Our ‘In Conversation With…’ events continued this week, with a panel from the School of Art and Design answering student questions.

The panel consisted of:

• Dr Kollette Super - Associate Dean - Student Experience
• Dr Nick Gorse - Head of School – Art and Design
• Dr Karen Bull – Associate Head of Student Experience

The event was chaired by Lucy Goodacre and Emily Long from CUSU, who were joined by Jessica Isaacs, the Faculty Officer for FAH. We picked out three of the key questions from the event below…

Many courses are being told that there will be no physical degree show and are very disappointed. Can you explain the reasoning behind our show being cancelled?

The first thing to say is that no shows are cancelled. We have over the last couple of years had to change the way we engage with our public through our degree show and we've done that very successfully through providing an online digital show online with many of the institutions. And in fact, I think we were one of the first to adopt and produce that.

The position we find ourselves in now is that having done that and done that successfully and realizing that this is a very positive way for students to engage with a much wider audience than they can have, if we solely have a show on campus in Coventry, we now have to return to a sort of pre-pandemic position, if you like, where there is an expectation that that we will return to the very, very large-scale university ran shows that that we had previously.

We are talking with Heads of School across the three schools in the faculty and we are looking at what we will do moving forward. We understand how important that end of course experience is for students. Our motivation is getting the best return for students possible.

How can the school build better communication with students? How can we ensure that there is student engagement with communication from the school?

We have lots of methods of gaining feedback from students, whether that's through MEQS or surveys, all sorts of different things. But one of the things I'm keen to do is to see if we can build opportunities for more informal feedback and general feedback about what students are studying and what they're doing, particularly as we want more of that type of student feedback and we were struggling to get it.

The Reps have been really good and bringing some of that in along with our ambassadors. One of the things some academics have tried to do in recent times is have digital drop-in sessions on teams – we’d love to see more people join them!

How does the school gather feedback and focus group spaces for the new space?

We are probably now moving into a place in the redevelopment where we have spaces that we can articulate with students a little more clearly than the rather desolate wet empty spaces that that that we've had up till this point. we are looking at a very firm habitation date for the new build that we could start to have those conversations. We will want to do that carefully. If you walk past it, you'll see it's moving at a heck of a pace now. We will soon have better imagery of the inside of the buildings, because at the moment it’s a building site and so there's not a lot to show you. What we're doing with the existing spaces, in particular for this school, is beginning the expansion of the workshop provision.

For more information on the ‘In Conversation With…’ events, there is a full schedule available here. A full transcript and video will be made available shortly.