From the ToR I chose to reflect on the poem ‘Is that a sign: White Supremacy’. The resounding final line to each stanza, ‘It doesn’t feel like home though’, is an impactful reminder that institutes are not home.
To share this poem with new students who join the undergraduate programmes, I think will help them understand that university is different from being at home. At home, if it is a good one, should be a place where there is peace, love and understanding. A place where your voice is heard and valued. A place where you are loved, and you can demonstrate love to others.
My role as a senior lecturer in practice has always been multifaceted. In love, Aisha, good practices of fashion design, exchanging knowledge with my student. I learned from them, and they learnt from me, the perfect balance in demand and supply. Alongside this, and just as important is my pastoral care to my students. For once they enroll on a unit of study with me, to the best of my ability, their successes are my successes and failures are my failures. Making and creating a safe environment within the fashion studio space is my responsibility, so that students feel ready to share ideas and develop their creativity. It becomes a new home, where they can make friends, with the potential to make lifelong friends, like I did when I was an undergraduate.
Home is where the heart is, and it is where one feels comfortable to stay. We as a faculty must take responsibility if we do not create spaces where our students feel a sense of belonging. Creating a sense of belonging is when we collectively win. Due to my role as the college admissions tutor, my responsibilities with recruitment often separate my teaching responsibilities. I say this to share that currently I teach in the first term to our new students and often do not see them again until much later in the academic year when I do see those same students, their feedback is on the whole that they miss my classes. I begin to wonder, do other colleagues create the same spaces of home?