The driving force behind how my ARP shaped up started off with the UAL attainment statistics – every year student grades are grouped by course, college, gender, disclosed disabilities, financial status and race. Year on year, when looking at attainment stats sorted by race, it is consistently white British home students who achieve the highest scores while other categories (names dictated by the stats office) such as black British, Asian, even ‘other’ consistently achieve lower attainment scores.
I began thinking about how technical workshops could factor into this – visiting and working in workshops encourages students to develop their skills, experiment with processes, and develop their project ideas – all of which are things that can help evidence key marking criteria and therefore improve students grades if done. It would be a disservice to say that all, but many students falling into race categories other than white British – particularly international students – have English as an additional language to their mother tongue. In my specialism – 3D printing – there is a plethora of industry specific terminology and words used in a different context to their dictionary definition that could be confusing to someone trying to get into it. I began to wonder if this was creating a hurdle that could be acting as a barrier to accessing the workshop – the linguistic complexities putting people off before even walking through the door.
We work in an arts based institution where many of our students and staff are visual thinkers. Rather than creating more text heavy inductions I began to think about creating an illustrated glossary of common terms needed to understand both the beginnings of 3D printing, and common terms that me and my colleague find ourselves struggling to explain to students. I decided to go for an illustrated glossary approach so that we could have the visuals in the workshop to refer to with students, and the text would be alongside so that students could also use it as a resource for self learning and take ownership of understanding. Visual contextual support has been found to improve students vocabulary acquisition (Nasrollahi and Daneshfar, 2018) and in theory this resource can be something that can continue to be edited as softwares change and we release what is missing, or what isn’t needed.
376 words
References:
ActiveDashboards. Available at: https://dashboards.arts.ac.uk/dashboard/ActiveDashboards/DashboardPage.aspx?dashboardid=c04b6e35-6d26-4db8-9ea0-5e27d30e3402&dashcontextid=638985459734562108 (Accessed: 12 November 2025).
Nasrollahi, K. and Daneshfar, S. (2018) ‘The Effect of Visual Contextual Support and Glossary of Words on Guessing Meaning of New Vocabulary Items in English by Pre-university Male EFL Students’, Journal of Language Teaching and Research, 9(3), pp. 561–672. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.17507/jltr.0903.16.