After the experience of being a co-learner, I was wondering how best to convey my experiences of this process. It’s not quite teaching, but its also not really the same as being a student, and you sometimes find yourself in a strange place when stuck between these two. Where you are expected to make mistakes, but also to show other how to learn from them. So, I wanted to encapsulate my experience, both from the perspective of the many mistakes I made when trying to teach things, but also of my satisfaction when things went right. And there are of course some miscellaneous thoughts and feelings in there as well, which I hope to give a more holistic and human perspective of my experience.
After some deliberation, I decided that the best medium to communicate undiluted emotional experiences are memes, and specifically cat memes. The combination of brief descriptions, as well as context where appropriate, with a relatable image helps the viewer to put themselves in your shoes and communicates a deeper meaning than words or even more abstracted images can. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a meme is worth a thousand more.
My name is Enrico Manfredi-Haylock and I am currently studying for a PhD in Materials. I also did my undergraduate degree in the same subject here, and I was enrolled in another Change Maker’s Horizons module last year (Creative Futures) which piqued my interest in this type of extra-curricular learning. It made me realise that by only learning about the science, you kind of miss out on learning about the wider world as a whole, and how the inventions that we work towards in the lab fit in with technological progress. I was keen to become a co-learner for this course because I saw the opportunity to apply what I learnt in Creative Futures, researching future directions of travel of technologies, and showing other people what I learned as well. I really enjoyed this experience, not only because it’s really rewarding to work with such talented and intelligent students, but also through making mistakes and fixing them on the fly, I hope that I helped students to challenge their fear of failure which comes with the plunge from school to university.