Your very first assignment – what to send to your tutor

This blog is specifically for students of Drawing 1 or those undertaking their first level one visual art course with the Open College of the Arts who are just at the point of trying to decide what to send off to their tutor for assignment 1.
I have had two queries recently from Drawing 1 students asking what and how much to send me as their tutor.  There are rarely yes / no answers in Higher Education. A question is almost always answered by another set of questions, or seen as a way to frame further enquiry.
In this case, a seemingly innocuous question about what to put in a portfolio is actually a question which requires a response which asks the student to think again about how and what they are learning and the function of assignment reports.
A distance learning degree is a long road to travel. That road is punctuated along the way at the end of each module by a formal assessment process. Right up until HE6 that formal assessment process is there simply to assess your progress against formal expectations as a tool for your learning; to help you and your tutors understand your needs and to make sure you are ready for the next rung of the ladder so that you can make the most of your ‘graduating’ modules when they come along.
In between this more formal assessment which focuses on parity and your performance against externally moderated bands of criteria, you have interaction with your own personal tutor through assignment feedback.
This feedback is personal, completely student centred and relative to your own work. At Assignments 2 & 4 your tutor will try to give an indication as to what might happen at assessment, but they will almost certainly not be assessing you when the time comes.
The assignment feedback is for you to use selfishly, to ask questions both through your making and through your log and send them off to be answered.
Looking at assignment work from a tutor’s perspective can feel a little like an American crime scene drama – CSI or NCIS or the like. The work has been done and the student is absent. My role is not one of critic. I don’t want to see 2 single assignment pieces and judge how successful they are on their own terms as art works.
My role as tutor is to try to decipher your process and aims for your own work so that I can be informed enough about what you were trying to do and how you went about it to be able to offer pertinent and directly useful advice.
Your role as a student is to be committed to your own work, and to select elements from across your experiences of the weeks leading up to sending off your first assignment to send your tutor so that they can elicit the most useful information possible in order to give you the best possible feedback in terms of its ongoing usefulness (see how convoluted answers can be?).
For example; you might mention in your log that two studies worked really well and the third was a disaster but you are not sure why, although you suspect that it is something to do with the palette. If you would like input on that, you should send in all three studies – but not the ten other studies that were really just more of the same.
Another example might be sending in a small sketchbook along with a larger final piece. Your tutor might see your more succinct, smaller sketches which cut to the chase and note how the energy that appears to have tailed off in your larger work might have been retained with a bit more judgement and discernment when it came to learning the lessons of the sketchbook.
You have an outer weight limit, and please do make your tutor’s life easier by making the work easy to extricate and, crucially, repack, but apart from that send a functional, vital and questioning edit with an accessible and punchy log to make sure that each assignment report is as valuable, pertinent and jam packed with fuel for the next leg as is possible.

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