An Interview with Jenny Grenfell
(“Int” refers to the interviewer, “Jenny" refers to Jenny Grenfell)
INT:	I'm speaking with Jenny Grenfell who is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Education in the field of Arts Education. Welcome Jenny.
JENNY:	Thank-you Mary.
INT:	How would you describe your philosophy of teaching and learning and how have your views on this have been shaped?
JENNY:	Ok what I want to do is to focus just on three major areas which I think have influenced the way in which my concepts of teaching and learning in visual arts education has emerged over a period of time. I think the most important thing to consider are philosophies that are based around the social constructivist notions of teaching and learning. Students take on board a number of ideas and concepts and construct their own meaning out of them. So that throughout my teaching activities what I like to do is to put the students in control of their own learning experiences. That means there's a framework of ideas and concepts and knowledge and understandings that students need to engage with, but then they take that and explore and expand it into their own ideas and experiences and I think that this is really important because it's actually, at the very heart of the visual arts experience. Where the idea of individuals exploring ideas and developing concepts, developing images and art works, that have some meaning personally for them but also, have meaning for the viewer as well is really important. The other thing too, is that I see the arts as being a form of literacy and these range across visual literacy of course, but also literacy in term of the written and spoken word and also literacy in terms of visual culture and socioculture contents. If you think of those sorts of frameworks well then you really need to think about the way in which we use visual images in our everyday life and our environment and I think it's really important that we not only look at literacies in terms of the cultural artifacts that we find on gallery walls, but also popular culture in terms of advertising and the images that we see on television, movies all of those sorts of everyday things that we have happening around us and it also is to do with looking at the symbols that we use to direct us in our everyday lives like road signs and all of those sorts of things. So that fits within the framework as well. These things are reflected in the way in which we look at the two areas of arts practice which is studio practice or the making of art works and also responding to works which are in the forms of atheistic criticism, history and contexts and it's really interesting when you look at these in terms of concepts of literacy and how people may construct their own meaning out of experiences. Just recently I had a group of students with me at the Geelong art gallery and we were having a look at some of the historical paintings and there was one there that is to do with early settlers handing over beads as a form of barter to aboriginal people and it's taking place In the Barrabool Hills. If you look at it from an historical context it says to you this is something that happened in the early eighteen hundreds where local aboriginal people were paid with beads for rather large tracks of land throughout the Barrabool Hills and paid by the European settlers. If you look at it terms of reconciliation and indigenous people in 2004 it can be read as the most horrendous indictment on discrimination against indigenous people and exploitation and its only a small painting and we spent quite a deal of time of looking at it, first of all in its historical context, but then looking at it in a contemporary context where means and ideas change so much from one period of time to another. That really looks at what we mean when we start to talk about aesthetics criticism, history and contexts and then you think to yourself how does that actually link with the arts practice of young people now and what it does is tells some really lovely stories about the way in which individual artists are able to take these ideas and concepts and put them within a particular framework, which is the visual image, and so it links things like developing symbols for ideas in the images that are part of the art works. So we have all these sorts of things happening and if you like framing all of these are to me ideas of the development of thinking skills of cognition in the arts where these ideas come to us in a number of forms which can be visual forms or it could be in a written form and then we take them and then we develop symbols, which are the images within the art work which then communicate those ideas to not only the person whose developing the art work but also the viewer or the spectator of the art work.
INT:	Jenny I know that you've used multimedia quite significantly in your teaching of trainee teachers. Can you just outline the specific ways in which you have used online multimedia to help student teachers develop curriculum.
JENNY:	Ok .
INT:	The way you use movies, still images and power point and so on and then also talk about the rational for the use of those things.
JENNY:	Ok, one of the things that has always concerned me is if we use print media for example, it becomes very linear and often for some people, is the easiest way to access information, but for a lot of other people who perhaps fit into that concept that I've been talking about, constructivist approaches to learning, being able to present the content of the learning experience in a non linear way, means that students access it in ways that enable them to be able to explore the ideas that are part of the learning experience and do it in a way that works for them as individuals and that's one of the things that I thought at first with online materials, that it was a way of allowing students to take control of their own learning experiences, that they can follow the sequence because it's non linear. That students can follow sequences in ways that maybe totally different from one individual to another. The other thing that is really important of course is that it's all very well to talk about the content, but one of the things with the visual arts of course is that it's a visual thing and so being able to use things like flash movies, still images, power point and integrating it with text mean you end up with a far richer experience. It also means too that if you are talking about visual analysis if you have power point that deconstructs an image and allows students to see, while the text is there you can read the text and then use pointers or emerging images and things like that to embellish what you're talking about. You have those two things happening as part of the learning experience and the other thing of course with movies, if you have small clips for me it's a way of perhaps using just a short clip that talks about some particular aspect of developing arts curriculum. For example that you want to focus in on for a moment and you may have a voice over an image or some aspect of the experience that your developing, still images of course if your talking about an art work and you can see it in front of you, not everyone has a encyclopedia of images stored in their brain, so if you mention a particular artist and art work they say 'oh yes I know all about that. Yes, yes' and you draw it up in your mind's eye. If you are talking about a particular image and you can put a still there it means that immediately the text has some meaning because you can see what we are talking about.
INT:	Can you just talk a little bit about the design factors you had to consider when you decided which unit elements to provide online?
JENNY:	One of the first things with developing materials for online is to consider first of all the content what you want students to experience and then how you want them to experience it, and most of the materials I've developed were initially for off campus people and students and that raised a whole range of really interesting issues for us because if you have students on campus it means that you can break students up into small discussion groups, or you can lead in a workshop activity and then have students come into those sorts of activities with their own ideas and concepts, if it's a practical activity. Then there's a certain amount of instruction that you can give if for example, a student is unfamiliar with a particular technique or may want to know something about the two point perspective, well then if you have on campus students and you've got people in the room well then you can demonstrate on the good old white board or whatever or show a movie. So what I wanted to do was to bring some of those aspects into the online experiences for off campus people, but I didn't want to go down the path of saying 'if I do all these things for on campus people I want off campus people to experience similar sorts of things' because that's not exploring the medium of the online learning environment to the extent that I wanted to do it. I wanted to be more interactive, I wanted students to be able to explore ideas and to use that constructivist approach where they actually took on board ideas, but they moved them in ways that were important to them, but it's still within the framework of the sorts of learning experiences that we want to have. To sum it up with the online environment I want to be able to develop, but in different ways, the sorts of experiences that students have on campus.
INT:	So in a sense you're using, you wanted to use the online environment for the things that it can uniquely do.
Jenny:	Yes, that's right and that's something I don't think we have explored enough with the sorts of things we are doing. We're in the early stages of development I think with our online sorts of things. We need to get involved more with the interactivity. Students need to experience the what if's and one of the things that I think is really important if you are talking about visual analysis for example, and you take an art work, and you talk about it in the terms of the dynamics of the composition and why do artists place objects in particular ways on the picture surface. Now if you can deconstruct that painting or art work and then get your students to explore what happens if you place those objects in different configurations, what happens in the tension in the painting to the composition, what happens if you change the colors, what happens to the expressive quality of the work? That's the sort of interactivity that we need to explore.
INT:	You have already spoken a little bit about the way in which your online environment has enriched students' learning. Can you talk a bit more about the teachers and learners' experiences of the online environment and also what impact you think your teaching and especially your use of digital media has had on students' learning?
JENNY:	OK, one of the things that I should mention is that with the advent of DSO, what I've done is to set up a common site where both on campus and off campus students access the same course material, so that there's no difference between on campus and off campus students. They all access the same content and what I've done has been to set up discussion areas where all students engage in discussions about the topic or the subject matter we are developing. The other thing that I have done has been to set a number of activities with all of the units that I teach, in there's an ICT component that's part of them. So students develop their own web pages that maybe in response to a particular assessment task that's been done. If they're developing curriculum for example they need to have either a web presence or develop a set of power point learning activities that are then posted either in the discussion area or what they do is upload them into the body of the materials that they are exploring, so that the student responses to these tasks are really integral to the development of the actual teaching and learning materials that their exploring as part of their semester's work. So what happens is that everyone who's involved with that particular unit of work becomes part of the learning process and the responses to the assessment tasks then become an ongoing part of the development of the learning materials. So that everyone becomes part of that teaching and learning experience if you want to put it that way. It also means too that since what we are doing is working with beginning teachers and in some cases teachers who are upgrading qualifications in schools. One of the really important things is for them to have hands on experiences developing ICT, how it can work in the classroom. So some of the things that we talk about are things like how you would use multimedia in your classroom, using it to a whole class or to small groups or perhaps how you develop these learning segments so that individual students in the classroom can access it as well. So it acts as a huge resource but it's also part of the learning experience, and once again we have these links between the visual image and questions and text as information to allow students to engage in looking at art works and this is really important because it's the sort of thing we do in the class and the teachers as students at university are exploring these sorts of things, then they go out into the classroom and they use those experiences to develop their own teaching within the classroom. So that it's an integrated process which I think is really important where they are putting the experiences that they have into practice in the classroom. So it's working at a number of levels and it's really important because some of the things they start to learn about through experiencing the online material and the online environments that we are developing here is that, there's a totally different way of writing when you are using online materials. That you don't want to be scrolling down pages and pages and pages of information that the way that it works is to have a visual image, text, questions, explorations for students to do and if you got interactivity it means all of those explorations and the responses to the activities can actually go back online and then and this is where you start to develop a really enriched learning experience because student then interact with each other, they see ideas that they may not have necessarily considered before, so the learning experience takes place which goes back to what I was talking about earlier where you start to talk about Vygotsky and the constructivist approaches to learning.
INT:	So there's evidence of social construction of knowledge in your environments.
JENNY:	Yes, that's right and that's what it's all about. It's a shared learning experience and everyone brings different things to that experience and so we don't get one particular point of view you may get a whole range of points of view based around the one topic. So it's a really rich experience and I think it's something that we have haven't really even began to tap into with some of the material. The things that we are doing as part of our online teaching and learning development and I think it's something we should explore further. I think that is very frustrating that we don't seem to have more forums. We should share more of these sorts of things and we don't seem to have the facilities for people who want to develop these things, but need perhaps to learn how to use software.
INT:	Would you like to just tell us a bit about how you envisage developing your teaching and online learning environments in the future?
JENNY:	As I said earlier I know I'm talking about a piece of software but its what the software actually does, and that's developing Flash based content which really focuses in on concepts of interactivity for students having students being able to access discussion sites so that they can explore fully the ideas that are part of the course materials. The other thing that I would like to be able to do too is that if students wanted to send in small film clips that are related to perhaps classroom activities so that we have a facility where they can actually post these sorts of things. I know it takes up a lot of space on a server and we would probably need a dedicated server. There are all those sorts of things but its really developing these artifacts and working. The students and a person like myself, is involved in a collaborative learning experience. The things that I am talking about, I learn as much from my students and the sorts of things that they explore and the ideas that they come up with as they learn from me. So it is really a collaborative process which I think is just so important.
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