I dont have time to……………. Margo Blythman University of the Arts London Susan Orr York St John Joan Mullin University of Texas at Austin.

‘I don’t have time to……………’

Margo Blythman University of the Arts London

Susan Orr York St John

Joan Mullin University of Texas at Austin

Two perspectives

• Academic staff

• Art and design students

• Implications for how art and design students relate to writing

Time

• extremely complex concept (Adam, Zerubavel) • permeates all aspects of our world view• seldom recognised as other than an objective,

finite resource. • little recognition of the phenomenological nature

of time• people, both as individuals and as groups,

experience time in different ways in different contexts.

Time is therefore perceived differently in different contexts:

• how an individual experiences time (phenomenological)• we make time/waste or lose time• we split time/divide time • we can have a hard or an easy time • we can ‘lose ‘time or ‘make’ time• Interruptions v breaks• time pressure• time imposed by others (deadlines)• competing time demands• personal control or lack of control over time

Task:

• Take 5 minutes to think about what you ‘waste’ time on and what you ‘make’ time for.

• In groups of four try to analyse why some things are worth making time for? Then analyse the characteristics of things that you and your group regard as a waste of time?

• Feedback

• What does this tell us about how much control we have over time? When do we feel in control and when do we feel out of control?

• How does this apply to students?

Adam (1995)• Everyone, it seems, holds a very exclusive

personal meaning-cluster of time, a distinct but not fixed composition, one open to changes and linked to shifts in personal circumstances, emotional states, health, age and context.

• the importance of getting to know the unreflected ‘backcloth’ of ‘own ‘time upon which ‘other’ times are constructed

How academic staff talk about time

• Discourse of pressure

• Particularly critical of administration

• QA procedures

• Discourse of powerlessness

How academic staff talk about time

• You find that a lot more time is taken up with ..teaching administration and teaching management than in the past

• Well the University has its Quality Assurance or Quality Management abyss or whatever you want to call it and edicts will come from them saying this is now something that we feel we need to do. I mean for example at Quality Assurance they were saying ‘Do you double mark or is there anonymity?’ We said we only double marked certain things and now we're finding a few years down the line everything has now got to be double marked, it has to be blind marking and of course the practicalities of that is that you're doubling your workload

• So how does this relate to art and design students and writing?

• What about time management?

The student project: wider findings

• A&D is seen as pain + gain

Writing is simply pain

• Concepts of 2D and 3 D

• Personal relationship with text and design

• Audience

Same student

• ‘What do I like about designing? Finding things inside yourself that you didn’t know were there’

• ‘I have a set of criteria (for writing) and the first one is a refusal to use the first person because it detracts from the impartial discussion of the argument and almost immediately leads to an opinionated conclusion’

Students and time

• Taking time out to overcome block - mainly took same approach to writing and design work. However:

• ‘Take a break – eat, exercise and come back to it an hour later’ (US 4 writing)

• ‘Concentration, new ideas’ (US 4 A&D)

• ‘I talk to friends and family for ideas’ (US 7 A&D)

Degree of personal control over time

• Making time• ‘By blocking out areas of time in my week

in which I must devote to my project – I usually don’t have trouble making time’

• ‘Make a timeline. Pretend it’s due earlier than it is. Set up dates with people’

• ‘If I know I need more time then I make time to come into the lab’

Time pressure• On the other hand students frequently let themselves be controlled

by deadlines and worked well under pressure• ‘All nighters’• ‘I don’t sleep or eat’• ‘I procrastinate and let the ‘crunch’ of the deadline force me to do as

much as I can correctly and move on’• ‘I do work exceptionally well under pressure’

• ‘ I always do deadlines, but a week beforehand nobody thinks I’m going to. I seem not able to concentrate on my work until I have got no choice…..I’m very good at drawing up schedules, but then looking at them and thinking, actually it doesn’t look that much on paper and then forgetting about the schedule…I meet deadlines. I might stay up for three days in order to achieve it but I meet my deadline’

• 'My best work comes when I procrastinate and the stress seems to work for me.'

• 'I’m afraid I tend to get in over my head on projects with deadlines as I’m an overachiever and commit myself to more work than is sane. I wind up working full-tilt non-stop, but somehow I always manage to get things done.'

Competing time

• 'For Moving Image the course hasn’t quite got the understanding of exactly how the research works…..because Moving Image is so time-consuming that researching is taking away that time'

Types of time

• Re very big projects: ‘ I give myself a hard time over it’

Strategies to make time for their art

• 'By blocking out areas of time in my week in which I must devote to my project – I usually don’t have trouble making time'.

Writing - articulated as inevitables, lack of control

• 'I wait until after I write it down first, then type'.

• 'I have to get started early because it takes me a long time to do a short paper'.

• ‘I never manage time.’

Writing- procrastination - defeat or resignation

• 'because then I have to get it done'

• 'bite the bullet.'

But

• A&D - procrastination is to produce quality

• A&D - deadlines are generative

• Writing - deadlines negatively stressful

Conclusion

• Listen to how your students talk about time

• Listen to how you talk about time to your students

• Link design to writing

• Deal with issues of control and ownership