Counter-mapping the curriculum with the graduating cohort
Context and problem
The MA Social Innovation and Sustainable Futures is student-led and depends on sustained participation in crits, debate and group work. Getting the students to fully participate has always been a relative challenge but in the last few years, with a changing student cohort, this challenge has amplified. Most of our students are now Chinese, on a 15 month soon to be a one-year MA this leaves little time to adapt before assessment begins. Reading Bradbury (2020), my assumptions were confirmed and I came to see this as an problem of perspective rather than a student problem: Could it be that students don’t participate because the tools that we give them to participate aren’t well adapted to them? What kind of participation do we expect? Are there other ways of participating that we haven’t looked at? What do our students feel and think of participating?
Rationale
UAL’s anti-racism action plan (2021) commits to placing decolonisation at the heart of all curricula, yet such commitments often fall short of their promises at the level of everyday practice (Garrett, 2024). This is evident from my experience as a lecturer in many institutions that there is a lot of goodwill and expectations from top-down interventions that are not well supported at the ground level. They end up being lip service rather than actual change for the student.
Crenshaw (1990) reminds us that language, race, class, gender and distance from home intersect to shape what assessment can recognise. More specifically in this context, McLean et al. (2026) show that Chinese international students in London already navigate these intersections collectively: they map pain points on social media (anxiety over unreadable grading norms, isolation, structural friction) and tactics (peer knowledge economies, pragmatic partnerships) in a “collectively authored survival manual” invisible to institutions. I have a bunch of students doing projects about:
– Integration
– participation
– feeling at home
– housing
– perspectives of safety in London
o I would like to offer a common platform on which all these worries and anxieties, resolutions can be put into a common and used to discuss what we as a teaching staff and how the curriculum is designed could be designed better to better satisfy these students.
My personal expertise and experience with mapping is what leads me to think of mapping in a very wide definition of the word. By this I mean using a common graphic platform (which could be an online platform) to amalgamate feelings, experiences, tactics, thoughts that these students might have about their experience of coming to London and specifically to UAL as a foreign student. I am continuously inspired by the work of Iconoclasistas’ collective mapping (Risler and Ares, 2013) and the Counter-Cartographies Collective’s Counter/Mapping QMary (Dalton and Mason-Deese, 2012) Their grounded approach to mapping allows me to release myself of the worry of yet again asking the students to do something that is not comfortable to them. This grounded collective cartography approach would allow them to discuss how they want to represent this topic to us, what kind of map, if a map? They could write a manifesto and map it in text if they wanted to.
Activity
The beginning of the year (september) represents a quite interesting moment in which the outgoing graduating students meet the incoming MA students for two weeks of intense exchange. This allows the outgoing students to communicate to the incoming students what the course is about, how they found it, the things that they’ve done, and give them advice.
The platform is almost already there. What I would like to do is use a moment of that week to have an intentional focus group on our curriculum and our MA. I would like to allow a very free-flowing activity in which any thought and feeling is allowed to be put on the MA.
I will convene graduating students and course staff, the course leader co-hosting. It begins with a co-design conversation: student volunteers decide what to map For example I have noticed that Pain Points is a language that the Chinese students already use and Navigation Tactics are some things that we have shown them in the MA. They could use both these concepts to help them guide the initial thoughts. Students then map without staff present, on Miro or paper, in whatever mix of languages and visual codes they choose, deciding collectively what to include.