Creative Education

The programme aims to:

• Provide you with the intellectual, technical and professional skills to review and renew your approach to creative education.
• Foster an experimental learning and teaching environment that enables you to make connections between different people, environments and ideas.
• Enable you to develop and realise an independent research project that translates your pedagogical principles into practice.
• Develop your confidence to identity and pursue opportunities that enhance your creative education practice and profile.
• Establish a diverse community of creative educators able to work collaboratively across disciplinary, sectoral and national boundaries.

By the end of the programme, you should be able to:

• Define your values as a creative educator in relation to competing critical, conceptual and policy perspectives.
• Critically evaluate your pedagogical strategies using the principles and methods of educational research.
• Demonstrate how to translate your pedagogical principles into the design and delivery of effective creative education.
• Critically reflect on the public impact of your practice as a creative educator, and on your responsibilities as a practitioner.
• Develop strategies for working with others across a range of diverse national and international learning environments.
• Communicate the aims, methods and outcomes of your creative education practice to a range of specialist and non-specialist audiences.
• Define your professional ambitions as a creative educator, and the actions required to met those ambitions.

The programme will operate three principal modes of delivery:

• Burst-mode learning, where you attend campus for intensive weeks of study, followed by synchronous/asynchronous online learning. For example, a 15-credit unit will involve one week of on-campus study.
• Blended learning, where you attend a regular pattern of scheduled teaching throughout the unit that is delivered both online and on-campus.
• Online learning, where you attend a regular pattern of scheduled teaching throughout the unit that is delivered wholly online.

Term 1

Foundations of Learning: this unit explores the concepts and controversies of contemporary creative education. You will reflect on your experiences, knowledge and values, and locate your practice within a broader theoretical context.

Experiments in Learning (proposal): this unit enables you to review and renew your own creative education practice through the principles of action research. You will develop a project plan and associated ethics application that provides a rationale for your chosen project, and outlines how you intend to gather, analyse and present research data.

Term 2

Designs for Learning: this unit gives you insight into and experience of designing inclusive creative education. It explores how to apply ideas in practice across a range of educational methods and modes, including discussion of campus-based, blended and remote learning.

Experiments in Learning (project): this unit enables you to review and renew your creative education practice through the principles of action research. You will conduct, analyse and present your project, and reflect on how it informs your practice as a creative educator.

Term 3

Independent Research Project Proposal: this unit enables you to bring together learning throughout the programme on an ambitious research project that concludes your degree. For this part, you will develop a research proposal and associated ethics application that provides a rationale for your chosen project, and outlines how you intend to gather, analyse and present research data.

Independent Research Project: this unit enables you to bring together learning throughout the programme on an ambitious research project that concludes your degree. For this part, you will conduct, analyse and present your research project.

This MA is delivered over 45 weeks (full-time) and 90 weeks (part-time).

You will be able to choose from a selection of College-wide electives. These will include two elective units themed around creative education:

Education for Change: this Term 1 unit supports you to design and deliver creative education that is focused on transformation. This will involve an exploration on how education can support people to navigate a complex, changing and unpredictable world.

Making Pedagogies: this Term 2 unit explores the pedagogical implications and possibilities of an education based on making, including a consideration of the materials we use, the processes that we employ and the spaces that we inhabit.