St Edmunds Mentoring School: Home Collaborations

Week Six: 01/04/20

The week leading up to the final submission myself and the group had a Microsoft teams call regarding the feedback we received from Jemma. We all discussed how we would move forward and take all our findings into our combined portfolio as a conclusive analysed form. We used the relevant statistical data we received from both the students and the teacher to conclude the work.

Everyone was assigned to specific tasks this week, Lechelle focused on the theoretical texts, improving the contextual link and making comparisons between the schools marking criteria and the universities expected standards. James finalised the portfolio presentation of the making sure we didn’t miss any relevant work out that could help support and back up our experience and findings, whereas I looked more at the statistical data and the background information to sum up the work of the school. The focus was on analysing each finding such as the reason behind the gender balance in studying a design subject and how it is devalued due to relevant sources as the text ‘Beyond Discipline’ suggests. I curated files of the schools marking criteria and how the school’s marking differs in higher education.

The week prior to this I created a set of questions on google documents that the students could fill out whilst our last session was cancelled. We received a range of data that both we expected and ones that surprised us. Overall, the school is underachieving in some areas as figure 2 suggests. Therefore, is the teacher implements our skills and design strategies the students can continue applying those skills into their work which would boost the overall grades and therefore increase competitiveness of the school. However, due to the school being a catholic academy, there is a higher independence for teaching meaning more lenience in what is taught as the government have no influence. Therefore, it is ran mrs like a business due to more funding from local authorities meaning more competition.

There is a gender balance in studying design at St Edmunds due to there being an even amount of both genders although boys are less stimulated to achieve due to the negative label attached to what is seen as a design subject, as a result of it’s feminine qualities. According to new data, the ‘gender gap closes among Architecture students.’ On the other hand, many would argue that the workplace in Architecture is more dominated by males.

After receiving an email prior to our last session from the school that stated that external visitors were permitted to enter the school due to the Corona virus myself and the group had to overcome this issue and find an alternative to deliver resources. Therefore, to make the most of this inconvenience myself and Emre filmed a final video of our reflections over the weeks whereas Lechelle, James and Daniel sent across their part of the video separately before merging the clips In one video.

During this pandemic, I emailed Mrs Devi with a useful link of the ‘Architectural Graphics’ book written by Francis D.K Ching. The students can use this as reference to gain inspiration for the visuals and drawings that they could produce for their final project, which would give them an advantage to previous students . Therefore this is how we overcame the obstacle of our final session being cancelled as this was an unexpected occurrence as we had planned to have a session on model making moving away from the digital software and move into hand crafted outcomes. The main reason why myself and Emre wanted to cover this session is due to uncertain times like this when we can’t rely on machinery to produce a clean model due to homes not having this type of resource. Moreover, model making by hand is available to everyone and it creates a individualistic outcome that isn’t standardised.

Written by Wiktoria Glowczewska- BA Interior Architecture