“They bring innovation”: Teaching and learning from Northamptonshire’s next generation of creatives
Steph Lee-Vae is an arts and design lecturer at Tresham College in Corby and Kettering. Steph explains what they love about working with students on creative processes, how their digital art practice influences their teaching and what it was like to be named Further Education Lecturer of the Year.
My path to teaching
If you'd told me when I was 18 I'd go into teaching I'd have laughed at you.
But then I worked in a school for a year and I absolutely loved it. I suddenly thought teaching is what I could see myself doing.
I loved working with young people who may have had it tough or might not have engaged with the most orthodox subjects like English, Maths and Science but were actually creative people in different ways.
So that became my idea. I'd train to be a teacher.
I knew I wanted to work with young people in the creative industries but I didn't know how that would look or the direction it would take me. You can never quite plan out the twists and turns.
I studied for a Fine Art degree at the University of Northampton. I was always a traditional printmaker but then my work started to take a different direction. When I was in the third year at university, I got to specialise in one area so I decided to experiment with digital. I would take my artworks and scan them in, then process photographs in a darkroom and combine the two. I would edit them in Photoshop and reproduce them in huge large-format prints.
That meant that when I went into teaching, I had this approach of taking the traditional into the digital realm. I love the combination of the two.
What I'm interested in as an artist, what I learn from doing exhibitions and working with different practitioners all helps shape my teaching.
'How far can we push that?'
When I looked into doing my Masters, I found the Fine Art Digital degree at the University of the Arts London. For me that was absolutely the best approach. I learned about things like projection mapping, VR and how to integrate different technologies and audio into my work. I was really thinking outside of the box - if you're a traditional artist, how can you use digital to push what you do even further? It was about taking your work from its origins and flipping it on its head.
That's now what I like my students to do. I want them to look at their work and think of all the ways they could flip it, manipulate it and work with it. That could be artwork, a drawing or a design. How far can we push that? How far can we take that in different ways?
For my final showpiece for my MA, I was trying to find the most manufactured lands in the world - terrain that had been disturbed and remade by humans.
These landscapes are cultivated, re-purposed and re-used so rather than something we as humans should preserve and respect, we see it as something for consumption. We take that material, we tear it apart and manipulate it.
One of my favourite photographers, Edward Burtynsky, looks at the most manmade landscapes in the world and photographs them from the aerial perspective. I didn't have a plane or the funds to travel the world, so I started planning how I could replicate that possibility. From an aerial perspective, these landscapes are always formed in grids or circular crop fields. How could I show these landscapes and create a visual language to trick the viewer into thinking about what we're doing to the world we're living in?
I realised I could use Google Earth as part of an artistic process. I'd use Google Maps to search around the most impacted terrains in the world. I'd spend about 7 or 8 hours at a time scouring the surface of the Earth. I loved that process.
I created shapes in Illustrator, then exported the image from Google Earth into Photoshop and started the manipulation process - I'd take the landscape that's been destroyed and put it into a digital realm where I'd re-form it and create a whole new language for what's happening to our planet. It's a comment on how we as humans are impacting the world around us.
Just after I graduated, the first lockdown hit. My personal life was taken up by planning and teaching and for two years it was so hectic. After my MA I had so many other plans. This year I'm just starting to look again at opportunities and get back into my practice. I've got so many ideas about how I can push things forward you would not believe. Having the money and resources to do it is another thing!
'A community of creativity and innovation'
I've been at Tresham for ten years and this year I'm working with around 50 students. At the moment they're doing an animation project. I put together a “mock” client brief where the client has asked for a 30-second animation to represent the theme 'creativity'. I'll set the students up into teams and they produce an outcome together. When they're discussing what they're doing, we call that a design team meeting.
One of the students asked if they had to execute it as a real advertisement, and I said "absolutely” - it is important to set the standard and have them strive to do their best in all the projects. They come to me with ideas. You have to bring them up to your level so they see themselves as part of your design team. It's not class any more - it's an art or design team, you bring your ideas and you shape your projects. When you're working with students you have a community of creativity and innovation all around you.
Appreciating students as creatives and practitioners in their own right, especially with their vast knowledge of social media, is so important. When we get together I make that apparent. I might be the teacher but they teach me as well. They bring innovation and shape ideas as part of their design teams.
They come in and talk about a new app or software. They ask if I've heard of it and I'll say no, let's take a look at it. In fact, why don't you do a workshop on this with the group next week? The other day we found an AI art generator app and the students ran a session on it. They loved it because it was dead quirky.
What I love most is when it's energetic and fun, when everyone's talking and communicating. They'll sit there, having coffee, planning ideas. Sometimes we do get a bit carried away talking forever about different ideas!
I'm also passionate about helping students with their mental health and wellbeing. Good grades aren't the most important factor. If someone leaves college in a good state of mind, as a well-rounded human, that's the most important thing. We're giving them life skills, not just subject-specific skills.
Award winner
I was named Further Education Lecturer of the Year in 2022. I was with my Graphics Year 2 students when I found out. I thought it was a joke at first so I was laughing and they asked what had happened. I said I had an email about a national award. I really thought one of my students was playing a prank on me.
I normally just try to do the best job I can for my students and I don't need a pat on the back or recognition. I was so humbled by the nomination and the award.
I've grown up in Tresham for the past ten years and I'm lucky that I've had so many opportunities through the creative people I'm surrounded by. I'm just one of many and I'm surrounded by innovative educators who have always supported me and shaped me into the practitioner I am.
After all, nobody gets into teaching for the accolades. You do it for the kids and for the love of the subject - giving back and being creative.
Our ask
What we need every single year is in-house work placements for our students. We get people asking for our students to design certain things which is great but actually getting them out into a design or animation studio would be even better, to have contacts who are willing to take students even just for a couple of hours a week.
Every year as a college we have to link our curriculum to the industry. What would be good is to have an opportunity to go into different companies, see what skills they need our students to acquire. We'd love to organise a studio visit so some of our students can see what that environment looks like.
We’re also always keen to invite people working in creative industries to come to talk to our students about what they do for a living, how they got there and why they love it.
Want to know more?
Find out more about Tresham College and Steph Lee-Vae’s work.