24 Sep 2024

This blog was written by Meredith Wood, a technical tutor in textiles at UCA, and a PgCert student from the 2023/2024 cohort, as part of the Higher Education in Practice: Personal reflections on your discipline and the wider context of higher education submission.

Meredith

Image - ‘Bundles’ Naturally dyed textiles: madder, weld, Persian berries, beans, onion skins onto cotton and silk 

‘Bundle dyed textiles’ is a reflection on the multitude of issues students face within Higher Education, which in turn effect their mental health. The work is a nod to how interconnected these themes are, such as how the cost of living crisis or belonging to the LGBTQIA+ community can affect issues such as attainment, access to resources and inclusive assessment, which can consequently affect student mental health. These issues are complex, diverse and interconnected.  

‘Bundles’ – “a collection of things or quantity of material tied or wrapped up together” (Oxford Languages 2024) 

Each bundle is unique, representing the different attributes that make up each individual student. Each strip of fabric is dyed with a combination of different natural dyes, on different fabrics, representing a range of intersecting difficulties that students face, and how they are combined in relation to each other. Some colours are pulled out to highlight specific issues, however within each bundle you can see how blended together these colours and issues are. Once you start to pull away at the thread, a lot can be unravelled. The different colours represent different issues – for example, purple represents students who have financial backing and can afford a range of materials and equipment to use in their studies, lack of purple may be subtle and not noticeable on the surface, but can have a large impact on the student experience, as well as how teachers may view the students ‘giftedness’. “Bourdieu (1974, p. 42) discusses ‘the ideology of giftedness’ that is a means by which social inequalities are presented so that successful educational achievement becomes giftedness and failure is attributed to some aspect of the student’s nature.” (Orr 2007).  

All of these tools and difficulties combine together, they are hard to separate from one another, some are cause and effects of others. The range of colours also symbolise colours from the LGBTQIA+ flag, again interconnecting in different ways to highlight individual identities. “In terms of academic engagement, LGBQ+ students often do not see their experiences and history reflected in the curriculum” (Advance HE 2022). This is another issue which affects the student experience of HE and another factor when looking at the individuality of each bundle. 

The process of creating bundles made me reflect on the idea of students being ‘wrapped up together’. Each natural dye and subsequent colour represent the different attributes which makes each student different. Some will have many of the tools available to help them thrive throughout their education, and yet many will have a range of barriers which make it harder for them to achieve, and yet they are so often ‘wrapped up together’. This can be found in both positive and negative ways: 

Unfair comparisons of students during assessment can be one of the negative ways in which this ‘wrapped up togetherness’ begins to show itself. “Your mark is 75, I put 80, shall we split the difference or, let’s look at another one in the 80s? (M.M.4)” (Orr 2007). The different strips are all the same size, and when laid out next to each other they are very easy to compare. This is a reflection on assessment and comparing students work with others in the same grade band and how this can cause issues for inclusivity when not all students have had the same ‘tools’ to create the work. 

The process of students all together, waiting whilst something is being steamed, taking away the dye matter, washing the fabric, you are left with a final piece and without context, not much of an idea of how we got here. Natural dyes leave a mark on the fabric, the same way these experiences leave marks on the student experience.  

The word bundle draws on ideas of working collaboratively. Many of my textiles workshops with the students, including bundle dyeing, involve intentional building of Communities of Practice, in which students can “build relationships that enable them to learn from each other” (Wegner Trayner 2015). I believe this has a lot of positive value to the students experience, forming relationships with each other which can in turn promote their learning. “Collaborative activity may even take the form of a ‘threshold concept’ (see Land et al., 2008) in that it leads ‘not only to transfigured thought but to transfiguration of identity and adoption of an extended or elaborated discourse’.” (Walsh et al 2010).  

The bundles I have created represent a hope for bringing students together in a way which doesn’t compare them to each other, but allows for them to learn together, learn from each other, and grow together, whilst recognising the individuality of them all. 

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