Summer STEP Success

Title: Website on Exploring Chinese Art and Culture in Scotland 

Sponsor: Michelle Huang

Project coach: Mi Zhou

Members: students from Art History, Computer Science, History, International Relations, Economics and Management

This project aimed to create an interactive website with information about where to explore, see, taste and experience things related to Chinese art and culture in Scotland. The website provides information about major museum collections, exhibitions, Chinese diaspora artists, cultural organisations, research networks, events and other resources that may support the teaching of Chinese art and culture at the University of St Andrews. The website first takes you to explore Chinese collections in the areas of Tayside, Central and Fife. It also introduces selected artists, scholars and cultural organisations based in St Andrews, Edinburgh and Glasgow. It is hoped that more information on various topics will be updated at a later stage when funding and other resources become available. 

Title: Creating Teaching Aids and Promotional Material for Upcoming Online Courses in the School of Art History

Sponsor: Natalia Sassu Suarez Ferri

The project focused on creating resources for the first upcoming short online course offered by the School of Art History, 'The Image of the Woman Artist'. The project was led by Dr Natalia Sassu Suarez Ferri and two PhD Candidates in the School, Hemdat Kislev and Meg Dolan. Our team of six sub-honours and honours students in Art History created two teaching aids: 1) a non-academic resource list that will help participants investigate the theme of the course beyond the academic reading list provided by staff; and 2) an online exhibition, for which they selected the artworks, the theme of each room, investigated image rights, and produced captions and wall text material. Additionally, students provided the School’s videographers with a video brief, which is currently being used to produce a promotional video for the course.

Title: Developing and applying robust interdisciplinary tools for decolonising teaching modules 

Sponsors: Prof. Kevin N Lala (School of Biology) and Dr. Stephanie O’Rourke (School of Art History).

During this initiative, two sub-teams critically evaluated the Biomolecular Sciences Public Engagement module (BL4294) and the Community Heritage and Sustainability module (AH5605 – MLitt) to determine areas for improvement to promote anti-racism and decolonise teaching methods. Through collaboration with module coordinators and a systematic methodology to evaluate teaching materials, our STEP team generated suggestions to improve lecture materials, workshops, citations and research practices to promote anti-racist teaching. Consequently, we created a guide, which provides supporting resources, including a “Guide to Integrating Research from Diverse Perspectives,” which was previously produced in a pilot study by Sarah Graham, along with a five-step list to help staff navigate areas for module improvement.