Creative Graduates: integrating learning and research in the creative and cultural industries
This project forms part of the Scottish QAA Enhancement theme Research-Teaching Linkages: Enhancing Graduate Attributes, examining connexions between teaching and the other activities of HEIs, across all the disciplines represented in Scottish Universities, with the aim of improving the student’s experience.
Those activities have been gathered together under the general heading ‘research’, but (perhaps especially in the case of institutions and courses that prepare students for work in creative and cultural practice) they include a very wide range of activities that may not always fall naturally under this rubric.
Our project is particularly concerned with understanding how Scottish institutions enhance the students’ learning experience through the use of:
- Performances and exhibitions;
- Creative projects within and outwith the institution;
- Contact with professional artists and organisations;
- The professional artistic experience of staff;
- The research interests of staff – especially where these include creative work and practice-based approaches;
- The other research activities of the institution, including consultancy work.
Some connexions between these activities and students’ learning will be explicitly set out in degree and course design and regulations, while others will be more implicit. All are potentially relevant to this investigation.
The aim of the project is to help institutions working in the field of creative and cultural practice to share their most effective practices, but the investigation will also allow cross-fertilisation across disciplines, so that, for example, other disciplines can learn from the approaches taken by those in creative and cultural practice, and vice-versa.
Survey
As part of our work for this project, we have developed a short online questionnaire, which we are encouraging colleagues to complete.
The survey is available at:
www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=o9daTlXv3bwANeDX8TMW1Q_3d_3d
Symposium
Creative Graduates: Learning and Research in the creative arts
The symposium took place on Tuesday 18 March 2008 at The Alexander Gibson Opera School, Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, Glasgow.
This symposium was an important contribution to the work of the project. It aimed to provide a valuable opportunity to discuss and showcase the various ways in which 'a spirit of enquiry' informs and becomes integral to the learning process in creative and practice-based disciplines. It also aims to explore and articulate the interconnectedness of research, learning and teaching in those disciplines.
Publications
The briefing paper, Creative Graduates: enhancing teaching-research links in the creative arts
This briefing paper is intended for academics and institutional policy-makers within creative disciplines in higher education to provoke debate and enhance understanding of the ways in which research and teaching can be conceptualised and linked so that students emerge from their programmes of study with knowledge and attributes that equip them not only to enter the creative industries but to move those industries forward: to become creative graduates.
Project Partners
HEA-ADM (The Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Art, Design and Media)
| Date: | 1/2/2007 - 1/7/2008 |
| Contact: | Ralph Brown 01524 593545, ralph.brown@lancaster.ac.uk |
