#LILAC22 the power of collating to unlock research topics

 Pam McKinney here live blogging from the lilac conference. This session is a workshop led by James Soderman from Queen Mary university. This is a replication of a workshop offered to PhD students. James worked with a learning development team to create this session “visualise it” which is one part of a 4 strand workshop design. We were all given a big sheet of paper and asked to write a research topic in the middle. We had some magazines, and were encouraged to cut images out of the magazines to help visualise our topics, and cover up the words we had used to define our topic. This was a fun way to engage with a topic and think about the breadth of it. We then had to explain our topic to a partner, and were encouraged to think about which part of the topic we were most interested in. The next stage was a reflection stage, but we skipped this due to time! Then James spoke about his experiences of running this workshop. Feedback from students was really positive, they liked the visual aspect, and found it useful to think about their research in a different way. During COVID James found the workshop more tricky to deliver online, he encouraged students to collect images from Pixabay rather than using magazines. Comments from the audience were that this could be tricky to run with taught students at university because it is difficult to “get” time from lecturers for IL workshops, however this is good for an audience of PGR students who self select development opportunities.
Photo by Pam McKinney: her collage