Using artistic collaboration to understand business problems

Over recent years, staff at Queen Mary’s School of Business and Management have been working to transform undergraduate learning with more innovative, student-centred approaches. They also wanted to specifically address a disparity in attainment between student who came to the school with BTEC qualifications and students who came with A levels.

“University assessment tends to be by essays and exams, which is generally tailored towards students with an A level background,” explains Professor Liam Campling, Associate Dean for Research at the school. “We wanted to find a way for all students to bring their different strengths into the classroom. At the same time, we wanted to create a learning environment where the lecturer is part of the process but not directing it, where we have more peer-to-peer learning.”

Alongside colleagues Professor Martha Prevezer, Professor Gerard Hanlon and Dr Matteo Mandarini, Professor Campling applied for Westfield funding to try out an unconventional learning approach that he believed would help the school meet its aims. He commissioned a duo of artists called Audrey Samson and Francisco Gallardo, together known as FRAUD, to help plan lessons using a technique called décollage.

Professor Campling continues: “This is a method of layering up and then stripping back. You sometimes see it with posters in the street or different wallpaper patterns in old houses and it allows you to see the depth of history there.”

FRAUD work with small groups using décollage to unpick complex issues, such as the Mediterranean  refugee crisis, where small groups look at technological, political, legal and economic dimensions by layering pictures and words onto graphs or timelines, and then come together to see how these dimensions are layered. They then collaboratively strip back the complexity: “This helps people consider what matters most, the key turning points and the relationships. It’s also great pedagogy because it engages participants in debate about causality and develops their analytical skills.”

The challenge was to make this approach work with a much bigger group – around 350 students on the Contemporary Challenges in Business and Management module – and to adapt it to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Part of the solution was to teach in classes of 60, with students working in ten groups of six. To use décollage in the virtual world, each group met via Teams and used OneNote as an online whiteboard. They focused on the causes and effects of the pandemic and its impact on business management as their topic.

“We gave the students some initial ideas about how and where to research information, they mapped their findings with words and pictures on their whiteboard, creating a very visual space where you can zoom in and out and look for connections. Then we asked students to analyse the long-term and short-term causes and effects, to strip back to the three most import factors and present their findings succinctly.”

There are already signs that this approach to learning is working. These include high levels of class attendance; positive engagement between students during the workshops, with very few problems in terms of group management; and the quality of the whiteboards, presentations and final essays. “We watched live when they were talking in Teams meetings, and we could see that they were buzzing.”

With a full return to in person teaching and learning, Professor Campling and his colleagues plan to continue using the décollage approach, adapting it again to work in the physical classroom.

He adds: “I’m pleased to see that the attainment gap is narrowing. We can’t put that down to one module, but this approach pushes students well outside their comfort zone, whether they have a BTEC or A level background. They have to be reflective and analytical, and they can only do well if they are fully engaged.”