Abstract:

Drawing visualisation is an uncommon learning tool in health science tertiary environments, yet creativity is integral to students’ development as critical thinkers. We therefore pose the question, how might creativity through drawing provide a generative approach to enriching and diversifying student learning experiences?

An opportunity exploring this question with students arose in an undergraduate health science program. In this, students reflected on their group work to make sense of their learning in an enriching and positive way. Rather than focusing on group-work outputs, staff/lecturers co-developed into the assessment outcomes a critical soft skill; group dynamics and the phasic nature of groups.
Innovatively, students were asked to reflect and draw their experiences of the group work dynamics. The unique part was embedding the reflection at the following stage of their group project. Supported by an in- class plenary, students individually, then within their groups and collectively, created, shared, and reflected on their group work through drawing, flipping this against group-phasic theory to make sense and co-develop knowledge.
We therefore describe the learning process and methods, and present focus group feedback of students reflecting on their learning using drawing as a sense-making tool. This includes students’ description of drawing as 'rich' and 'authentic', depicting the 'story of their group-work learning journey' that words alone could not. Students from mature age and culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds valued the activity. Rich contextual meaning about group inter-relational processes is apparent in the drawing's produced by the students. These drawings provide disciplinary specific insight to how students group work experiences may differ or align with current group dynamic theories. We therefore also present a simple tool developed from this work to display visual datasets of group learning, and conceptually discuss the potential of improving this with machine-learning approaches with consensus building between experts, students, academics, and practitioners, for developing new insights into the phasic-nature of groups, and to support student learning.

Keywords:

Arts-based methods, transdisciplinary, group dynamics, collaborative learning, machine learning, health science, Chinese medicine, data visualisation.