Q&A with Dr Thomas Kador

Dr Thomas Kador (Teaching Fellow, UCL Public and Cultural Engagement) explains the benefits of UCL's cultural resources and shares his thoughts on teaching, learning and higher education. 

What are you working on at the moment?

My role centres on initiating new teaching opportunities utilising UCL’s cultural resources including the Museums and Collections and the Bloomsbury Theatre Studio. My focus is in particular on developing object-based learning, creative and performance-based teaching and learning opportunities for students and staff across the UCL curricula.

There are clear and tangible benefits in designing learning activities using physical objects and we have over 400,000 of them within our collections. So there is something for every discipline and field of study within the University. But equally, our museums and the Bloomsbury Studio are brilliant and very inspiring spaces that can be used for innovative teaching, not as substitute classrooms, but to really push the boundaries of contemporary teaching practice.

Finally, I am also the (only) Connected Curriculum teaching fellow for the Joint Faculty of Arts and Humanities and Social and Historical Sciences. This role entails working closely with the Centre for the Advancement of Learning and Teaching (CALT), and especially the other Connected Curriculum Fellows, but also E-Learning Environments to help promote research-based education at UCL through the Connected Curriculum initiative.

What advice would you give to someone looking to develop the way they teach?

Start by thinking what you actually would like the students to learn, what are the outcomes they should and realistically can achieve? And then think about how to design teaching activities that actually help students achieve these outcomes and ensure that your assessments directly relate to these outcomes too. If possible could you even actively involve the students in the assessment process?

In terms of the teaching activities themselves, try and appeal to as many of the students' senses and the different learning styles that may exist within your class, especially try and work with the non-visual and non-verbal senses as the verbal and visual tend to get all the air time. Could you make your teaching activities more active and get the students to work on problems; ideally collaboratively? Ask yourself how you like to learn, and the answer is probably not to sit through a 50 minute PowerPoint presentation.

How do you expect higher education to change in the next five years?

Being archaeologically trained I tend to look at the past to help me think about what the future might look like and there have clearly been substantial changes in higher education in the UK and beyond in the recent past. So projecting forward it is likely that British universities will remain on this trajectory of change. There is the wider European Context of the Bolgna process, harmonising higher education across the EU and bringing with it modularisation of all study programmes. Equally, like previous interviewees have mentioned on these pages, in the age of increasing university fees there is a perception of the students as consumers, so following this logic it would make us as teachers the producers. But I agree with Abbie King and Jenny Marie that in fact there is a move against this trend towards a more collaborative approach with teachers and students working collaboratively on ‘producing’ new knowledge and meaning making. There are also movements like slow science and the slow university which seem to resonate with many academics but also with a lot of students. And obviously, working with objects, within museums and performance spaces are brilliant ways to engage slowly, intensely and reflectively with a subject matter. So being optimistic about the future, I believe that in five years’ time most teaching programmes in UCL will have an inbuilt object-based learning and/or creative-based teaching component.

What piece of technology do you find invaluable in your teaching?

The human body and in particular the senses.

Our capabilities to observe, process information and interpret/draw conclusions, never mind our potential for creative expression, are far beyond what any piece of technology can ever achieve. By extension our capacity to collaborate, as social learners and problem solvers is also unique.

Therefore it is essential that in our teaching we work with and appeal to our senses, as both teachers and learners, and build plenty of problem solving opportunities (ideally real-life ones) into our learning programmes.

And these are really the key strengths of object-based learning and performance-based practice. They allow learners to engage and sharpen the full range of their sensual pallette and deal with the questions and problems the world presents us ‘naturally’ with. OBL especially foregrounds the sense of touch, which is often neglected in our very visual world, while performance-based practice is about physical movement and engagement with space as well as both verbal and nonverbal expression.

What achievement are you most proud of?

I’m not a great fan of pride or self-congratulation but I’m very grateful that UCL and the people that make up this institution clearly value their cultural resources like having ‘in house’ museums and collections, which go right back to the foundation of the university, and a theatre even though we have no performing arts department. The great support for these cultural assets is highlighted by the fact that we have an excellent team of curatorial, museum and theatre staff that look after the collections and manage the museums and the Bloomsbury Theatre.

But if I have to use the phrase, I am proud to work in an institution that values its collections and is serious not just about taking good care of them but also making best use of them in realising the teaching, learning and research opportunities they provide us with right across all our curricula and the entire disciplinary spectrum.

The UCL ChangeMakers team ask: UCL ChangeMakers encourages staff and students to work together as partners. If you have experience of this, what was the best and most challenging things about it?

I recently jointly curated an exhibition with a class of 60 undergraduate students, which we put on public display in a busy city centre venue. The students worked in small groups doing the research and working on their individual displays but then we had to work together as a large team to turn these into a coherent exhibition that made sense overall. This was a very democratic, at times challenging, but ultimately hugely rewarding process.

Similarly, at UCL PACE we always have opportunities for student internships and placements work where they work in collaboration with our Museums & Collections staff in relation to one particular aspect of the collections. Usually this involves a real-life problem or question that the staff are grappling with already. So the students get to make an actual and very valuable contribution towards our understanding of the material or to help resolve a practical problem.

So based on these and similar experiences, the best aspect of staff and students working collaboratively is the leaving behind of the traditional authority and power divisions, as this allows everyone to be totally focused on the task at hand. This, in turn, inevitably means that learning takes place without anybody really noticing and it tends to be fun too. So it’s really one of the best ways to learn.

The most challenging aspect about this tends to be the obstacles put in the way by our education system; in particular the reliance on the teacher as authority figure who holds all the knowledge and the drilling of students to rote learning of ‘accepted facts’. They then have to regurgitate this knowledge at the appropriate moment (i.e. the examination) rather than actively engage with problems themselves. So collaboration, especially with an ‘authority figure’ like a teacher, is very often anathema to students having just emerged from this system, meaning that we have to do some unlearning (or un-teaching) before they can actually start to become equal participants in more active and collaborative approaches to learning.

What question would you like to pose to the next interviewee?

My question to the next interviewee and to everyone who reads this article is very simple. How could you creatively employ objects and materials and utilise the resources for object-based learning, creative and performance based practice available at UCL in your day to day teaching?

There are several online resources for object-based learning in particular on the UCL PACE website but if you have any questions or ideas about OBL and CBP that you would like to discuss further please contact me on t.kador@ucl.ac.uk