How to approach crits?
As a lecturer, I sometimes struggle to find the balance between attending to the students’ accessibility needs and creating an open and welcoming environment versus encouraging them to practise presenting and discussing their work.
While I mostly deliver technical content, I feel confident about sharing my knowledge from a position of some authority due to my expertise and experience. The case is very different when sharing feedback about creative work. How can I comment about the students’ experience, thoughts and opinions?
My favourite outtake from bell hooks’s Teaching to transgress was the idea of dismantling the power structures in the classroom by embracing mutual teaching and learning through sharing experiential knowledge. Unlike technical knowledge (production and sharing of which is subject to its own power structures), experiential knowledge cannot be invalidated or deemed incorrect, making everyone in the room an equal expert in their own experience. Still, it allows people to learn from one another by exchanging and broadening perspectives.
In art schools, crits can play an important part in collective knowledge-sharing. As Linda noted during the TPP in-class discussion, “a crit is actually co-teaching with the students, creating a democratic space where the hierarchy drops” (PGCert Group 1, 2024). Several people with experience as art or architecture students remembered that during their time in school, crits could be extremely stressful, with someone mentioning trauma. We noticed a strong parallel between “traditional” crits and the content of one of the readings, which pointed out that assessment often serves as a mean of maintaining existing power structures (Broadfoot, 1996), which matched a lot of my colleagues’ student experience, including my own, and which the group strongly opposed. Nick made a very compelling argument for re-framing and re-phrasing crits to students, and that a simple change in phrasing can help the students feel more at ease.
In that case, what can be the tutor’s role during crits? While some group members see the tutors mostly as facilitators during crit discussions, and prefer to organise peer feedback as the main activity, a podcast I recently listened to featured 2 UAL students expressing a different point of view (Interrogating Spaces, 2022). They both said they expected the tutor’s feedback during crits, and at the same time were hoping for concrete guidance on how to improve their work, including references. A UAL colleague, Dr Anna Troisi, talking about compassionate feedback, mentioned the role of objectivity in providing feedback on creative work. Anna expressed a strong opinion that our role is to assess the student’s work against the learning outcomes rather than our own opinion. I understand that as teachers with varying degrees of pedagogical expertise, these two aspects cannot be replaced by peer discussions alone, and are an important condition of respectful work and communication with the students.
References
Broadfoot, P. (1996). The social purposes of assessment. In: Education, Assessment, and Society: A Sociological Analysis. Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press.
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York, NY: Routledge.
Interrogating Spaces (2022). Compassionate Feedback. Podcast episode from 11th October 2022. Available at: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1FD32TFMn5pYBYeXGIgH9Z?si=7bd502eb26514dea (accessed: 22.04.2025).
PGCert Group 1 (2024). Workshop 5 & 6 notes from Group 1, PGCert Academic Practice in Art, Design and Communication collected by Marysia Tańska. University of the Arts London, 26th February 2024. Available at: https://artslondon-my.sharepoint.com/:w:/g/personal/m_tanska_arts_ac_uk/ERXcHAfPJMFJnGa1IuENB18BBICNOSTaeLiZm6wfJxZflw?e=dkO8ur (accessed: 23.07.2024).
Other resources
class & reading notes
2024_PGCert_TPP_notes_assessment1