Workshop Spotlight - Visualizing a Hopeful Future: A Reflective Collage-Making Workshop
Collage serves as the central medium for this work. Tsang and Malik emphasize that “text is not enough to express the richness of thoughts and imagination.” By working with images, fragments, and layered materials, participants can access emotional and intuitive dimensions that traditional discussion may not fully surface. They note that collage “offers a platform for expressing emotions that may be difficult to articulate through words only,” while also creating space for “multiple meanings and sometimes for contradictions.” The assembling of disparate pieces becomes a metaphor for re-imagining educational futures: fragments are not forced into seamless coherence but allowed to coexist, generating new insight through juxtaposition. In this way, the act of collage-making becomes a reflective and critical practice, where selected images and texts become “sources for reflection, dialogue, and critical meaning-making.”
Slowness is a deliberate pedagogical choice within the workshop. By emphasizing a slower pace, Tsang and Malik aim to cultivate “a reflective and caring space that counters the fast-paced, productivity-driven norms of real-world settings.” This approach values emotional, sensory, and relational forms of knowing, inviting participants to engage more deeply with themselves and with one another. Rather than privileging speed or polished outcomes, the workshop centers attentiveness and presence.
Ultimately, they hope participants leave with both a tangible artifact and an expanded sense of possibility. They envision attendees carrying “a tangible visual representation of their imagined futures and a deeper sense of connection to collective hope.” Beyond the collage itself, the session encourages participants to see arts-based practice as a meaningful way to support reflection, emotional engagement, and the ongoing work of re-imagining education.
Facilitators: Chanel Tsang and Ghazal Malik
Saturday March 7, 11.30am to 1pm, 12-199 (Boardroom)
Mariam Vakani is a PhD student in Higher Education. Her work examines caregivers and institutional life through relational and equity-focused frameworks. She writes across academic and creative forms, drawn to the spaces where pedagogy, ethics, and storytelling meet and where imagining more responsive futures becomes possible.
