuracy of its financial statements and information used by management. These controls can be used to plan and control costs to support management strategies by predicting costs and resources for a particular action over a specified period. Financial statements present the overall performance of the business and are used for internal analysis of the organisation’s performance and to detect any areas that may need to be improved (Kaplan, 2022). Financial statements are also used by external stakeholders for several purposes:

• Check creditworthiness

• Profitability

• Liquidity

• Work out tax obligations

• Determine the financial worth of the business

• Make equity evaluations

Ratio Analysis

Ratio analysis can be calculated using the financial statements and provide easily comparable data. These can be used to compare past and current performance or similar businesses depending on the user of the data. Ratio analysis can also be used by management to evaluate the financial stability and growth potential of the business and to make important investment decisions (Rashid, 2021). Ratio analysis consists of five categories: profitability, liquidity, efficiency, solvency and coverage.

Figure 1 opposite, shows some of the different ratios used by stakeholders for financial analysis. Depending on the stakeholder the group of metrics used may change. A manager may wish to access profitability, liquidity and turnover. However, shareholders may be more interested in return on net worth, earnings per share and profit to equity ratios (Thakur, 2020).

Value and Limitations

Ratio analysis is used extensively in practice by a variety of stakeholders such as managers, analysts, lenders, creditors and investors. The main strength is that it provides a systematic approach to analysing performance. However, ratio analysis also has limitations such as:

• Needing comparative information to make the data meaningful – examples include previous year’s figures to identify trends, industry averages or competitors’ performance.

• Using historical data and therefore may not account for seasonal trends or large capital expenditures that impact financial statements.

• Comparisons may be unreliable if different accounting policies are used by organisations (ACCA, 2022).

In an international context, ratio analysis can be flawed due to the use of different accounting principles, financial systems and tax systems. As well as mandatory and voluntary disclosure requirements depending on the country the business is operating in (Robinson, 2020). In recent years there has been a merger of the United States Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and the United Kingdom’s International Financial Reporting Standards however, it will still be several years before they are fully merged (Yusrina et al., 2017).

Part Two Amazon

Amazon provides an online shopping service to customers, selling consumer products and subscription services around the world. It was founded by Jeffrey Bezos in July 1994 and now has over 1.3 million employees worldwide (The Wall Street Journal, 2022). Amazon went public in May 1997 when its initial public offering was $18.00 (Amazon, 2022). Since then, Amazon shares have continued to increase in price and according to the London Stock market (2022), the stock price is $170. However, Amazon never has (and have stated they never will) paid dividends to their shareholders. Therefore, this report will analyse financial and non-financial data to see if Amazon is worth investing in.

Shareholder Information

Before deciding to purchase shares in an organisation a shareholder must ensure that they have the information needed to make investment, credit and other decisions. This information comes from the annual reports produced

Figure 1: Types of Ratios used to access performance (Thakur, 2020).

by the company each year. According to the Financial Accounting Standards Board (2020), the purpose of financial reporting is to provide useful financial information to existing and potential investors (as well as creditors and other lenders). The information gathered will help investors analyse the risk and returns associated with the investment. According to Harry Markowitz (1952), all investors are risk-averse and will only accept high-risk investments with higher levels of return. Investors can minimise this risk by diversifying their portfolios. Shareholders want to maximise their returns and will use the financial statements to calculate their share in the company, earnings per share, stock market value and cash flow status. Being able to determine the prospective cash flow against debt will help investors understand if the organisation will make a dividend pay-out in the future. Additionally, shareholders will want to know the organisation’s strategic objectives to decide if buying into the organisation is a good choice. Investors will look for dividends to:

• Reduce uncertainty as capital gains are unpredictable

• Measure financial strength - profits, liquidity and solvency

• Receive regular income (Livoreka et al., 2014).

Dividend Policy

There are several different viewpoints on dividend policies and their level of importance for the shareholder. The dividend irrelevance theory by Miller and Modigliani (1961) stated that the dividend policy is irrelevant to investors if the investors receive a higher return on their initial investment. The assumptions proposed by Miller and Modigliani are:

• Capital markets are profitable and provide income.

• Company information is available to everyone.

• Managers can make decisions that maximise the value of shares.

• The value of the company depends only on profits from investments, not dividend pay-outs.

However, in contrast to Miller and Modigliani’s theory, is that of Gordan and Lithner (1963). They proposed that shareholders prefer dividends to be paid now rather than wait for capital gains in the future due to uncertainty. They also believed that shareholders would rather have large dividends paid today from retained earnings rather than wait for increases in share price as this is deemed riskier (Smirnov, 2020).

The clientele effect explains a change in share price due to the corporate decisions caused by changes in tax, dividends pay-outs or other company policy changes. Different investors are attracted to different company policies so, when a company changes one of its policies this will cause a shift in demand. This will also impact the share price of that company (Pettit, 1977). Research on the clientele effect suggests that some investors may prefer regular earnings from dividends over capital gains. While others may prefer the company to reinvest their retained earnings towards growing the business and in turn see stock appreciation (Elton and Gruber, 1970; Kalay, 1982).

Since its initial public offering in 1997, Amazon has adopted a no-dividend policy and have never declared or paid a cash dividend on their common stock. Instead, the company believes that they need to focus on the future and reinvest any available capital to generate high growth through acquisitions and investing internally (Amazon. com, Inc.-FAQs, 2022). Amazon is still growing, developing and improving products and therefore feels that this is the best use of any cash surpluses. Similarly, Google has a no-dividend policy and funds expansion and Facebook have never paid dividends to shareholders stating that they do not expect to declare any future dividend pay-outs (Ghosh, 2022). Whilst dividend pay-outs would attract investors, these companies look at long term profitability and increases in stock price to attract investors instead. Amazon (2020) stated that they had, ‘created $1.6 trillion of wealth for shareowners’, this has been achieved by the increase in stock price since 1997. The clientele effect

at Amazon has shown that investors are happy with their investments and are willing to wait for the stock price to increase and therefore their investment to grow. This suggests that any changes in company policies regarding dividend pay-outs may impact the share price and see investors sell their stock. Therefore, it may be beneficial for Amazon to continue with a no dividend policy for the foreseeable future and to attract investors who are willing to invest long-term and wait for capital gains rather than paying dividends. However, long-term investors would still need to analyse company performance to ensure that Amazon is a good investment and that stock prices will continue to grow, or they may lose money on their investment.

Financial Performance

Investors that are looking for long-term stock appreciation investments will want to see if the company is profitable, that they have retained earnings to reinvest, that they will remain solvent, the debt load is not high, price to earnings is good and return on equity acceptable. Using the financial statements of Amazon (Appendix 1), published on the 3rd February 2021 for the year ended December 2020, ratios will be calculated to analyse the performance of the company. These will then be compared with the industry averages to determine if Amazon is a good investment opportunity. Industry averages available on Investing.com stock exchange (2022).

Gross profit margin measures the percentage of revenue available to cover operating and other expenses. Amazon is just above industry averages showing it controls its cost of sales efficiently.

Net profit margin measures the actual profits after all expenses have been accounted for - this is lower than industry averages. This suggests, that compared to industry Amazon may use ineffective pricing strategies. This could be the result of no-delivery charges being made on Amazon’s own-brand goods bought or returned resulting in higher costs for the company. However, this policy encourages customers to use the company as there is no financial risk (Duvell, 2022).

The current ratio and quick ratio measure the solvency of the company and whether they have enough current assets to pay for its short-term obligations. Both of Amazon’s liquidity ratios are less than industry averages. Though, its quick ratio would suggest that Amazon may have difficulty paying for its short-term debts as they fall due. However, it has been reported that Amazon has a unique business strategy that focuses on its free cash flow. It uses this to pay down its debt and build cash reserves. Amazon also works on a negative working capital cycle meaning that it never pays for goods before sales are made finding itself in a state of permanent liquidity (Hake, 2021).

The debt-to-equity ratio is used to evaluate a company’s financial leverage. The higher the ratio the more the

company relies on borrowed funds. Amazon has a lower debt-to-equity ratio than industry average and this shows that Amazon is less risky than its competitors. It also shows that stockholders have higher stakes in the business than creditors. However, a low debt-to-equity ratio may also indicate that the company is not taking advantage of financial leverage to grow the business.

Return on equity measures a company’s profitability against the profit it retains and outside investments. The higher the ratio the more profit the company is making. Compared to industry, Amazon’s ratio is higher. This is probably due to the low amount of debt the organisation has as shown in the debt-to-equity ratio.

Return on assets measures how efficient the company’s management is at generating earnings from the assets held in the company. Amazon’s return on assets is higher than industry averages indicating it is better at using its assets to make money. Investors use this ratio to find stock opportunities as it indicates how well the company is converting its investment into net income. A return on assets ratio that increases over time shows that the company is good at increasing profits and utilising its economic resources (CFI, 2022).

Revenue/share is the amount of revenue per share of the company’s stock. Revenue is the amount of money from the sale of goods. Companies with more consistent revenue and earnings growth are less risky as revenue is expected to be received at regular intervals. When comparing companies, revenue can be manipulated by changing how sales and payments are recorded in their financial data. This would then impact the comparability so should not be used as the only measure (Canina and Potter, 2018). Amazon’s revenue per share is higher than industry averages and would therefore indicate to investors this is a good investment.

Price to Earnings (P/E) ratio measures the company’s share price compared to the company’s earnings per share. The P/E ratio shows what investors are willing to pay for stock based on future earning potential. The lower the ratio the more valuable the company may be to investors as the stock may be undervalued. Amazon’s P/E is lower than industry showing that Amazon may be undervalued however, compared to S&P 500 as a whole, Amazon looks overvalued (Duggan, 2022). This may be because Amazon reinvests surplus cash to grow the business to boost its market share. From the financial ratios analysed, investors can be optimistic about Amazon’s future performance potential which could see the share price increase. However, investors should also look at non-financial indicators before considering investing.

Balanced Scorecard Approach

The balanced scorecard is a management tool developed by Norton and Kaplan in 1992. It is used to achieve the goals and objectives of the business by looking at both financial and non-financial data to measure performance as seen in figure 2 below.

Figure 2: Balance scorecard devised by Kaplan and Norton (1992)

This can also be used by investors by applying it to investments to help evaluate capital allocation decisions and allow performance to be effectively monitored. Financial performance has already been discussed previously; the other three perspectives will be evaluated next.

Customer Focus

Amazon stated in the 2020 annual report that its focus was on customers, invention, operational excellence and long-term thinking rather than competitors and profits. Amazon’s mission is to be Earth’s most customer-centric company believing that this can be achieved by looking at customer needs and working backwards (Amazon, 2020). This innovative strategy keeps customers at the centre of the decision-making process to create customer value and ensure that the products produced will be successful and profitable. This strategy seems to be working as sales have increased 39% since 2018 as shown in figure 3 below.

Figure 3: Net sales generated from internationally-focused online stores (in millions $) (Amazon, 2021).

However, this increase in sales may have been the result of the lockdown in 2020 as the majority of high-street retailers were forced to close due to the covid pandemic and consumers turned to online retailers, like Amazon, who were still allowed to operate.

Learning and Growth

Amazon’s growth strategy is focused on entry and growth in new markets as well as developing new products. This has contributed to Amazon’s success globally trading in over 100 countries worldwide. Amazon now has multiple capabilities from online shopping, streaming services, cloud computing, and teamed with Morrisons in the UK for delivery of groceries the same day. Amazon also has specialist brand devices such as tablets and smart speakers that are continually updated to offer new features and have sold over 150 million devices worldwide (Amazon, 2020). By continually being innovative Amazon has seen its business grow to a trillion-dollar corporation. However, this has meant reinvesting surplus cash and forfeiting dividends to shareholders as they continually aim to grow the organisation.

Business Processes

In 2019 Amazon made headlines when it stated it would spend $700 million on staff training to build a highlyskilled workforce to improve employee retention. A similar strategy to that of Google and Walmart who are also offering employee training programmes (Scott, 2019). However, it has been reported that employees are still unhappy due to long hours and working conditions. Employees frequently complain about the huge warehouses and amount of walking done on a shift and this escalated during the covid pandemic when the volume of work increased exponentially (BBC News, 2021). Listening to the grievances of employees, Amazon has developed warehouse robots that will reduce physical work for employees. Amazon has used robots since 2012 to streamline processes, improve safety and increase efficiencies while creating 200,000 extra jobs so employees should feel secure in their employment rather than feel they are being replaced (Amazon, 2021).

Amazon also highlights competitive factors such as selection, price, convenience and fast reliable fulfilment of orders as part of its business strategy. Using these factors to encourage customers to shop from Amazon. Additionally,

Amazon ensures product variety and availability along with low prices and next day delivery creating loyalty with customers that allows them a competitive edge over competitors.

Other Considerations

Milton Friedman developed shareholder theory in 1970 by stating that an organisations responsibility is to maximise its revenues, increase returns for shareholders and responsibilities to society are disregarded (Friedman Doctrine, 2022). In Contrast to Freidman’s view is that of Edward Freeman who proposed Stakeholder theory. This theory involves directors balancing the interest of all stakeholders, customers, suppliers, creditors, shareholders and the wider community. This is done by identifying available options and determining the effect they may have on the stakeholders (Freeman, 2009). As stakeholders, investors believe that the company will be successful in the future and will receive capital gains and/or dividend payments. Historically, this was the only concern of the shareholder however, research conducted by Ernest and Young’s (2019) found that investors have increased their interest on environmental and social topics. While, research by Schroders Global Investors found that investors were willing to divest and move to an entirely sustainable portfolio by placing more importance on sustainability and corporate social responsibility (Needham, 2021).

Corporate Social Responsibility

Amazon has stated in their Sustainability Report 2020 that:

• they use 65% renewable energy across the organisation

• use electric vehicles

• pay above minimum wage

• set new diversity, equality and inclusion goals

• invested $2 billion in the research and development of carbon-reducing technology (Amazon, 2020).

Amazon invests heavily in CSR and shares this knowledge with shareholders. This encourages investors to remain loyal to the company rather than selling their stock as shareholders can see the value of the social impact of the investments being made. However, shareholders should be aware that Amazon may only share highlights of good practice that benefits Amazon’s Image to retain this loyalty.

Investment Opportunity Recommendation

Overall, Amazon continues to generate high profits by utilising its assets well and managing its cash flow to ensure it remains solvent. The company has kept its debts low although it could take advantage of leverage to fund growth. However, it does use retained earnings for this purpose meaning dividends are not paid. The company has proved that it is innovative and will continue to develop and grow by offering new products and improving the others. This should mean that shares prices will appreciate in the future. However, due to continued reinvestment

Amazon are unlikely to pay dividends anytime in the new future. The biggest risks of investing in Amazon are increasing competition, uncertainty around profits and share price volatility. Amazon has delivered high revenue growth since 1997 when it first went public which could be a good indicator of future performance. However, due to the unpredictability in share price, for a short-term investment, this would not be a good investment as shareholders may lose money. Yet for long-term investors who are happy to watch Amazon grow and continue to develop this is a good choice as the investors will see their investment appreciate in the future.

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Appendices

Appendix 1

Amazon.com financial statements taken from the annual reports

Drive Thru’: A Collaboration with Stephen Clarke

Aaron Tonks

Rationale

Covid-related lockdowns affected many exhibiting artists as galleries and exhibition venues were forced to close. They were forced to find alternative internet-based platforms to exhibit their work and often without the benefit of a curator. These platforms varied from webpages to immersive virtual gallery spaces. However, there were many artists who did not have a web presence, either by choice or didn’t have the knowledge (or confidence) to create one. Stephen Clarke, an artist and lecturer, based at the University of Chester, was one such person.

Stephen’s photography project, ‘Alien Resident’ was exhibited at CASC Gallery, Chester over lockdown and was subsequently closed to the public. This led me to approach him and propose a collaboration as a way of providing public access to his photographs and gave me the chance to respond to his work and design, build and curate a bespoke virtual gallery for it.

This collaboration also allowed me to re-examine the traditionally fractious relationship between the artist and curator through the lens of new technology.

Artist/curator relationships have been well documented as being quite rocky. Indeed leading curators and critics such as Jeffrey Kipnis often warn against including artists in the active process of curation and design of their exhibitions - ‘a show… I understood to be selected and installed by the artist - a risky adventure, in my opinion, as the lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client’ (Kipnis, 2016). The reasons for this source of friction are, says Robert Storr ‘that some artists are very good, flexible, and creative… Quite a few are not, but only some of them are aware of it. (Storr, 2016).

Storr goes on to correctly identify the gallery space as another point of friction, that the curator takes the (hard learned) idiosyncrasies of the site into consideration during planning, whereas an artist cannot necessarily make the best decisions for placing their artworks because they are rarely immersed within the exhibition space.

VR however, is a fairly new exhibition medium and the ability to make a new space, ‘where the audience can see works of art and have an art experience’ (Jacob, 2016), has created a new environment where the traditional norms may not manifest in the same way.

Methodology

After discussing the project and showing Stephen examples of virtual galleries, he sent to me a series of 11 photographs, made during an extended visit to San Diego in 1986 - 1987, that depicted a suburban car-based lifestyle. He left the gallery design and layout completely up to me.

The photographs were an unusual mix of seven suburban street views and four car portraits. This odd balance of images may not necessarily have sat happily in a traditional wall-hung gallery. However, a virtual gallery does not have to follow conventional rules and I had the chance to create a space which helps to make sense of the work.

I created a large airy space and placed the suburban pictures on large panels framed between equally large windows and I placed the car portraits in smaller, warmer, individual human-sized spaces. I tried to emulate structures, textures and colours that I felt were iconic of San Diego. For example, I used dark wood edging, cream-toned vertical panelling, and grey (aluminium) window frames which appear to be quite popular design features within commercial buildings in San Diego and are reflected in the photographs. Unusually for this gallery, I made the decision to include windows and create a monochromatic facsimile of San Diego’s surrounding landscape.

Stephen and I had three meetings supplemented with weekly updates throughout the collaboration process. We discussed my design, the light, the landscape, architectural features, and the order and size of the images. From this Stephen was able to write an introduction where, in an analogy to the creation of my gallery in the virtual landscape, he compares himself to Mr Natural a Robert Crumb character who enters into a deep meditation in an empty desert, where under blazing sun, ‘...a road is rolled out, a car passes and then a town emerges. In the midst of passing traffic, Mr Natural sits in front of a Denny’s Diner where, eventually, a cop tries to move him on’from nothing to something.

Feedback from Collaborator: Stephen Clarke

Stephen admitted that he had low expectations at the beginning of the process, he had seen other virtual galleries that looked ‘Sims-like’, flat and unreal. However, the finished gallery excelled expectations and he began to feel that the virtual landscape was a real place. There was also a realisation that a gallery can be made to fit, in complete opposition to a traditional (real and expensive) exhibition. He felt that the gallery design made sense of his work and gave form to an unstructured project.

He believes that whilst being web-based extends the gallery to new audiences, he feels that it would appeal to select interests similar to consumers of specialist photo zines, like Cafe Royal Books.

Stephen felt that this opportunity arrived at the right time. He thinks that we are on the cusp of a virtual land grab and likens it to the American mid-west land grab (Oklahoma land rush) of 1889. He sees the opportunity for projects, such as this one, to carve out a space for themselves, again, similar to Cafe Royal Books which produces single project photo zines that fit into a larger series documenting ‘cultural and social shifts in Britain and Ireland’.

Reflection: Aaron Tonks

I proposed the collaboration because I wanted to design a gallery and exhibition for a specific body of work to see if it supported it, added or detracted from it, to see if any ‘new ideas’ presented themselves (to be surprised), to see how I could improve it, and I wanted feedback about it from within the industry.

An online search will quickly reveal that many virtual galleries fit the stereotype of traditional galleries, but they don’t need to. Indeed, a real-world gallery typically in the guise of O’Doherty’s classic ‘white cube’ gallery (O’Doherty, 1986) is a compromise that allows curators to utilise the same space to frame many different types of artwork. There are a few examples built to house specific works of art such as the Rothko Chapel and Monet in the Orangerie museum but they are hugely expensive. However, there is no such concern in the virtual world as the only expense is time and there is the ability to design and create something completely original and atypical.

In the end, I believe I was able to create an expressive, sympathetic and immersive virtual gallery that successfully supported Stephen’s photographs. It did indeed give the project structure and the virtual environment framed the subject matter and helped to engage the viewer.

Summary: Collaboration and Compromise

Very often, a curator must find a compromise between the artist’s wishes, the artworks, the gallery and the viewer

and having the freedom to change one of those elements can make that compromise easier to achieve and in this instance, the gallery, a complete creation in response to Stephen’s work, meant that I was able to address some of his concerns along the way and potential areas of friction did not materialise. A compromise did not need to be made. Working with Stephen was a pleasure.

References

Clarke, S. (2020) “Alien Resident.” Chester: UK. Information (no date) Café Royal Books. Available at: https://www.caferoyalbooks.com/information-1 (Accessed: September 23, 2022).

Jacob, M.J. (2016) What makes a great exhibition? Philadelphia, PA: The Pew Center for Arts &amp; Heritage.

Kipnis, J. (2016) What makes a great exhibition? Philadelphia, PA: The Pew Center for Arts &amp; Heritage.

Marincola, P. et al. (2016) What makes a great exhibition? Philadelphia, PA: The Pew Center for Arts &amp; Heritage.

O’Doherty, B. (1986) Inside the White Cube: The ideology of the gallery space. Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Pr.

Storr, R. (2016) What makes a great exhibition? Philadelphia, PA: The Pew Center for Arts &amp; Heritage.

‘Reader, I married him’: Love, Marriage and the Development of Realism in Jane Eyre

Lauren Watson

Despite the best efforts of many literary critics, in the popular imagination Jane Eyre remains a love story. Marxists critics may try to emphasise the early chapters of the novel and the class conflicts articulated by the text, but adaptations continue to portray it as a romantic drama centred around the conflicting desires of its female protagonist. The well-received 2006 BBC adaptation, for example, condensed the ‘Lowood’ section into brief opening scenes, with the series concentrating on the relationship between Jane and Rochester. The last episode concluded with their marriage and a portrait of their extended family- a conclusion which seems ‘natural’ and emotionally satisfying.

However, ‘love’ and ‘marriage’ are ideas defined as much by history as by the urgings of the heart or hormones. This article will look at the portrayal of love and marriage in Jane Eyre, comparing it to the ways in which these same concepts were represented in the 18th century, at the birth of the novel form and the advent of Realism as a genre. It will argue that Jane Eyre illustrates the profound social, cultural and philosophical changes which occurred between the early 18th and the mid-19th century, changes most obvious at the level of character and plot. However, these changes can also be detected at a formal level, as Realism itself shifts from a mode of merely reflecting society in the 18th century to a means of representing the individual consciousness.

In the 18th century, it was comparatively rare to marry out of mutual affection, although it could be hoped that such sentiments would develop later. At the beginning of the 18th century most marriages (amongst landed or moneyed families at least) were based on social utility: they were contracts designed to cement alliances, acquire property, secure social influence and produce an heir - regardless of the feelings of the individuals involved. This was something which satirists of the time parodied, most famously Hogarth’s paintings ‘Marriage a-la Mode’ (1745), in which an arranged marriage between a young earl and a merchant’s daughter brings ruin to both. Similarly, in Daniel Defoe’s novel Moll Flanders (1722), the eponymous Moll adopts this pragmatic approach to marriage. Arranging her own advantageous matches, Moll moves from husband to husband with strategic intent, calculating how each new union will affect her financial position. Far from being deviant, Moll’s mercenary attitude only magnifies behaviour of her betters, in which love comes a distant third behind the social and economic benefits of marriage.

In the second half of the 18th century, this materialist idea of marriage came increasingly under attack. Materialism in this case does not simply mean the accumulation of wealth: more widely, it was the philosophical position that human consciousness was a by-product of the external, physical world in which it existed. Many were troubled by this idea that individual thoughts, beliefs and emotions were determined by their material context – particularly when it came to the holy sacrament of matrimony. As the century progressed the debate about the purpose of marriage raged, and found literary expression in sentimental novels of the period such as Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. By the late 18th century, marrying for love finally became acceptable, as long as other social parameters were respected. This pivotal moment is captured in the novels of Jane Austen, where the relative importance of material or emotional motives in courtship is central to the plot. Austen’s novels allow both parties to state their case, from the unsentimental rationalism of Charlotte Lucas in Pride and Prejudice (1796; published 1813) to

Catherine Moreland’s passionate attacks on mercenary marriages in Northanger Abbey (1803; published 1817). There is no doubt that Austen ultimately privileges heart over head; it is equally true, however, that she is not blind to the financial and social implications of marriage, and these material considerations are also ultimately resolved to her heroines’ benefit.

This social acceptance of marrying for love anticipated the philosophical changes that occurred as the Neo-Classical era gave way to the Romanticism of the early 19th century, when the precept of materialism was replaced by Idealism. Idealism, which asserted the primacy of the subjective mind over external matter, was the polar opposite of materialism and provided the metaphysical foundation of the Romantic world-view. For the Romantics, love was paramount; marriage should not be based upon socio-economic concerns, but solely on emotional and sexual self-fulfilment. It was left to a later generation of 19th century novelists, like Charlotte Bronte, to negotiate these two opposing paradigms and propose a model of marriage which balanced the materialism of the Neo-Classical period with the idealism of the Romantics.

That Bronte inherits a distaste for arranged marriages is evident from her portrayal of the relationship between the Rochester and Bertha Mason. Rochester’s first marriage could be illustrated by Hogarth’s engravings; it is a union doomed to fail through the financial machinations of the families involved. However, this marriage is not simply a product of 18th century materialism. It is also a product of the romantic idealism of the early 19th century. The young Rochester, like Byron, is enraptured by Bertha’s beauty and exotic sensuality. But this is not ‘She Walks in Beauty’, Byron’s lyrical evocation of love-at-first-sight. It is more like Coleridge’s horrific ballad ‘Christabel’; Rochester goes to bed with a beautiful woman and wakes up with a ‘vampire’. It is evident from the breakdown of this relationship that neither materialism nor idealism in themselves provide the basis for a healthy marriage.

But what shapes Jane’s matrimonial choices? As an orphan, Jane is free from parental control; she has an active role in her own fate and is able to articulate her dilemma. There is a conscious struggle within Jane between the forces of passion and conscience, between romantic desires and social obligations. In most adaptations of the novel, this vacillation is framed as being simply a part of Jane’s psychology, a product of her personality or her upbringing. But it can also be seen within an historical context, with Jane as the unwitting inheritor of those conflicting views of love and marriage that emerged during the long 18th century: marriage as an act of personal fulfilment versus marriage as a social instrument. Does she follow her heart and marry Rochester, or does she marry Rivers for the greater social good (albeit for spiritual, rather than financial, reward)?

-Jane, and the novel, eventually settles on a post-romantic bourgeois model of marriage; the domesticated, economically-independent nuclear family bonded by mutual affection. Jane marries her superior for emotional rather than economic reasons, but that love does not contravene society’s legal or moral codes. Jane and Rochester’s marriage represents a Victorian equilibrium between idealism and materialism, a compromise which still perhaps influences our modern-day conceptions of marriage. However, this shifting conception of marriage – from materialism, to idealism, to Victorian synthesis- doesn’t just exist at the level of plot and character. It is also mirrored at a formal level, specifically in the development of Realism as a genre.

In his account of the rise of the novel, Ian Watt states that 18th century novels typify ‘Formal Realism’. By this he means that the novel functions as a realistic reflection of both society and the individual subject, presenting ‘a full and authentic report of human experience’. However, the novel had not yet realised its full potential: whilst successfully detailing the external world of early 18th century, early novels like Moll Flanders often fail to present a convincing account of the inner life of their protagonists. If the early 18th century viewed the sensibilities of the individual as subservient to the socio-economic advantages of marriage, it is hardly surprising that the embryonic realism of these early novels should share something of this materialist approach. Novels at this stage were less invested in the emotional development of individual characters; they treat their characters as currency, to be

disposed of as casually as Moll disposes of husbands once they have fulfilled their narrative use. The historical conditions were not yet right for a Realism that could successfully accommodate social observation with subjective individual experience. This was to develop in the post-Romantic period, with novels like Jane Eyre and the beginnings of ‘Psychological Realism’.

Jane Eyre is a narrative of emerging self-consciousness, of one woman’s struggle to negotiate spiritual and sexual desires as she journeys towards emotional maturity. In this sense, it is recognisably a Romantic text. The novel revolves around the subjectivity of a protagonist who, in turn, gives psychological depth to most of the novel’s other characters. Just as Moll Flanders unwittingly mirrors the hard-nosed materialism of its heroine, so too does Bronte’s novel share its heroine’s preoccupation with analysing the minds of others. Both Jane and the novel subscribe to Romantic idealism, and its privileging of imagination and intuition as the primary means of understanding the world.

However, the novel also incorporates some digressions into social criticism and is not above introducing more two-dimensional characters, such as Brocklehurst, for satirical purposes. Here, the desire to provide psychological depth is abandoned in order to launch a devastating critique on an institution of which Bronte had personal experience. Lowood’s regime is recorded in fine material detail, rather than the more abstract ‘romantic’ discourse used to represent thoughts and emotions elsewhere in the novel. The text also uses ‘Jane’ as a vehicle for making contentious political statements (notably in her famous battlements speech) in the same way as ‘Moll’ is used to articulate the satirical intent of Defoe, even if these sentiments don’t always sit easily with the character’s development. It is perhaps at these points, where social institutions such as religion, education and politics are scrutinised, that Bronte’s novel reneges on idealism and reveals its materialist legacy, its indebtedness to the 18th century.

In conclusion, it could be argued that Jane Eyre concludes with two successful marriages. Not just that of Jane and Rochester, but also in the way that the novel marries materialism with idealism, social critique with psychological individualism. This was a marriage achieved through the development of Realism as a genre during the 19th century.

Dr. Lauren Watson is a lecturer at Blackpool and the Fylde College on BA English: Language, Literature and Creative Writing.

Influence, affluence and expectations: a study on the corresponding factors impacting on the aspirations of children

Lisa Gayton

Abstract

This research focused on the aspirations of primary school age children in terms of their intended career choices and examined the corresponding factors that influence the complex development of aspirations of children. Mixed methods research was conducted, and findings compiled from interactions with a total of 16 children and their 16 respective parents across two primary schools in Lancashire. The schools selected for the research were in areas that were juxtaposed socio-economically. School 1 is set in a rural village serving a community identified as being in the top 20% nationally in terms of their socio-economic status (SES) with school 2 serving a deprived coastal town in the bottom 20% SES (English Indices of Deprivation, 2019).

The research findings indicated that the child’s location and, from a micro perspective, neighbourhood, potentially impacts on their levels of aspiration. The children from school 2 held lower aspirations and lower confidence levels in their academic expectations than their counterparts in school 1; furthermore, the data suggested parental expectations between the two cohorts also differed. School 1 evidenced a parental focus on education, exams, and employability whereas school 2’s parents tended towards a focus on emotional wellbeing and happiness. As a result of this obvious disparity, further research is recommended focusing on embedding factors such as the emotional wellbeing of children into the longstanding educational and employability focus currently evident in government ideology and policy reviewed within this study.

The study identified distinct correlations between parental expectations and the aspirations of the child. This suggests that expectations play a key role in the emergence and development of the child’s future aspirations and, again, this degree of influence requires further study to establish just how impactful or influential expectations can be. Interestingly, this study also found that 81% of the children cited ‘family’ as the sole influence on their future success however, in contrast, the parents cited ‘school’ or the ‘child’ themselves as the main influence on their future success. This indicates a need for parents to appreciate a deeper understanding of the ways a ‘family’ can impact a child’s confidence and their aspirations.

Introduction

The aim of this study is to explore factors that influence the aspirations of primary school age children by capturing the perceptions of children and their parents in terms of their aspirations, motivations, expectations, and family lifestyle. The research aimed to gather insights and examine factors that potentially impact on and influence the aspirations of the child. The rationale for this study was based on reflection and introspection related to my professional experience during my sixteen years (1999-2015) working in youth development across areas of significant deprivation. The youth strategy at this time focused on engaging young people and guiding them to develop their potential to increase

their chances of educational success and securing future employment. Most of my job role was driven by government policy that required the meeting of targets in relation to the attainment of young people’s engagement in both education and in employment. Having worked at the forefront of the voluntary sector for ten years followed by leading a large statutory service for six years, I reflected on youth practice and noted that it seemed that not all young people fit the ‘expectations’ set out in educational and employment policies and programmes. For some young people, staying engaged in the educational system was really challenging.

Context of the Study

This study examined a range of research and theories on aspiration and related policy discourse from 2010 to 2019. Literature consistently evidenced a range of policy discourses that attempt to ‘raise’ the ‘low’ aspirations of children and young people, particularly in disadvantaged neighbourhoods (Field, 2011; Gorard, 2010; Baker, 2014). This strategy is also validated by several researchers who report that children and young people from low SES areas have lower aspirations than other children from more affluent areas (Kintrea, 2011; Lupton and Kintrea, 2011; Flouri et al, 2015). Taking this into consideration, I made the decision to include two schools located in areas of contrasting levels of SES for this study. I wanted to evaluate if children in areas of low SES did indeed hold low aspirations compared to those in areas of high SES. Defining aspiration is challenging with many competing perspectives debating the concept and function of aspiration and what key influences claim to shape the development of aspiration.

A simple definition by Gorard, Huat-See and Davies (2012, p. 13) describe it as “what an individual hopes will happen in the future”. The more comprehensive definitions such as Hart’s (2016) state aspiration is a multidimensional phenomenon that encompasses the wider considerations of aspiration such as the freedom an individual has, to aspire, alongside their capability to achieve their aspirations. Hart (2016), a significant writer on aspiration, acknowledges the wider influences such as the political, institutional, and family influences on the development of aspirations. This multi-dimensional approach also resonates with the views of Zipin et al. (2015) who argue aspiration is a more complex and social-cultural phenomena and that the wider social, cultural, economic, and political factors must be considered when examining aspiration.

The wider context to this study highlights there is 12 million children in the United Kingdom, of these, 4.7 million children are in primary education (The Office of National Statistics, 2019). According to BESA (British Educational Suppliers Association, 2019) there are 16,769 primary schools across England with 644,348 pupils in Year 6 aged 10 and 11 years old studying the KS2 curriculum. On reflection of these statistics, this is a small-scale study given the time constraints of the researcher.

A more detailed overview of the two schools is useful here to set the context of the study. School 1 is based in a small rural village in the Ribble Valley area of the Northwest of England. The total population of this village is 410 people. Research shows a high proportion of local jobs are based in the private sector due to the international manufacturing industry provided by British Aerospace (BAE) systems nearby (Census, 2011). There are 114 pupils enrolled at the school of which, for 34 of these children, English is not their first language. Interestingly, of the 114 pupils there are just 4.6% eligible for free school meals. The gender of the children is in line with the national average at both schools (Ofsted, 2018). Both schools are state funded, mainstream primary schools. In contrast, School 2, is in a large northern coastal town with a population of 25,939 of which, 24,905 are from white ethnic backgrounds. There are only three pupils at this school where English is not their first language. According to Ofsted (2016) it is a larger than average primary school with a total of 504 pupils. It is important to note that there are 41.8% of these pupils eligible for free school meals. According to Ofsted (2016) the proportion of disadvantaged pupils is more than twice the national average. The local economy of the area has been impacted by a long-term decline in the fishing industry and the closure of a large, industrial ICI manufacturing plant (Census, 2011).

Literature Review Theme 1 - Policy and the Positioning of Aspiration

Hart (2016) is an insightful and significant contributor to research on aspiration and she highlighted many policy discourses that have positioned aspirations solely in terms of educational attainment and or employment (Hart, 2016 citing HEFCE 2003, 2005, 2012; DFES 2003, 2006; Watts and bridges 2004; Watts 2006; Hart 2012). This is significant as it could be limiting the potential of aspiration if we consider only the benefits to aspiring within the realms of educational attainment, gaining employment, earning money, and improving the economy as policy appears to present.

Literature Review Theme 2 - Education and Aspiration

The second emergent theme was the links found between aspiration and educational attainment. Low aspirations are often presented as a major barrier to closing educational attainment gaps or improving social mobility. (Baker, 2014 citing Blanden et al., 2011). Baker reported that aspirations are regularly used to justify why policy interventions are not more effective. Interestingly, both Gorard (2012) and Baker (2014) argue that there is little evidence to suggest that interventions designed to raise aspirations narrow the education attainment gap for individuals at all. Baker (2017) claims that aspirations may be shaped by society and societal expectations. Young people without qualifications and those who do not actively pursue higher education are regularly positioned as failures (Baker, 2017 citing Reay, David, and Ball, 2005; Skeggs and Loveday, 2012). In Baker’s (2017) study of semi-structured interviews of 29 young people in a sixth form school within a disadvantaged area, a finding was that aspirations are closely connected to the formation of individual and group identities. This study also highlighted the importance of the moral meaning young people place on aspirations. Many of the young people’s aspirations were based on ideals of what young people ‘should do’ for a ‘good life’. Baker termed this ‘moral inter-personal duties’ and evidenced that young people often chose aspirations based on what they ‘ought to do’ or that would help them to be the person they ‘should become’. This was further supported by Giddens (1991) and Stahl (2015) who reported aspirations are highly moralised and are also connected to the young person’s sense of self-worth. These findings shaped my data collection tools to include questions about the children’s individual motivation and confidence alongside their educational experience and expectations.

Literature Review Theme 3 - Aspiration and the Wider Context

The underlying narrative of the policy makers has been to ‘raise’ aspiration to improve educational attainment and meet the requirements of the job market (Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson, 2011). Archer, Hollingworth and Mendick (2010) found that the context in which aspirations emerge may impact on the levels of aspiration. Interestingly, they questioned if young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are fundamentally low in their aspirational aims or whether their expressions of aspiration are limited by circumstances. They found young people’s self-efficacy, self-esteem, confidence, and motivation are all affected by circumstances that may lead to reduced expectations, or an unwillingness to express their genuine aspirations. Supporting this perspective, Kintrea et al. (2015) found a core distinction between children’s ‘ideal’ aspirations and their ‘realistic’ aspirations. The ‘ideal’ aspirations were if there were no constraints surrounding the child and the ‘realistic’ aspirations were the children’s expectations given their perception of individual constraints and the local social influences. Interestingly, household income and class may also be influential factors to the decisions young people make about their aspirations, Archer et al (2010) identified a barrier to higher ambitious aspirations among disadvantaged young people as the need for that young person to leave school early and contribute to their household income. Reay (2001) cited in Kintrea 2015 highlighted this may be termed as a working-class loyalty that may conflict with the young person’s attraction to social mobility and the pressure to achieve and move up the class boundary and achieve social mobility (Kintrea et al., 2015 citing Archer, Hollingworth and Mendick, 2010).

Findings and Conclusions

Children’s levels of aspiration did appear to be impacted by socio economic status (SES). The findings evidenced that school 1 (upper SES) had 57% of children with aspirations towards the highest professional categories compared to school 2 (lower SES) with just 22% however, those in school 2 recorded a reduced number of fears about the pressure of exams and having to meet parental expectations with school 1 participants more motivated and confident about passing their GCSEs and progressing to university. Baker’s (2014) theory of the moral meaning people place on aspiration and that motivation to do what they ‘ought’ to do to be a good citizen also offers some explanation for why the children feel strongly about doing well in education and their future.

A notable difference between the schools was the levels of parental aspirations for the children. School 1 evidenced a parental focus on education, exams, and employability whilst school 2 returned parental responses that focused on emotional wellbeing and happiness. As a result of this obvious disparity, further research is recommended focusing on embedding factors such as the emotional wellbeing of children into the longstanding educational and employability focus currently evident in government ideology and policy. A blend of the two approaches maybe co-dependant factors in supporting the children to develop more holistically. A future study would prove useful here, perhaps by widening the sample across several schools in areas of differing SES and examining further factors such as parental occupation and their experiences in education that may impact on parental aspirations for their children. This elevation in scaling may offer a wider, richer data set, one that provides more reliable findings.

The study also identified distinct correlations between parental expectations and the aspirations of the child. This suggests that expectations play a key role in the emergence and development of the child’s future aspirations and, again, this degree of influence requires further study to establish just how impactful or influential expectations can be. Interestingly, this study also found that 81% of the children cited ‘family’ as the sole influence on their future success however, in contrast, the parents cited ‘school’ or the ‘child’ themselves as the main influence on their future success. This indicates a need for parents to appreciate a deeper understanding of the ways a ‘family’ can impact a child’s confidence and their aspirations. My findings align to Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’ theory of cultural roots where family is claimed to be a primary influence on their child’s future. Bourdieu attributes habitus theory to the reason that young people strive to be successful and do what they ‘ought’ to do to gain success and secure upward mobility in society (Bourdieu, 2010, quoted in Hart, 2016, p.330).

A range of factors impacting aspirations must be considered alongside socio-economic status; notably, the children in both schools felt safe in their neighbourhood, were confident in their educational progress, and were all motivated to learn. All the children acknowledged it takes hard work and effort to achieve their chosen aspirations. The wider contextual factors examined in this study were neighbourhood, experience, family lifestyle and the availability of resources such as IT, transport and adequate living expenses were examined in this study but not identified by as an issue and were therefore not considered a notable influence on aspiration in this study.

This study aimed to provide practitioners and educators with insights into the complexities and influences that shape children’s aspirations to enable them to effectively engage and support our next generation of young people to become healthy, thriving, and happy. An increased focus on the more holistic emotional and social wellbeing of our children could help each child reach their individual potential to live a happy and fulfilling life. This research aligns to the views of Zipin et al., (2015) in that aspiration is a complex and social-cultural phenomena that needs understanding on a wider social, cultural, economic, and political context. Hart (2016) insightfully evidences that aspirations are vital to human development but also highlights if we continue to raise aspirations then we need to develop effective strategies to support the pursuit of those raised aspirations. Brown (2010) warns that the continued policy strategy of raising aspirations of children may be creating generations of disappointed young people unable to fulfil their earlier aspirations of university or that ‘dream graduate job’ (Brown, 2010). The researcher hopes that

further research will enhance our understanding of a more multi-dimensional view of aspiration to identify strategies and more effective policy intervention that reduces the inequality in wellbeing, health, education and in wider society for our future children.

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Zipin. L., Sellar, S., Brennan, M and Gale, T. (2015) ‘Educating for Futures in Marginalized Regions: A sociological framework for rethinking and researching aspirations’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 47(3), pp. 227-246.

Theatre to Games and Back: a Speculative Study

Seamus Fox Theatre is currently undergoing a metamorphosis in order to survive the social and political landscape. In a recent article for The Guardian, Larne Bakare discusses the efficacy of theatre and its future, focusing on immersive theatre and drive in theatre. He discusses Sonya Friedman’s statement that, “Theatre is incompatible with social distancing” (cited in Bakare, 2012). Whilst this is true with regards to audience capacity of the theatres, McKenzie Wylie argues “that immersive theatre’s flexibility means it can weather the pandemic better than most traditional theatre, which is constrained by its physical location” (cited in Bakare, 2012). The Theatre as a building is in crisis; financial support is needed to maintain theatres and keep them open; however, immersive theatre is not bound by the constraints of traditional theatre. Now in a Post-Covid world, the notion of merging live theatre with remote interactive audiences, is one that should be explored as it could be beneficial in the ‘next step’ for the industry.

Immersive Theatre can survive so long as there is an audience to engage with it; it is key that after a show, it leads to discourse among the participants. Similar to Roland Barthes ideas in ‘Death of the Author’ & ‘Birth of the Reader’ and audience affect. Umberto Eco states:

A sequence of communicative effects in such a way that each individual addressee can refashion the original composition devised by the author. The Addressee is bound to enter into the interplay of stimulus and response which depends in his unique capacity for sensitive reception of the piece. (Eco, 2006, 22)

Much in the same way that Neil Druckmann approached The Last of Us franchise; there is a clear consideration of the audience and their importance to the narrative. Rosemary Kilch (2016) discusses the use of ‘Epistemic Immersion’ and a ‘typology of narrative immersion’ (Cited in Frieze, 2017, pg.224). TLOU of franchise is presented using emotional and epistemic immersion to elicit full attention from the player.

Utilising the information above begins to formulate a specific set of research questions that this project will answer, though the answers cannot be anticipated in the outset

I. What are the differences and similarities between immersive theatre and digital gaming?

II. How do audience members align with specific narrative perspectives?

III. In becoming an emancipated spectator does the audience lose accountability to others?

IV. Can you sustain audience agency using the uncanny rooted in epistemic immersion?

V. In performance, can sensory deprivation work towards a total immersion of attention in the same way a controller demands it from the player?

This is a speculative research project that shifts from theoretical to practical with the intention of yielding results that not only inform the future of immersive theatre but work towards a hybrid form of immersive theatre that is inspired by digital storytelling. This would in turn become a pedagogical approach in actor training for these specific styles of performance aimed as a benchmark for the HE Sector.

In 2016 an exhaustive report developed by The Arts Council England discovered that immersive theatre or site-specific performance is;

This kind of work requires new kinds of skills and knowledge, which often reside outside the theatre sector (e.g. within performance art or video games). Its growth, therefore, may well lie in partnerships being developed between companies with specialist expertise in this field and partner ‘hosts’, such as festivals or theatre buildings.

(Arts Council England, 2020)

There are commonalities between the two disciplines: gaming and Immersive Theatre. It is now time to explore this relationship in detail to aid in securing the future of immersive theatre.

As of 2014 Vault Festival in London has offered an opportunity for immersive performances to be held across the city, I am to start a dialogue with this festival to review the practice during the age of COVID and utilise the company as a data collection point. There is flexibility to change as the discourse on the topic evolves over the course of this research.

Throughout the project, I aim to develop and produce two performances. These will be informed by research including but not limited to, Interviews, Surveys, and practical workshops; with the aim to inform the next set of research objectives after critically analysing the process and performance itself. The first performance will aim to adapt an existing Video Game The Last of Us, underpinned by the working methodologies of immersive theatre practice and The Uncanny. This allows the project to take a successful example of game design and apply the principles of immersive theatre, by adding an immediacy that is lacking in the original due to the distance created by the controller and screen.

The final performance will then be a new original piece of writing produced for Theatre that is underpinned and influenced by both Immersive theatre practice and game design, utilising the methodology and research findings from the first project to determine its efficacy in action.

We crafted a character driven story, focusing on flawed individuals and the difficult choices that they make. As you experience it with them, we hope you’ll laugh, cry and even feel their struggle through heavy moments that are designed to be emotionally challenging. Most of all, we hope this game inspires in you the kind of philosophical debates we had while making it. (Druckmann, 2020)

Druckmann’s explanation is an inspiration and mantra for this project. There has always been a relationship between the audience and the stimulus forever growing into new ways for the audience to experience it, to become immersed in that world. Using Horror movies as an example, we like to put ourselves through the feeling of fear without actually being in danger. Now with advancements in technology, especially in games such as The Last of Us, the audience is able to lose themselves in the story and become part of it. Making the audience part of the game, allowing them to make decisions and feeling consequences for their actions, Adam Alston interrogates Affect in his book Beyond Immersive Theatre. He talks about the RAP or Rational Actors Paradigm in relation to Spinozist methodology stating: ‘As a state of in-between-ness linking both human and non-human bodies over time… thinking about affect in terms of RAP, as something impacting on human’s capacity to think, fell and act, without nullifying personal idiosyncrasies’ (Alston, 2016, pg.45) Additionally, this could be applied to other forms of storytelling and narrative such as live theatre showing commonality between digital and theatrical.

Methodologies

This project leans heavily on a Practice-Based-Research framework where the aim is to develop a praxis. Utilising a phenomenological approach via empirical evidence from audience engagement, interviews, and immersive theatre

projects. Notably engaging with companies such as Blast Theory, Colab Theatre and Chronic Insanity.

Collecting empirical evidence from audience members is essential to gauge their understanding and personal engagement with the material. This will be both in the form of qualitative (interviews) and quantitative (surveys) to provide in-depth data. I am hoping that this will lead to an analytic overview of audience members and their experiences within each project. The section of the research will be orientated on audience. I aim to engage both the normal immersive theatre demographic, of 25-44 as suggested by The Arts Council England’s, Analysis of Theatre in England (2016). But also, the demographic of Gamers who primarily engage with narrative based digital games specifically within the UK (I am yet to find statistical data on this demographic, I am aiming to incorporate this into part of the initial data collection). As this research project relies heavily on audience engagement with practical performance, there is a consideration of ethical implications, notably approaching audience consent throughout the performances with a scaffolded approach. In the development of the performances, audience testing will take place and a space for the audience to debrief will be embedded in the performances.

Working with both performers and writers in this process I aim to use ethnographic journaling to provide evidence of the creative process from different perspectives within the team.

Literature Review

Matt Trueman says, “Immersive Theatre…Marks a piece of theatre experienced from within rather than as an outside observer… you are part of it, rather than looking on fundamentally distinct” (Trueman, 2012). It is within this that we start to identify the connection of Immersive Theatre and Digital Gaming. It is more about what we as the audience take away from the experience as opposed to how the experience unfolds.

KD. Ball in conversation with G. Home-Cook illustrates that in Immersive theatre or theatre that has to utilise unique spaces; ‘Often matter of production tend to take precedent over matters of perception’ (Frieze , 2017, pg132) meaning that the experiential elements of performance is sometimes not at the forefront of the production, rather the spectacle. Expanding upon Druckmann’s quote earlier, there is a clear consideration placed on the audience and their reception of the piece/narrative. Using this in conjunction with G.Home Cook’s Phenomenology of Theatrical Attending elicits further lines of enquiry; does the controller of the console TLOU is played on provide the attention needed for immersion? Similarly does sensory deprivation provide the attention needed for immersion in person?

Heussner discusses direct representation in games where the players are able to identify with elements of real life and how they are more likely to become engaged within the game world. Using TLOU as an example we are presented with familiar social dynamics and flawed characters, which offers the players authentic representation. By adding an unfamiliar element that is new to these dynamics it heightens the authenticity, “The Infected” add an uncanny element to the world that forces players to focus on what they can identify from real life, the characters and their storylines.

Edgar raises Plausibility in playwriting. ‘Does the play fit in with our knowledge of the subject or our experience of life?’ (Edgar, 2012, p.8). We have no real life examples of Zombies to draw from, therefore a play based on zombies doesn’t fit with our experience of life. However, through different forms of media, TV, Film & Gaming, we as audience members have developed schemas on the term zombie and have expectations when we are presented with them. Both plausibility and direct representation are not necessarily the property of the writer/ developer, rather the ownership lies with the audience/players. Edgar goes on to talk about genre and how the writer doesn’t get to dictate it, even if they hit specific beats and archetypes throughout the story such as Blake

Synders The Hero’s Journey it is how the audience interpret it, determines the genre.

Felix Barrett of Punchdrunk discusses their use of Mask as a methodology in creating immersive theatre, enabling the audience to become part of the scenography, and not be judged for their actions that evening (Machon, 2013, p. 161). As an audience member playing The Last of Us 1/2 (TLOU) we are given a “Mask” in the form of a controller and due to our preconceived moral & ethical compass we are therefore not judged for our actions in the narrative as we have created a distance between our choices and that of the characters. The Narrative construction of TLOU has us the audience play out the story of Ellie and Joel, their destiny is not controlled by us, it is a kernel without satellites. Chronic Insanity are a Nottingham based theatre company whose recent show All Falls Down (2023) is an interactive digital-live hybrid horror show. They champion accessible theatre for all and achieves this through interdisciplinary engagement. Dread Falls Theatre’s latest installation piece Patient 4620 (2023) is an immersive blend of auditory storytelling and installation. Dante or Die have a commitment to working local communities wherever they work from similarly to Chronic Insanity there is also a commitment to developing audiences within the communities they work. All Kinds of Limbo (2019) was developed by The National Theatre which blends VR and AR technologies allowing the audience to view the piece on a smartphone which adapts and transforms the surroundings beyond the phone into a production set.

Bibliography

Arts Council England (2016) Analysis of Theatre in England. Available at: https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/sites/ default/files/download-file/Analysis%20of%20Theatre%20in%20England%20-%20Final%20Report.pdf

(Accessed: 12 November 2020)

Allegue, L. Et Al. (2009) Practice–as-Research in Performance and Screen. Hampshire. Palgrave Macmillan

Alston, A. (2016) Beyond Immersive Theatre. London. Palgrave Macmillan.

Aston, E. & Harris, G. (2008) Performance Practice and Process: Contemporary [Women] Practitioners. Hampshire. Palgrave Macmillan.

Bakare, L. (2020) ‘Immersive Theatre and drive-in gigs leads the way for return of UK performing arts’, The Guardian, 17 June. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/jun/17/immersive-theatre-drive-in-gigslead-way-return-performing-arts-coronavirus

Bal, M. (1997) Narratology: introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto, University of Toronto Press.

Berger, R. (2019) Dramatic Storytelling & Narrative Design: A Writers Guide to Video Games and Transmedia Boca Raton. CRC Press.

Bryant, R.D, & Gigilo, K. (2015) Slay The Dragon: Writing Great Stories for Video Games. Studio City. Michael Weise Productions.

Crawford, C. (2013) Interactive Storytelling. 2nd ed. Indianapolis. New Riders Publishing.

Eco, U. (2006) The Poetics of The Open Work // 1962. Participation. Ed Claire Bishop. London. Whitechapel Gallery, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 20-40.

Edgar, D. (2012) How Plays Work. London, Nick Hern Books.

Frieze, J (ed.) 2017, Reframing Immersive Theatre: The Politics and Pragmatics of Participatory Performance, Palgrave Macmillan UK, London.

Gottschall, J. (2013) The Story Telling Animal: How Stories Make us Human. New York. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

Harvie, J. & Lavender, A. (2010) Making Contemporary Theatre. Manchester. Manchester University Press.

Heussner, T. (2019) The Advanced Game Narrative Toolbox. Boca Raton. CRC Press.

Machamer, J. (2017) Immersive Theatre: Engaging The Audience. Common Ground. Champaign IL.

Machon, J. (2013) Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance. Hampshire, Palgrave Macmillan

Machon, J. (2019) The Punchdrunk Encyclopaedia. Oxon. Routledge.

Miller, H.C. (2014) Digital Storytelling – A creator’s guide to interactive entertainment 3rd Ed. Oxon, Focal Press.

Druckmann, N.(2020) ‘The Last of Us Part II is Out Now’, Naughty Dog, 18th June. https://www.naughtydog.com/blog/the_last_of_us_part_ii_out_now [Accessed 28/11/2020]

Naughty Dog (2020) ‘About’ Available at: https://www.naughtydog.com/company [Accessed 28/11/2020]

Onega, S. Et Al. (1999) Narratology. Essex, Pearson Education Limited.

Pitches, J.& Popat, S. (2011) Performance Perspectives. Hampsire. Palgrave Macmillan.

Short, T, X. & Adams, T. (2019) Procedural Storytelling in Game Design. Boca Raton. CRC Press.

Ranciere, J. (2011) The Emancipated Spectator. Verso. London.

Skolnick, E. (2014) Video Game Storytelling. New York. Watson-Guptill Publications.

Trueman, M. (2012) ‘Fading Smiles – A response to the One on One Festival at BAC’ Matt Trueman. 3rd April 2011. http://matttrueman.co.uk/2011/04/fading-smiles-a-response-to-the-one-on-one-festival-at-bac.html [Accessed 02/12/2020]

Warren, J. (2017) How to Make Immersive Theatre. London. Nick Hern Books.

Westling, C.E.I. (2020) Immersion and Participation in Punchdrunks Theatrical Worlds. London, Methuen Drama. (Kindle Edition)

Focus on Scholars The People Behind the Papers

This feature of the Scholarship Review showcases the individuals who have contributed to this year’s edition through their projects funded by SRDS, research papers, case studies, features and reflective think pieces.

A big thank you to all contributors.

Scholarship Profile: Carrie Lee Biography

Carrie joined Blackpool and The Fylde College as a student, where she completed a year-long access course in Social Sciences, before graduating in 2022 with a first-class BA Honours degree in Criminology and Criminal Justice. During her degree, Carrie engaged in a number of research projects, on important topics such as environmental harms with the most recent being ‘A Critical Green Criminological Investigation into the Corporatisation and Commodification of Fresh Water’.

Carrie was keen to obtain experience and accepted all additional opportunities including a Nationwide research project in conjunction with Lancashire Violence Reduction Network, presenting at the Lancaster Undergraduate Conference and various training sessions including Trauma Informed Practice and Restorative Justice.

Now in her fifth consecutive year at B&FC, Carrie continued her involvement as an employee, taking on the role of Students’ Union Sabbatical Officer. In this capacity, Carrie is dedicated to amplifying the student voice and with her passion for social justice and equity, Carrie is keen to use her leadership role to be instrumental in driving positive change for students.

Scholarship Profile: Michael Holdsworth Biography

Michael Holdsworth is a lecturer, researcher, performer, and producer based in Lancashire, United Kingdom. For the last fifteen years he has worked as Programme Leader for the BA (Hons) Acting and Musical Theatre programmes at the Blackpool School of Arts. Michael is currently undertaking a PhD at Lincoln University exploring the intersection between the Musical Theatre Chorus and the Crowd Phenomenon, Mob Mentality and Group Behaviour in the development of a new pedagogy.

Michael has recently delivered a workshop the S Word: Stanislavsky’s Last Words in Prague, written for the International Stanislavsky Journal and will be presenting at Warwick University’s upcoming conference: Performing the Fantastical on the topic of Immersive Theatre: The Santa Claus Experience. Further research interests include: Forum Theatre in the Classroom, Active Analysis and Organic Action and the relationship between Psychology and Body in the Realisation of Performance.

Scholarship Profile: Sara Shotton Biography

Sara Shotton has worked in education for 17 years and is a lecturer in Leadership Management and Lifestyle across FE and HE. Her specialisms are exercise, fitness, health and nutrition. Sara holds a wide range of fitness and health qualifications as well as a Level 4 IV award, and she is a World Skills ambassador. However, her First-Class Hons degree and Master’s qualifications (UCLAN), are in the field of education and professional practice. Sara’s current research topics include ‘Improving student engagement in an FE setting’ and ‘Where does learning really happen’? exploring how teachers can facilitate the lightbulb moment in and out of the classroom.

Scholarship Profile: Robert Sims Biography

Rob started with the College in July 2022 as a lecturer in the School of Computing. Rob previously worked at Hewlett Packard for 15 years progressing from service help desk, through to COBOL programming, some project management roles and finally working on the governments Working Age Change programme before seeking and accepting voluntary redundancy in 2013.

Rob then returned to education at B&FC in 2014 where he obtained a first class degree in Interactive Media Development (B.Sc Hons) and was awarded Higher Education student of the year in 2017. Rob then completed his PGCE with B&FC in 2018. Rob subsequently applied for a competitive Ph.D opportunity at Lancaster University and was successful, starting in Oct 2018 with a topic of ‘ Virtual Reality:Integrated Delivery of Education’ under the guidance of Dr. Abhijit Karnik. Rob is due to defend his thesis in May 2023.

Rob has attended and published to various conferences including IEEE ILRN and EduLearn. Rob’s research profile is https://www.researchgate.net/profile/ Robert-Sims-9, ORCID 0000-0002-2387-4451.

Scholarship Profile: Paula Smithson Biography

Paula Smithson is a UK based practising artist and printmaker living in Lancashire. She studied BA Hons Fine Art at the University of Central Lancashire where she specialised in printmaking, since graduating in 1999 she has exhibited nationally and internationally and has worked to commission. She also holds a Masters Degree in Illustration from Manchester Metropolitan University. Alongside her creative practice she has been teaching further, higher and adult education since 1999 in formal educational establishments and in participatory settings, she currently holds the post of Lecturer in Printmaking and Illustration at Blackpool School of Arts.

Her work is inspired by commedia de’lla arte and the carnivalesque and explores ideas around performance and spectatorship with a focus on circus and the psychological impact aerialists have on audience. She regularly attends the circus to draw during performances.

Smithson is a member of ArtLab Contemporary Printmaking Studio.

Scholarship Profile: Carolyn Foy Biography

Carolyn Foy is a lecturer for the BA (Hons) Business Management, Leadership, Management and Lifestyle at Blackpool and The Fylde College, United Kingdom. Teaching mostly finance based subjects such as Managing finance, Financial Decision Making, Strategic Finance and Accounting.

Carolyn holds a BA (Hons) in Business and Financial Management and PostGraduate Certificate in Education awarded by Lancaster University. She is also working towards a MSc in Finance and Strategy with Manchester Metropolitan University. In 2022, Carolyn achieved the status of Higher Education Fellow (HEA).

Carolyn started her career in finance 9 years ago after working primarily in the hospitality sector for many years. Carolyn had spent several years developing her skills and knowledge before moving into teaching (both FE and HE) four years ago at B&FC. In her role she is constantly researching financial decision-making and strategy in modern corporations to help developing and create relevant scaffolding resources for her students.

Carolyn is enthusiastic about strategic finance and the transition to a sustainable economy. However, her main research area is currently focused around investigating the role of financial control in organisations while evaluating the value of this system as a performance assessment approach.

Scholarship Profile: Aaron Tonks Biography

Aaron Tonks is a Lecturer and Specialist Practitioner specialising in Digital Imaging and Photography and teaches across HE and FE programmes for Blackpool School of Arts. He graduated from the Arts Institute at Bournemouth with a BA (Hons) in Photography and has an MA in Visual Design as Creative Practice from (B&FC) Lancaster University, specialising in gallery ideology. Aaron is the curator for the college’s art gallery and has helped to deliver a rich and inspiring programme of exhibitions in support of the school’s ethos – Community, Connectivity and Process. He has also been at the forefront in researching and developing virtual and VR technology for the purposes of exhibiting and interacting with art.

Scholarship Profile: Lauren Watson Biography

Dr. Lauren Watson is a lecturer on BA English: Language, Literature and Writing and has taught in the H.E. sector for 15 years. She studied for a research MA in Victorian Literature from Liverpool University (sponsored by an award from the British Academy) and completed a funded PhD in post-structuralism, contemporary metafiction and the later works of Charles Dickens at Lancaster University. She has lectured at Lancaster University and the University of Cumbria, teaching a range of modules on English literature degrees, and has also taught international students on EAP courses. Her research interests currently include late Victorian fiction and representations of terrorism.

She has published in journals - including Textual Practice, the leading international journal of radical literary studies – and is author of Contingencies and Masterly Fictions: Countertextuality in Dickens, Contemporary Fiction and Theory (2010). She has recently started writing for the English and Media Subject Centre, writing study materials for A-Level students in their publication EMAGAZINE and online resource centre.

Scholarship Profile: Lisa Gayton Biography

Lisa Gayton is a lecturer in the school of Society, Health and Childhood. Lisa lectures in Leadership and Management, Child and Youth Development and Health Development. Prior to working at Blackpool and the Fylde college she gained 18 years’ experience managing and leading in community development and youth in rural and urban areas, specialising in funding and charity management and managing centres across Lancashire. Later in her career she was Head of Service for Community Development leading the funding and the strategic delivery for statutory authorities.

Lisa has a HND in Business and Finance, a BSc (Hons) from Edge Hill University and more recently a Master’s from Cumbria University in Community Development and Youth. Her research is pending publication. Lisa is passionate about her specialism in Leadership and Management and has recently developed several commercial training programmes for leaders and managers in social care across Lancashire. Lisa is also involved with a Lancaster University research body who are leading a European consultation on a new adult social care training framework for the UK.

Scholarship Profile: Seamus Fox

Biography

Seamus Fox is the Senior Tutor of Scholarship and Research at Blackpool School of Arts and the Theatre Making Pathway leader for BA Hons Acting & BA Hons Musical Theatre. His background is in Theatre and after gaining an MA in Making Performance from Edge Hill University he founded Vexed Theatre a touring company who has performed across the UK and Ireland. Previous research interests include The Uncanny in performance and acting pedagogy, supernatural theatre, and adaptation. All the shows that Seamus has written or produced, adopt a practice-based research methodology to develop existing acting pedagogy for contemporary performers. His current research interests lie within the field of Immersive Performance and immersive technologies drawing inspiration from narrative structures used in AAA games. Seamus is now developing a new show to go to Edinburg Fringe Festival and Vault Festival later this year.

Lancaster University Undergraduate Research Conference 2022

In March 2022 Lancaster University held its third Undergraduate (UG) Research Conference. This conference was held virtually online, and included nearly 100 students from all UK and oversea partners including:

• Beijing Jiaotong University, China

• Blackburn College

• Blackpool and The Fylde College

• Lancaster University Bailrigg

• Lancaster University Ghana

• Lancaster University Leipzig

• Sunway University, Malaysia

• University Academy 92 (UA92), Manchester

B&FC students responded positively to the conference with applications submitted from the majority of curriculum areas by the agreed deadline. The abstract reviewers were impressed by the range of topics covered in the undergraduate research projects undertaken at B&FC; representing the diverse nature of the subject disciplines within each curriculum area. Unfortunately, some students withdrew from the conference owing to personal mitigating circumstances.

The impact of participation in relation to student scholarship and professional development was demonstrated through the positive feedback and outcomes achieved by B&FC students. Notably, a level 6 student on the Criminology and Criminal Justice Degree in Leadership, Management and Lifestyle presented on Zemiology and Covid-19: An Examination of UK Preparedness, Response and Avoidable Deaths (UK). The student received excellent feedback on her research and presentation and won the prize for the best presentation in the Social Sciences category at the conference.

A submission was made by the following students:

Blackpool School of Arts

BA (Hons) Fine Art Professional Practice

Freya Bennett - “Exploring the Vanitas”

Holly Woodman - “The Embodiment of Physical Health Conditions in Contemporary Art”

Leadership Management and Lifestyle

BA (Hons) Criminology and Criminal Justice

Carrie Lee - “Plastic Pandemic: A Green Criminological Investigation into the Ecological Impact of COVID-19”

Summer Kaur - “Zemiology and Covid-19: An Examination of UK Preparedness, Response and Avoidable Deaths (UK)”

Society, Health and Childhood

BA (Hons) Criminology and Criminal Justice

Danielle Jones - “Is social media making it more challenging to protect children and young people from Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE)?”

BA (Hons) Early Childhood Studies

Melissa Jayne Ball - “The Importance of Oral Health within Early Years and the Significance of Parental Influence”

Computing and Digital Technologies

BSc (Hons) Computer Science and Digital Technologies

Rooney Adu-Gyamfi - “At what level can deep learning be applied towards eliminating the need for skillful experts towards the diagnosis of parasitized or healthy malaria patients in remote parts of the world”

Engineering and Science

BEng (Hons) Engineering (Aerospace Engineering)

Elizabeth Barr - “A Training Needs Analysis for In-Air Refuelling Training in a Synthetic Environment”

BSc (Hons) Project Management

Ella Stanley - “Project Politics – How to Play the Game in the 21st Century”

Victoria Gatty - “Does a Global Pandemic, such a Covid-19, Impact the Identification Process of New and Emerging Leaders Within an Engineering Business such as BAE Systems”

Blackpool and The Fylde College Annual Teaching and Learning Conference 2022

In early July 2022, the HE Annual Learning and Teaching event comprised of an external keynote speech followed by a series of breakout sessions along the key theme of: ‘Scholarship and Research’, aligned with colleague presentations from the 2021 Scholarship Review. A range of complementary HE self-paced materials were also made available on the day. Over 100 colleagues who deliver and support HE attended the event and breakout sessions.

We welcomed our keynote speaker, Professor Mick Healey, HE Consultant and Researcher and Emeritus Professor at the University of Gloucestershire. Professor Healey delivered an informative session entitled “Engaging Students as Partners in Research and Inquiry in College Based HE”.

In his presentation Professor Healey discussed how much current debate concerns the form that research and scholarship should take in the HE in FE / College-Based HE (CBHE) sector. Most of these discussions have concentrated on the implications for staff; in this session he extended this discussion to how students in CBHE may be engaged as partners in research and inquiry, how curricula may be designed to achieve this and what departmental, institutional, and national strategies are needed to foster these developments. The session explored the variety of ways in which undergraduate research and inquiry-based learning are undertaken using numerous mini case studies from different disciplines, departments and institutions in Australasia, Europe and North America.

There were then two further breakout sessions which were recorded (as was the keynote) to allow colleagues to self-pace their learning and refer back to.

Our first breakout was delivered by external academic, Dr Laura Machin, Senior Lecturer in Medical Ethics from Lancaster Medical School, Lancaster University on “Insider research ethics, also known as practitioner research”. The session explored the complexities of when a person is both a practitioner and a researcher within the same setting or environment. In this session, the challenges, and ethical dilemmas that insider researchers can face were explored. The session was interactive with time given to briefly discuss a case study. Finally, the session reviewed what considerations need to be in place when designing, conducting, and reviewing insider research projects.

The second breakout session was delivered by B&FC’s Head of Digital and Learning Resource Centre (LRC), Dr Jonathan Mann. He presented on “Academic Integrity”. He explained that this term is a broad description of written and unwritten rules, traditions, and conventions, which can differ from institution to institution. The term has both positive and negative connotations, and crosses the border between compliance, professional ethics, professional identity, and academic malpractice. The session was a blend of scholarly inquiry and practical support which sought to provide a more holistic perspective on academic integrity as a concept and in application. The session was of great use to both experienced and new users of these systems.

Some of our staff from both curriculum and service areas who received funding from the Scholarship and Research and Development Scheme during 2021-22, presented the following:

• The pursuit of happiness: an early year’s explorative study into the challenges of recognising and supporting child health and wellbeing

Françoise Pell, Senior Tutor S&R (Society, Health & Childhood)

• The Realm(s) of Belongingness (Online)

Colette Mazzola-Randles, Senior Tutor S&R and Curriculum Manager (CM)

• ‘Is Die Hard a Christmas Movie?’ A brief investigation into the application of genre

Dr Ashley Lister, Programme Leader (Leadership, Management & Lifestyle)

• Development of a MEMS Hotplate-based Photoacoustic CO2 Sensor

Dr Lucky Ishaku, Senior Tutor S&R (Engineering & Science)

• The impact of diet and nutrition on the wellbeing of students at B&FC: A case study into student’s perceptions at Levels one and two regarding the importance of dietary intake on wellbeing

Graham Mason, Programme Leader (Leadership, Management & Lifestyle) and Mark Bellfield, Specialist Practitioner (Leadership, Management & Lifestyle)

The feedback from our external guests, presenters and delegates was very positive and we are now looking ahead to next year’s conference.

Validation Showcase

Congratulations to all the staff involved in curriculum design who have researched, analysed, designed and progressed their curriculum through very successful validation and revalidation this academic year.

Through this process, the integration of market research and pedagogic design principles are distilled and synthesised to create curriculum which meets the needs of students, employers and communities.

This has been another successful year with many of the programmes validated having no or few conditions reflecting our maturity and excellent academic curriculum design practice.

Engineering BEng (5 pathways): Aerospace, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical & Electronic Engineering, Robotics and Automation Engineering and Industrial Engineering BEng (Hons)

Lancaster University

GOOD/INNOVATIVE/COMMENDABLE PRACTICE

• Strong industry and employability focus.

• The teams’ focus on ‘Women in Engineering’.

• The Level 4 module ‘Introduction to Academic Study’.

• Good student support and evidence of personal development.

• The emphasis on linking students with research clusters.

Protective Services Fd & BA (Hons) top-up

Lancaster University

GOOD/INNOVATIVE/COMMENDABLE PRACTICE

• The high level of student and employer consultation contributing to the programme.

• The large range of visiting guest speakers, practitioners and innovative assessments.

• The enthusiasm of the programme team and their commitment to the course and widening participation.

• The strong pastoral support.

• Curriculum threads.

• The team’s engagement with research communities and the number of students that engage with research opportunities.

Teaching and Learning Support Fd

Lancaster University

& BA (Hons) top-up

GOOD/INNOVATIVE/COMMENDABLE PRACTICE

• The team’s passion for the student experience.

• The team’s work with applicants prior to recruitment to ensure it is the correct programme for them.

• The monitoring and oversight of the students, both academic and pastoral.

• The integration of the local context and the contemporaneous nature of the programme.

• The range of assessment practices and support that the team provide the students.

• The involvement of external partners.

Children, Young People and Families Certificate of HE, Fd and BA (Hons) top up

Lancaster University

GOOD/INNOVATIVE/COMMENDABLE PRACTICE

• The merging of Family Support & Wellbeing and Youth Studies programmes to provide a holistic overview.

• Reference to contemporary issues, particularly around the pandemic and the flexibility to introduce other current issues, such as child county line and child sexual exploitation (CSE) into the curriculum.

• Trauma informed approaches which reflect the moods of the local authority and police, and shows the team are responding to the needs of the local service developments within the sector.

• Evidence that the team have listened to employers and alumni to recognise reflective practice and that this is embedded in the curriculum.

Project Manager BSc (Hons)

Lancaster University

GOOD/INNOVATIVE/COMMENDABLE PRACTICE

• 5 days to be spent back in industry is an excellent practice and B&FC should support staff to ensure these are encouraged and spent appropriately.

• Undergraduate engagement with the Conference for Undergraduate Research and student’s participation.

• Documentation is very clear and well-structured and includes some relevant and up to date references.

Electromechanical Engineering BEng (Hons)

Lancaster University

GOOD/INNOVATIVE/COMMENDABLE PRACTICE

• Excellent staff development and training.

• Excellent quality of the paperwork/documentation.

• The innovative multi-disciplinary knowledge of the team on apprenticeships.

• The team’s employer engagement reflected in the programme.

Software Engineering (Game Development / Systems Development)

Fd & BSc (Hons) top-up

Lancaster University

GOOD/INNOVATIVE/COMMENDABLE PRACTICE

• A well-designed programme linking theory into practice.

• The team’s identification and support of students, with an open-door policy.

• A cohesive programme team.

• The shared work across modules.

Fashion and Costume with Sustainable Practice Certificate of HE

Lancaster University

GOOD/INNOVATIVE/COMMENDABLE PRACTICE

• The documentation is clear and well presented.

• Considerations of diversity, including mental health conditions, have been reflected in the programme design.

• The vision to adapt the programme to place emphasis on an area of current debate is timely and relevant.

• The small cohort sizes could really enable quality learning, peer to peer engagement and bespoke tutor support.

• The links with local industry and alumni network to inform the development of this programme and the recognition of the potential for it to facilitate employment and work-based learning opportunities.

• Overall, an ambitious contemporary programme with relevant intentions.

• In ‘starting the conversation’ there are a good range of UN sustainable development goals that broaden the spectrum of how we define sustainability to students. This element offers a much more exciting way in which to approach the programme.

• Given the student demographic, this programme is a great option for helping potential learners build their confidence, resilience and practical skills, the entrepreneurship for potential career opportunities is commendable.

Mental Health and Resilience B&FC Fd and Lancaster University BA (Hons) Top Up

GOOD/INNOVATIVE/COMMENDABLE PRACTICE

• The team’s enthusiasm and passion for the sector.

• The coherence and sense of progression demonstrated through the programme.

• The team’s extensive employer engagement.

• A good programme that has integrity.

Marine Electrical and Electronics Engineering Fd Eng

GOOD/INNOVATIVE/COMMENDABLE PRACTICE

• Clear alignment to industry and currency of whole team, engaged with sector and industry.

• Clear investment in resources that enables students to demonstrate their achievement and providing them with a rich experience.

Marine Engineering SQA Advanced Certificate and Advanced Diploma

GOOD/INNOVATIVE/COMMENDABLE PRACTICE

• The quality of the student experience and the accessibility and expertise of the staff.

• That the team is clearly situated in the wider context.

• The team, and particularly the Blended Learning Centre Coordinator, on the well organised oversight of quality and the student experience.

Nautical Science SQA Advanced Certificate and Advanced Diploma

GOOD/INNOVATIVE/COMMENDABLE PRACTICE

• The close working relationships with employers, ensuring that the needs of industry are met.

• The research undertaken to ensure currency in the delivery of technical education.

HNC Music

GOOD/INNOVATIVE/COMMENDABLE PRACTICE

• The team’s obvious enthusiasm and passion.

• The clear subject expertise and employer engagement.

• The clear links, progression and plans from FE to HE.

• The emphasis, throughout, on key transferrable skills.

Materials Science Technologist Degree Apprenticeship

GOOD/INNOVATIVE/COMMENDABLE PRACTICE

• The clear experience and expertise of the curriculum area.

• Highly effective engagement in the process and clear oversight of all programmes/delivery of apprenticeships.

• The confidence provided in delivery of a very positive apprenticeship experience.

• Clear and extensive employer relationships built up over a number of years.

The Scholarship and Research Development Scheme (SRDS)

Blackpool and The Fylde College has established a fund to support the scholarly activity of members of academic and support staff who wish to enhance their scholarship and develop their role in the College. The Scholarship and Research Development Scheme (SRDS) was developed and piloted as part of the Teaching Quality Enhancement Project during 2007. Since its inception the scheme has supported a wide variety of projects centered in and around the development of subject expertise and the scholarship of teaching and learning.

What is Scholarship?

There have been various debates about what actually constitutes scholarly activity and in particular how scholarship is actually relevant to vocationally based higher education. Blackpool and The Fylde College has developed a hierarchical model of scholarship (see Fig 1) which can be used as a framework upon which to organise scholarly development and to inform teaching and learning quality enhancement.

Scholarship is the driving force that influences and informs the development of curriculum which is not only about what we teach and who we teach, but also how we teach.

Fig 1: The Blackpool and The Fylde Hierarchical Model of Scholarship

We welcome applications on a broad range of topics however, we encourage applications concerned with the following Scholarship themes:

• Communication, information and digital skills

• Graduate attributes and transferrable skills

• Enterprise and entrepreneurship

• Ethical and sustainable practice (including climate change)

• Societal and civic engagement

• Equality, diversity, inclusion (including decolonisation)

• Health, wellbeing and resilience

What Kind of Activities Can Be Classed as Scholarship?

Scholarship can be informed and generated by participation in a variety of different activities including:

• Attendance at scholarly events, exhibitions and conferences.

• Organising or speaking at a scholarly event, exhibition or conference.

• Consultancy relevant to subject expertise.

• The writing of conference papers, poster presentations, refereed articles for academic journals, chapters for academic texts, or contributions to professional or academic publications or exhibitions.

• Professional and industrial updating, workshop attendance or employer engagement.

• Field research, including visits to centres of academic excellence, good practice or with specialist facilities.

• Action research relevant to teaching and learning in HE.

• Authoring appropriately challenging, well referenced and contemporary course materials to support flexible learning.

These activities might in themselves be scholarly, but it is in the reflection, dissemination and incorporation of what has been learned into curriculum which defines scholarship. That is the fundamental difference between staff development and scholarship.

What is the Difference between Professional Development and Scholarship?

The hallmark of true scholarship is in the production of scholarly artefacts or outputs, some examples of which are listed below:

• High quality appropriately referenced teaching and learning materials to support flexible modes of study in HE.

• Published work (paper, journal article, academic poster or book).

• Published conference/exhibition papers or posters.

• Dissemination workshops.

• The development of materials for the purpose of sharing good practice.

• A report detailing quantitative and qualitative evidence to inform College strategy and operation.

• A report detailing quantitative and qualitative evidence to support improved learner experience.

• A detailed action research report to inform Curriculum Area strategy and operation.

How Do I Apply for Funding?

Applications are welcome from full time and part time staff involved in teaching and the support of learning. Applications for funding must be made on the Scholarship and Research Development Application form obtained from the HE Directorate.

What Type of Projects Does the College Provide Funding For?

• Pedagogic research linked to the professional standards and Curriculum Area / College professional and Quality Improvement Plans (QIP).

• Subject updating through industrial placement and industry led development, conference attendance and presentation.

• The development of lecturer skills to support flexible modes of study, work-based and placement learning, online learning and the development of quality teaching and learning materials of appropriate challenge, differentiated and available for asynchronous access.

• Good practice sharing activities.

• Collaborative research with Lancaster University or other external partners.

• Collaborative research and development projects with industry.

• The production of scholarly resources such as text books, e-books and journals.

• Curriculum Area / College centred entrepreneurial activities.

• The development of new curriculum from concept phase through to validation/revalidation.

When is Funding Available?

Applications for funding can be submitted at any time during the academic year, but these must be supported by a clear timetable of activities and with the endorsement of the Head of Curriculum Area.

In order to facilitate forward planning and timetabling it is highly recommended that project proposals and applications for funding are made well in advance of the start of the academic year.

The SRDS panel meets four times per year to consider applications. The panel dates are available via the HE Directorate.

Project Support

The HE Directorate can help you to formulate your project objectives, proposal, application for funding and subsequent project planning, implementation and evaluation. Bespoke one-to-one coaching and mentoring is provided.

Writing for The Scholarship Review

Instructions for Authors

Authors are invited to submit original work for publication in the next edition of the College’s Scholarship Review Journal.

Contributions are invited from colleagues who are currently engaged in action research and scholarship.

We would be delighted to receive:

• Full academic papers

• Short abstracts

• Case studies

• Reflective accounts

• Action research projects

We would also be pleased to hear about any experiences you have had:

• Writing journal articles, textbooks or chapters in textbooks

• Presenting a paper or poster at a conference

• Engaging in professional practice

• Curating or exhibiting artwork

• Script writing and directing

• Broadcasting via local or national TV and radio stations

• Consultancy work with local and national employers

• Consultancy work with voluntary sector organisations

We would like to support you in producing a scholarship showcase in the journal and on the college website.

So, whatever you are doing, if you are doing it well, this is an excellent opportunity for you to showcase your work, share good practice and motivate your colleagues and students.

How do I go about contributing?

Contact Helen Fogg, HE

Director

at helen.fogg@blackpool.ac.uk

Submit your abstract, idea or full paper to Helen Fogg,

Producing an Academic Paper for the Scholarship Review

Your paper should be between 1,000 and 3,000 words.

You need to include a short abstract summarising your paper in no more than 300 words.

• Use conservative British, not US spelling, for example programme not program; centre not center; analyse not analyze, etc.

• Use single ‘quotes’ for quotations rather than double “quotes”, unless the ‘quote is “within” another quote’.

• Only use the upper case for the first word in paper titles and all subheadings.

• All acronyms should be spelled out the first time they are introduced in text or references. Thereafter the acronym can be used if appropriate for example: College Based Higher Education (CBHE).

• The preferred local (national) usage for ethnic and other minorities should be used in all papers.

• Material to be emphasised should be italicised, please use such emphasis sparingly.

• When referring to numbers in a study the abbreviation (n) should be used similarly % for percent should be used.

• When referring to decimals the form 0.05 (not .05) should be used.

Referencing

Please use the Harvard system of referencing.

The name of the author and the date of publication provide a key to the full bibliographical details, which are set out in the list of references.

For example: Schön (1983) cited in the main text, appears in the references as follows:

Schön, D. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner. How professionals think in action, London: Temple Smith.

References should be indicated in the typescript by giving the author’s name, with the year of publication in parentheses. The references should be listed in full at the end of the paper.

Tables and figures should be referred to in text as follows: figure 1, table 12. Each table and/or figure must have a title that explains its purpose without reference to the text.

Criteria for acceptance of articles

The abstract must provide a clear and complete summary of the aims and scope of the paper.

The subject of the study should be exciting and innovating.

The issues/questions/problems that led to the study must be clear.

The relevant research literature the study relates to and builds on must be discussed and analysed.

The methodological and/or theoretical approaches that informed the study should be made clear.

The paper should discuss how the findings have been, or can be, used in improving learning and teaching.

Producing an Abstract

Abstracts are written to provide a brief summary of your research. The research you present may be taken from your dissertation thesis, some action research that you have completed as part of your job role at the College (lecturing, management or administration) or your own contemporary review or analysis of developments in a specific subject area or discipline. A good abstract should provide sufficient information so as to allow the reader to quickly ascertain the paper’s purpose and usefulness.

Abstracts are normally submitted to the editorial boards of academic journals or conference organisers; they are used as the basis for selecting for publishing or presentation. Abstract length varies by discipline and publisher requirements, but typically ranges from 100 to 500 words (one page).

A well written abstract should convey the overall theme or ‘flavour’ of the research and should include details regarding the background, relevance, introduction, objectives, methods, results and conclusions of the study.

Producing Case Studies and Reflective Accounts

Case studies can be a way of sharing the results of small scale action research or reflective activity with peers. They are particularly useful for showcasing innovative practice and can be used as a means of capturing experiences or critical learning incidents such as for example, your management of an unusual occurrence or circumstance, a story of individual student success or the impact of your scholarly activities on the student learning experience.

Each case study should be between 500 and 1000 words and should be organised as follows:

• The Title

• Author’s name, department and email contact

The Case Study outlining:

• The context

• The initial prompt/problem

• Strategies and interventions employed and rationale behind them

• The impact of the intervention

• An analysis of costs/benefits

• An evaluation

• Recommendations

• References

Producing Action Research Reports

Action research reports should be between 1,000 and 3,000 words and should be organised as follows:

• The Title

• Author’s name, department and email contact

• The context

• The initial prompt/problem

• Literature review

• Strategies and interventions employed and rationale behind them

• The impact of the intervention

• An analysis of costs/benefits

• An evaluation

• Recommendations

• References