and is experienced in the delivery of theoretical and practical lectures over the internet. He is also in the process of setting up a new MA in Art and the Environment which will be run from the island from September.
“Because I am teaching visual art it is much trickier because quite a lot of it is practical,” says Loughran. “A new way of assessing student projects was required as the lockdown meant students could not submit their work in the normal way,” says Loughran.While not being able to physically examine the work might seem to be a major setback for some, for Loughran it simply meant adopting a different creative approach.
“You’ll never completely replicate the materiality of anything you make and reproduce. It will never be 100 per cent but you can come up with creative strategies that allow you to frame the work in an interpretive way,” says Loughran. “There is a creativity boom within this crisis because you have to do something with the situation, otherwise it brings you down. You need a lot of creative problem-solving as well. You are constantly faced with barriers and limitations, and I think that creativity is the way that you negotiate that.”
“A teacher teaches with their hands and their eyes and they really embody their knowledge. One of the first things teachers notice whenever they are doing online teaching is how that goes. Teaching, he says, is “a very complex activity and it gets flattened out through these kinds of processes”.