Illustration Educators

We were very pleased to welcome Darren Raven to participate in a conversation about his ongoing ‘Lecture Zine’ project.

Darryl Clifton
Can you give us an overview of the project?

Darren Raven
Oh, well, thanks, Darryl. Thanks for asking me.
Really happy to talk about this.
It's my third daily Instagram project.
I did a year of making soup which was about experimenting with food and food culture.

And then, using an iPhone, I made animations from the world around me and applied a techno track to them. This year I decided to do something a bit more related to my day job in education. They are daily Instagram posts of 12 pages. 12 slides called Lecture Zines. It's meant to represent the idea of a fanzine, you know, quick.

They tackle ideas to do with design, design education, professional practise, politics, education theory and whatever grasps me, you know, whatever I see that is shiny and I then ‘whittle’ something down from.
They’re meant to be provocative, slightly flippant and irreverent.
I'm trying to learn as I do them, I'm learning about politics and feminism and the things that a lot of the students are really into. So, it gives me an opportunity to ‘meet’ them and understand things.

I have an ex colleague who claimed she was a professor in wilful amateurism, I love that phrase. So, I borrowed the approach.

I'm playing with the idea of, you know what that platform is.
I am also posting some of them on LinkedIn and it's interesting to see the different reactions from the different participants on each platform. So I don't know if that answers your question, but they're a thing. They're on my Instagram account and they evolve.

Darryl Clifton
Well, that does more than adequately answer that first question about describing what they are, and I would encourage anyone who's listening to this recording to go and have a look at the work that Darren's been producing.

it's a huge commitment so kudos to you for staying with it. It's an act of devotion!

Darren Raven
Yeah.
It seemed like a good idea. It was December last year that it [began] and seemed ‘doable’. I thought it would be a lot less work than a one minute 20 animation every day, but in some respects the animations were [easier]. There's thought in them (the animations), but it was the different type of thought, more visual, whereas these have to be a bit more coherent.
They take about an hour to two hours [to produce]

I use small parcels of time.
For many years I [found] it very difficult to make creative outputs because my [energy] was in my educational practise and that sucks a lot of energy out of you. [And then] I got to a point where I was no longer a programme leader. I had time. I was more free to think about my practise.

I started because I was burnt out as an illustrator, as a graphic artist, so I started playing with food, you know, and that's where the soup project came from.

I could I could do a separate talk about that, but I won't. But yeah, the act of doing something daily is really important to me. It's about using the small parcels of time that are often wasted, little moments in staff meetings when you're not active.
You know when somebody else is talking about something that's not really your thing, but you're there in the meeting because you're 4th or 5th on the agenda, so you need to be present. Those little moments where, you know, maybe you'd be tempted to do an Excel spreadsheet or some kind of performative admin. I do these instead.

Darryl Clifton
That reminds me of John Vernon Lord’s Drawn to Drawing. It’s a fairly comprehensive record of his sketch and note book work and includes incredibly intense doodles produced during meetings at Brighton when he was working as a teacher there.

I'm interested in how you understand the impact of these resources. They function as resources for your postgraduate students and it's an intensive and, almost, incessant stream of information/provocation. But how do you think they respond?

From your perspective what do you think it's doing for them?

Darren Raven
Part of the project is for my current cohort students who will be finishing soon. They seem to react to the immediacy of them. Some don't necessarily delve as deep into the content as they could and some pick and choose. I asked a few students what they thought and a couple said, oh, they're very difficult to read.
I've shared the zines on LinkedIn and Instagram and there is a link to the Google Slides repository so, if people want to go to the actual slides then they can and if they want to go in and copy and paste the text or click on the links they can also do that.

I’m aware that I’m probably not focused on accessibility as much as I should be. Sometimes I make them and they are in direct response to an assignment, a module or a learning outcome. And sometimes a theme, or a moment or something that's happening in the world. We also have weekly housekeeping with the students, and that's mainly where I've shown them. I've been kind of careful to ensure that aren't classed as core module.
If they were official institutional things I wouldn't be able to make them daily. I'd have to get things signed off or check or make sure that I'm not offending anybody or saying something that's out of step institutionally.
So I usually say, oh, this is my Instagram today do you want to see it? And most of them say yes. I don't do it with every single one.
I think the main thing is sometimes I'm asking them to do very challenging things.
And I'm doing that from my position of someone who's been there, done that. I know it's useful for them. So, they can sort of look at me and go well. What are you doing? You know? And by doing this I, kind of, feel like I'm walking the walk. You know, this process is developmental for me.

I'm hopefully not working in a manner which I'm modelling as the way to work, but showing students how I am engaging with contextual, theoretical, critical and complex ideas and trying to relate them to visual communication practise, which is something that their MA asks them to do and it's one of the main things that majority of them struggle with.
Particularly coming from undergrad, where a lot of the critical and contextual study aspects have shifted focus towards more employability or professionalisation

Darren Raven
More recently some of the students are referencing the zines and that's quite funny to see. I always feel a bit weird about that.
But they're not just saying Darren said this or this zine said that they're taking on some of the theories, taking ownership, sometimes misunderstanding them but having a go which is really interesting. We took some international students to the Whitworth where the Women in Riot exhibition was showing. So that opened up conversations in the studios afterwards. So, I was able to point to some of the zines and [talk about some key theories]. So the zines are visual tools at hand to point at, not dusty tomes or links on the institutional web site.

Darryl Clifton
You said that they are not proposed as a formal resource for the course?

But to see the material from the zines fed back to you in some form or other, and to know that there's some level of engagement, is a very positive thing.

What would you say your vision for positive student engagement is?

And.
Could you just explore the rationale for this particular method? I'm curious to know what the ideology is? What's the philosophy supporting this approach?

Darren Raven

I shifted from undergrad teaching to post grad about 2-3 years ago after about 20 years on undergrad and I just thought yeah, that'll be fine but actually it was quite a shift for me.
The students on the masters where I teach are very diverse in terms of their previous experience and their agendas. So, it's a bit like teaching on foundation to be honest.
In the ways that you can't be as ‘One-size-fits-all’. The modules are shared so I went back to some of my educational theory stuff and looking at Andrew Goggie and ideas relating to the education of adults. He talks about self-learning, you know, I always think of a man in a shed learning how to Weld, you know, without wanting to read any books or anything like that. And I also thought about constructivism. You know, the idea of scaffolding and gradually taking away the support, but this is fast constructivism, because we've only got them for a year. So, I was kind of trying to smash together constructivism and Andrew Goggie.

The zines are in categories and they draw from theory.
So they trick people into doing things which some of them are very fast and some of them are slower. In the last one I worked with a group to create a list of 100 formats so they all submitted ideas and had to pick 10.
The approach is a bit Steiner, giving the students gifts, the idea of prompts, tests, tricks, toys and they can pick and choose from them, which fits with the idea of choice. They need choice and to feel ownership; that they're choosing things which fit with their current idea of where they're going, what they want to do and why they're doing it.

We're really lucky to have a nice studio space with sofas, we all sit around in a sofa, a bit like an encounter group where we all share what we've been looking at that week.

I respond to them. They respond to me, it's cooperative.
What we're doing in the studio doesn't seem like academic activity is happening. You know, like some of the sessions where we make soup, it's a bit like Lego Serious play but with vegetables.

We talk while making the soup and then we'll have lunch together. It's really nice and as they're chatting I'm posing questions. Well, we determine what questions they want to ask or what they want to talk about while we're making soup. And then afterwards they go away, it's much better than sitting around asking everybody what they have you done this week or what have you not done this week or what do you what did you intend to do but now feel bad that you didn't do?

Darryl Clifton
How would you characterise this approach?

Darren Raven
So I don't really teach illustration. I teach how to think about your life?
In and around, doing whatever you call illustration is.
I've got a very broad definition of what it (illustration) is. You know, it's not a noun. It's more a verb.
I think I'm quite frustrating to some of the students initially, but they warm to it eventually realise I don't mean them harm.

Darryl Clifton
That is a real challenge. I'm conscious of my own bias towards underestimation. And then, all of a sudden you find yourself in a situation where, perhaps you are making soup or you are engaged in an activity which is seemingly unrelated and you realise that's where, you get the genuine engagement and openness to learning.

Darren Raven
Sometimes we go and sit in the stairwells which are quite transient spaces. But they're quiet, you know, and fun. You know, we try, and let the studio to be their (the students) space.

Darryl Clifton
Yeah.
That's interesting. So, the teaching space has become everywhere (else), but the studio, is different. Almost social or residential.

Darren Raven
Very much, yeah.

Darren Raven
We're lucky that we've been given this space, it's a whole floor of a 1960/70s art school. We've got a relatively new building at MMU, which is quite nice, but the old building is [also] nice and we're in there. We're on the 6th floor and have a nice view.
We've got a fridge, a microwave and a kettle. So the students, are in there for a while, it's nice, you know, it's proper old school. It's quite rare. Really lucky, really.

Darren Raven
[I used to carry around physical copies of] lots of the regular things like diagrams and theories, and you know, like Scott Macleod's narrative transitions or just anything that I've found myself frequently referring to. I photocopied them down to A6 size. And I carried this with me. The Lecture zine is kind of similar. I can point to stuff. I'm trying to build like a an archive or a legacy, you know, that I think people might refer back to in the future, I don't know.
People keep saying, are you going to publish it? And I'm like, well, it is published.

Darryl Clifton
That answers the next question in a way, but I’ll ask it all the same. I'm interested in the effects of the speed of transmission of information, it's making evident generational ‘breaks’. The frequency of the Zines feel in step with this wider cultural expectation particularly for a younger generation who seem to expect incessant flows of information through multiple platforms, more and more information and faster. How do you square this with your understanding of how learning happens for post grad students? Do you think that they're completely in lockstep?
Seems like you've made a decision to use that platform at this speed and rhythm because that is the contemporary expectation and how a generation engage with information.

Darren Raven
Kind of. I don't know if I was that thoughtful about it. You know, because I've done the previous projects and I'm locked into Instagram and it kind of fits with being able to generate the stuff and post it on my phone.
I could pre load things and do all that stuff that influencers do, you know with timed posts, but I don't want to automate it that much. I get a bit of thrill from hitting ‘post’.
I learned from the soup project, which started by accident, after about a month or two, you get the thrill of seeing your grid build on Instagram. You know, it's very pleasing.
I think you start to understand reflecting on action. You notice patterns that you can't see in an hour or day.
After three months, you're like, oh, God, I always do that, you know? Or I've used a lot of red. What does that mean?
So the speed of output fits with my speed of thought, but also allows me to log things so I can, over time, understand what I'm doing because I really struggle with reading. You know the material that I'm engaging with to make these things. I can't read those books or articles cover to cover. I have to dip in and out.

Darren Raven
I do understand that for some people it can be overwhelming, friends have said they struggle to keep up if they are trying to read every single word and engage with it on a deep level. Some of the students have said they find it quite comforting or reassuring that they're appearing every day. They fit my attention span and I think they fit the attention spans of some of the students. Rather than doom scrolling I do this. I use the doom scrolling to feed them, so it's a way of coping, perhaps…