As a Post Graduate student, Chris has a day job and comes on campus a couple of evenings a week for seminars and to study in the library. I had a very interesting evening shadowing him on Tuesday 18th March. We met at Campus Coffee at 4.30pm and then went to an MA Film Studies seminar. French New Wave Cinema is not a genre I’m familiar with, but Chris had told me they would be discussing ’Les Mepris‘ by Jean Luc Godard so I had watched it in advance in order to follow the discussion.
Working in ESS with a focus on learning spaces, I always find it useful to experience these rooms from the student and staff perspective. Shadowing Chris gave me an opportunity to see what they were like during the evening hours. Walking into room 1.48 in the Bedson teaching centre, I was really pleased to see that at 5pm it was as orderly as you would expect to find it at 9am. The tables and chairs were laid out ready for a class, and the room and whiteboard were clean. I noticed all the students, including myself, had brought in a drink for the 90 minute session, but that all cups had lids on and everything was cleared away at the end of the class.
The seminar group of five was small for the 60 capacity room and by 7pm I was quite cold and wondered if the heating had been turned off. It hadn’t been, but as the room was designed for 60 the heating doesn’t adjust to accommodate smaller groups. My working knowledge of the University Estate and timetabling gives me some understanding of why the group was booked into this room, but I can understand the irritation of those that don’t have this information. With over 300 teaching rooms it’s a complex puzzle.
The lecturer, who had kindly agreed to my sitting in on the seminar, knew I was from Estates. So when they tried to switch on the lights they were able to demonstrate the frustration that I hear about from many lecturers. The set of switches near the door work only for a couple of random rows. Switching for all the lights is near the lectern, but these are not labelled. Estates is about to embark on a programme to improve this type of switching, to install a simple on/off button by the doors and scene setting controls by the lectern. This will make it easier for the room user and help us all to reduce unnecessary carbon and energy bills caused by lights being left on.
We watched a few clips of the film and after a scene of Bridgitte Bardot lying naked on the bed we began our discussion about the red, white and blue filters Goddard had been using. Suddenly, there was a sound like shouting in a car park. The seminar group continued their discussion. I was confused as there wasn’t a car park outside our window. Then the sound changed to a muffled single voice of someone inside another room. I realised that it was coming from a film clip being played in room 1.47 next door. Again, this is a problem we are aware of in these rooms. Usually, it is classes in 1.47 that are affected by noise in the adjacent rooms. We have tried removing 1.47 from teaching to create a buffer between the two larger rooms either side. Unfortunately, the demand for small seminar rooms resulted in classes being timetabled in here for 2012/13, but the room will be removed from teaching next year, hopefully solving this problem.
After the class we called into the PG area in the Percy basement. This is where Chris comes to do his printing. Although Chris doesn’t like to study here as it’s a basement area with no natural light, many PG’s say they do really like it and there were about 10 students working away. Usually Chris would go on to the library but he had to leave early that evening, so we walked back through a very bustling Old Quad at 7.30pm. I’d really enjoyed the Film Studies seminar and was almost inspired to do the MA myself.