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Textiles: presenting work at assessment - The Open College of the Arts

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Textiles: presenting work at assessment

This is another post offering guidance to textile students on how to organise and present work for assessment. The previous posts are Textiles: organising your work for assessment, 19 October 2017 and Textiles: presentation for assessment, 17 January 2018. As Cari wrote in her post in January, organising your work for assessment is individual to your style and the kind of work you produce, there is therefore no one way to present work. It is also an opportunity for you to exhibit good judgement and consideration, however the basic aim is that your work looks coherent and that the assessors can effortlessly navigate it. It may take you a couple of assessment events to get this right but as you progress through the degree programme, repeatedly sending work for assessment you will develop and perfect ways of organising your work.
At the November 2017 assessment I chose the work of Sophie Devereux to illustrate the clear and logical yet simple way work can be presented for assessment. The reasons her work meets this criteria are
1. The packaging is simple and plain using white as the base colour and a black font for the labels.
2. All the work is clearly labelled with her name, student number, course name and which part of the course the work belongs to.
3. Labelling has been done using a uniform font style and size.
4. Each part of the course is gathered together, in this case loose leaves are in basic
homemade files where the student has used bulldog clips to secure the work and three dimensional work has been placed in box files with discrete labels.

As you see from the image of my colleague Collette Patterson we use the floor space to lay out work so we can look at it in detail and understand how work from different parts of the course relate to each other. With expert labelling and logical organised this process is much easier for the assessors.
Therefore the essential rules for presenting work in a coherent and orderly way are
1. Use boxes, files and sketchbooks of the same or similar colour.
2. Label all items with your name, student number, course title and which part of the course the work belongs to.
3. Use one basic font or typeface like arial or helvetica for the labels. If you want to
hand write these make sure your writing is attractive and consistent.
4. Arrange the work in a logical and rational way, for example by putting all your textiles
samples from Part 4 of the course in a box labelled ‘Part 4 textile samples’.

I suggest that you start to think about how to present work for assessment during Part One of your course. Use these ideas to present the work to your tutor when submitting it for formative feedback. Ask your tutor what they think about your organisational skills, the labels you have made and the type of boxes, files and sketchbooks you have used, this will help to hone your presentation skills and better prepared you as you approach the final stages of your course.


Posted by author: Rebecca Fairley

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