And down the rabbit hole…

“Begin at the beginning,” the King said, very gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop. Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

It’s been an amazing couple of days. At the start of this week I sat alone in a room full of cake wondering if any students wanted to work with me on scholarly activities and if they were interested in the Connecting classes project. Now we have:

• a full class wondering what their ‘big questions’ might be so we can run a connected class to discuss them
• six groups of four or five learners signed up to explore the links between theory and practice in ‘praxis groups’
• a project team keen to determine what outstanding scholarship in the visual arts looks like in order to start a peer-review panel and journal
• three groups of students who will be working as groups (or editing their dissertations) in order to submit work to conference or publication
• another project team keen to communicate and reach out to the wider world so we can disseminate our good practice at HCA and (hopefully) host a student conference next summer
• considerably less cake

So, a huge thanks to our amazing students at HCA.

I’ll be asking for your ‘big questions’ by email soon, so that we can decide on our mini-curriculum. Then we’ll aim to hold our first connected class on w/c 25^th April and for the next two successive weeks. Exciting!

I’ll also email with suggested dates/times for praxis groups, set up a google document so we can work remotely on what we think outstanding scholarship should look like, and we’ll start meeting to consider our ideas and research into our subject areas.

This feels like the start of an interesting journey. I’m glad to be in such good company.