Category Archives: Education

andy
January 10, 2013

my REAL wall and Stripygoose present 5 postcards 2013 (Introduction lecture wall)

Stripygoose and Andytgeezer present 5 Postcards 2013

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Over the years, I’ve been getting involved with mailart shows and projects with my REAL wall and it’s been such a hoot. Some shows and projects are now going into their second year, which I think is very flattering and this is one of those projects. 5 postcards was a project dreamt up by me and a lecturer at my university, Sue. I have always liked mixing business and pleasure and believe deeply in the educational benefit of tangible objects being exchanged between people, which is why I set up Schoolswaps.

We wanted to use postcards to get students thinking about school experiences. The idea was to get students to think of 5 incidents that happened to them in school, either as students or as teachers, that stuck with them. They then have to create 5 postcards illustrating these experiences.

Last year, the postcards blew us away. We were taken on quite a journey and found that the exercise really opened students up and got them expressing themselves. In the end we even collated all the postcards into a book, which we distributed to the students and done all sorts of extra work as it was such a thrill.

As a result of all this excitement, Sue signed up for Mailart 365 and has been steadily creating all year.

Oh yeah and on the subject of MA365…

I MADE IT! I just completed today!

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Aaaaaanyway…Todays REAL walls come from the introductory lesson to this years project. It’s a new class with new students but we wanted to build on last years success and do it again. So in todays lesson, Sue and I brought out some mailart from our collections. On the wall you can see some of the mailart that I’ve received since the last time I posted mingled among some of Sue’s own collection. I’ve never actually rifled through Sue’s collection and I have sent her one or two pieces. It was quite strange to see my works again that I had sent off but always a pleasure to see artists that I know in her collection, like Cornpone and Mim and she recognised works from Suus in Mokum and Rebecca in my collection.

Artists that Sue had never seen from my collection include Hope. There’s lots of post from Hope, who’s artwork I always adore. She’s an artist I will tell you time and again that you should subscribe to, because her letterpress is AWESOME!

Students picked out favourites from Angie and Snooky and Boo Cartledge as well as saying they loved Sue’s style.

So now the students have to go away and think about their experiences and start their creative process. I can’t wait to see what they create!

andy
July 6, 2012

my REAL wall presents – The Portrait Room

Following the success of the 5 postcards show, I was asked by the head of the department I look after, Education to put up the postcards in one of our most prestigious rooms in the university, the Portrait Room for an Education department meeting.

Me and Sue were superbly excited by the chance to get that sort of exposure, as the whole department we work for would get a chance to see our project, a project we strongly believe in. So we took the postcards down from where they were in room 122 in the library, and moved them all across to the Portrait Room in the morning.

With 230 cards, we managed to fill the entire room, and it looked AMAZING.

So, with a real sense of accomplishment after spending the whole morning posting the postcards on the wall, we slipped off to lunch.

When we arrived back, we found that some jobsworth properties/estates person had removed all the cards. Apparently the building is a listed building and no blu-tac was allowed on the wood panelling. Hmmmm Thanks. We were going to take them down straight after the meeting. Now, with 20 minutes before the meeting started, we had the task of getting all 230 cards back on the windows, and the cards were now a mess.

We were fuming.

We did manage to do it with a few extra hands, but ultimately the effect was lost and we had to live with the postcards no longer having the impact we expected. Sue has a much more pragmatic attitude than I do (I just wanted to punch someone in the face) and assured me that the unexpected does happen and we need to accept these things sometimes. I still want to punch someone in the face.

The presentation went pretty well and some of the lecturers were really inspired by what we had to say about postcards in education, so we were grateful for the exposure even though some things did go wrong, but I guess that’s how it goes sometimes

andy
June 27, 2012

my REAL wall presents… 5 Postcards exhibition, mailart call and website!

Regular readers of the blog will know that I like to mix business and pleasure and this week I was at it again. As you may know I work at the University of Roehampton as the e-learning advisor to the department of Education. Earlier this year, one of the lecturers in my department, Sue came to me and asked for a hand designing a reflective activity for her course.

The course was delivered to 2 sets of students – one set were leaving teaching, and the other set were entering teaching. The aim of the activity was to get students to think about their experience of school, and to reflect on how their school experience had influenced their lives.

Initially, being higher education, the assignment was a single 1000 word essay on an incident that happened to them that stood out from their school years, but Sue and I both realised that there was something not quite right about this activity.

So we sat down, thought through it and totally redesigned the activity. Instead of a wordy essay on a single incident, we opted to make postcard sized images representing 5 incidents from their school years, either as teachers or as pupils. The postcards were not assessed themselves, as that would have been unfair on the non-artists, but the students had to follow up the postcards with a 200 word writeup on each one.

Given the sensitive nature of the memories, we had to ensure that the students would feel safe to share their experiences and the use of images instead of words was one way that we achieved this. Using images the students were able to use icons and abstraction to build up their narrative, effectively telling their stories often without the need for words. Images were an excellent vehicle for expression of the emotive nature of these events.

In order to maintain this safety, we had another idea up our sleeves. When the students came in to the lesson, we had a postbox by the door and students dropped the cards into a postbox and went for coffee while Sue and I put the cards on the wall.

When they returned, they were told that if they wanted to share the story of their experience with the class they could come up, point to their card and tell the story. This way the students were able to abstain if they wished.

We heard some great stories, some really inspiring ones, some horrible stories and some totally unexpected ones too, like the one about the teacher who called his student Bob for a year.

Students fed back that this unusual activity was one of the most memorable and thought provoking activities that they had ever done.

The exhibition collected together all 230 postcards from all 46 students in both clases. I hand stamped all the labels and scanned each one personally and made them into a book too for the students to see.

The opening event in the library building was wonderful fun and was attended by teachers, teacher trainers and parents with their children as well as other members of the public and Sue provided the postcard-themed snacks and cakes.

Me and Sue are available for consultation on the use of postcards in teaching and learning, so if you are interested in using post in your classroom do get in touch and also check out my REAL wall’s educational offshoot Schoolswaps

This project was the most fun and thought-provoking educational project I’ve run this year, and we wanted to continue to investigate the 5 postcards experiences with YOU – the rest of the world. We couldn’t contain our excitement about it so we went out and bought www.5postcards.com and launch our first joint mailart call to the rest of the world.

The challenge, if you choose to accept it, is to illustrate 5 incidents that you can remember from school, using any media that you wish that will fit in the post 5 postcards. Once you’ve done this, just send them to us, either straight to the blog or in the post by going to this address http://5postcards.com/submit-your-5-postcards-here/ and we’ll share your 5 postcards with the world.

andy
March 3, 2012

my REAL wall presents…Using Postcards on the Art Education PGCE at TMRoehampton

I had a hand in putting together the first Teachmeet at Roehampton, the university where I work and decided that doing the tech bits and the organising wasn’t enough work for me, so decided to present 2 presentations too. One of the presentations was on the use of postcards on the secondary art PGCE (teacher training course) last year.

The original post, with video and powerpoint presentation slides is up on the teachmeet site at http://tmroehampton.posterous.com/andy-hoang-presents-7-minutes-on-using-postca (yes I put this up too – can’t get enough of all that lovely work)

I mainly yabber on about how postcards are a modern day alternative to all that electronic noise our children are used to these days. As much as I love the internet, I do still strongly believe that REAL tangible communications are key to a happy life as humans

andy
March 3, 2012

2012 MA Art Education presentation REAL wall

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For the second year running I was asked to run a talk to the MA Art Education students at my university on mailart in education. For me this is a hugely exciting lecture that I do as a favour to the art education lecturers, who I get on very well with.

This years cohort were a lovely bunch of girls who were really interested to hear about how mailart changed me from physics teacher to artist, and from artist to postcard swap coordinator. In short mailart has changed my life and I’m not afraid to admit it!

After talking at length about my REAL wall, mailart 365 and schoolswaps, the students were let loose to create their own mailart and they took to it like fish to water. In about an hour we had at least 2 pieces each ready to be let loose into the world.

All in a days work at my REAL wall 🙂

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andy
January 27, 2012

My REAL wall – student school experiences part 1

A couple of weeks ago I presented a lecture to some students at the university where I work on the use of postcards as an expressive tool for an assignment they were to be set.

The idea was that the students were going to create 5 postcards on which they were to tell of 5 incidents that stand out in their memory from their school days.

After introducing my REAL wall and talking about postcards in schools and how they had been used to tell stories from my experience, the students were asked to create their first ones and bring them in this week. This is by the first class and there are some cracking stories here!

The class was such a pleasure to attend. When the students came in, they dropped their cards into a “postbox” by the door. This mean that the students could remain anonymous if they wished. The lesson commenced and halfway through the lesson the students took a break, during which time the postcards were all put up on the board as you see them here.

On the return from their break, I took the students and we took a look at the postcards submitted. Students were asked to look at the postcards and discuss what they thought each one meant and if they related to any of them. They were told that they didn’t need to say which was theirs if they didn’t want to, but pretty soon we had explanations coming in from every student about what their postcards represented. It was GREAT! There were so many experiences, and so many nods from people who had been there.

In the flickr version of this photo (which you get to by simply clicking on the photo), I’ve done my best to recall which stories went with which, so if you hover over the images you’ll be able to read the stories. If you don’t read the stories, do just enjoy the images and ask yourself what they may mean.

At the moment the students are collecting these images up on a class blog, which is private, and at the end we hope to put on a little show, which should be a real gem. It would be really nice for teachers to be able to see the sorts of memories that the children go away from school with. I will also ask the students to upload any images they want to share with readers of my REAL wall so that they can share their experiences with you directly. You all have a treat in store believe me!

A little note for the Thursday group – I’m so sorry I didn’t manage to get a photo of the wall at the end of the lesson as I was chatting and by the time I remembered the postcards had all gone! 🙁

andy
January 16, 2012

Using postcards in the classroom – my REAL wall/Schoolswaps presentation at Teachmeet London

In November 2011, I attended Teachmeet London and gave a brief presentation on the use of postcards in teaching. I referred to my REAL wall, so here’s a link to the presentation a little belatedly

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqKQ1Sbhhco?version=3]

This year I’m looking to get more young people sending postcards, connecting up my hobby of sending and receiving post and my job in education, so you’ll see more stuff happening over on www.schoolswaps.net as well as here on my REAL wall

andy
June 27, 2011

Mailart in AD Magazine, June 2011

AD Magazine is the official magazine of The National Society for Education in Art and Design (NSEAD).

This month, issue 2 is out and my REAL wall makes an appearance, complete with a pic by me of Elena browsing some postcards!

The write up is by a student on the course and is about the mailart project I helped run in my university for the Art and Design secondary PGCE.

You can read more about the project here

(Apologies for the scan quality, I’ll try and get hold of a better one, this was sent to me by email and is horrible)

andy
March 3, 2011

MA Arts Mailart workshop March 1, 2011

I was asked to do a mailart workshop with the Masters Art Education students, at the university that I work at, most of whom were teachers.

Before the session, the students put a selection of my mailart up on the wall, then I done a little talk about how the mailart got to me and what mailart is. I explained how using mailart in the classroom allowed students to create artwork without fear of criticism from those around them.

MA Arts Mailart workshop March 1 2011 (4)

The students were asked to take a postcard down from the wall that appealed to them, then to create their own piece of mailart which they were to send back. This allowed students to create their first piece of mailart, and illustrated that mailart was art without a context of the artist.

After they created their artworks, the students presented their art to the rest of the class, explaining why they had chosen the pieces they did and explained their responses.

MA Arts Mailart workshop March 1 2011 (7)

As an extension to this lesson, the students were asked to make a piece of mailart about themselves. This is to be sent to their tutor, without their name on it. The idea is to allow them total freedom of expression. The tutor will then put up their received artwork in the next lesson and the students will be able to view the shows without revealing their identity.

Personally, I didn’t like presenting artwork at school in front of my peers. The idea of remaining anonymous but being able to listen to peoples comments on my artwork without them knowing that I made it would have made me much more open to listening. The commentary that I expect to come out would be about the art and not about me as a person.

MA Arts Mailart workshop March 1 2011 (3)

I look forward to seeing what the students produce and will post the results up here when I get the chance (and if I get the consent)