Learning environment

As a postgraduate only art and design university, students join our community from diverse backgrounds, careers and life experiences. Within this environment, Master’s students are led by their own interests and focus on developing their individual practices. However, peer-to-peer learning is also a vital part of the RCA experience; collaboration, cross-pollination and discourse across disciplines are at the heart of what we do at the College.

Studying at the RCA may be different from your previous educational experiences. You will be encouraged to study with curiosity and to be open to engage with the world around you. All our programmes are research-driven and you are encouraged to experiment and test new ideas with the aim to create new knowledge.

At the RCA, we aim to hold the space for your creative and collaborative development. Our curricula are process-driven and encourage you to experiment to develop new skills which inform your personal interests.

Students at the RCA study:

• Independently: you will be required to manage your own time and structure the way you work towards your final projects and submissions.
• Critically: you are encouraged to engage with your work critically, and work together with fellow students and tutors to question the purpose of your work. You are encouraged to engage with the contemporary discourse around your research topics.
• Sustainably: you are encouraged to work in a sustainable way, not only engaging with sustainable topics on climate change, but also sustaining yourself emotionally and physically.
• Collaboratively: depending on your programme of study, you will be required to work together in groups with peers in your programme, but also with peers across the College on units like AcrossRCA.
• Ethically: you will be encouraged to demonstrate how your activities can provide benefits and minimise harm to others.
• Inclusively: you are encouraged to value diverse perspectives, creating work and learning environments that are welcoming, accessible, and actively anti-discriminatory. We expect you to engage with a spirit of curiosity, recognising the contributions of individuals across backgrounds and identities.
• Respectfully: you are expected to engage with empathy, integrity and cultural awareness. This includes demonstrating inclusive behaviours and communicating in a way that fosters mutual respect and understanding, in line with the RCA’s values of Integrity, Inclusion, Collaboration, and Curiosity.

We believe these are crucial skills to be successful in your future careers and navigate an uncertain future, broaden your peer network at the College, and enable you to thrive beyond graduation.

Some day-to-day elements of studying at the RCA may be different from those at other universities around the world.

• You will actively shape your own learning. You’ll come in with a sense of what you want to do with your time at the College, and what you want to focus on in your research.
• Independent making. Our tutors don’t teach you how to develop your craft or making skills, but instead facilitate discussion for you to critically explore the ideas behind your practice. Technical support is available to help you explore new techniques or new processes, or master a skill or practice.
• Your work isn’t graded. Students at the RCA complete their programme with either a pass or a fail. The focus of assessment is on your personal development. An exception to this is the Art & Design Graduate Diploma.
• You will learn through peer-based conversations. Through these conversations we invite not only your tutors, but also your peers to discuss your work with you. Tutors facilitate these conversations and ask provocative questions about your work, rather than give you information or assess your work.
• Independent Research Project. The concluding unit of your studies will be an extended period of independent research. With the support of tutors, students define and design their own research project, which results in the production of a major thesis or practical project demonstrating intellectual engagement, technical skills and professional development. Most of our student’s final projects are practice-based and don’t require a written dissertation.

Students come to the RCA with backgrounds as varied as nuclear science, journalism, medicine, computer engineering, business administration and music. This range of perspectives enriches students, igniting new ways of thinking and sparking innovation as they move between media and materials.

We encourage our students to work in collaborative teams, spanning the RCA’s four schools and different programmes.

The unique AcrossRCA unit offered as part of our MA programmes gives staff and students a more formal chance to work together through a series of interdisciplinary collaborative projects that explore new ideas, approaches and skills.

AcrossRCA is compulsory for all MA programmes. Students joining one of our MFA, MDes, MRes, MArch, MEd programmes can choose between AcrossRCA or other elective units.

On AcrossRCA students respond to the complexity of an uncertain, changing world and are challenged to use their intellect and imagination to respond to urgent contemporary themes. This develops confidence about the contribution that the creative arts can make to our understanding and experience of the world around us.

We believe that creative invention and innovation spring from individual imagination.

We welcome students who demonstrate technical accomplishments and creative ability, but most importantly who can think, have creative ideas, find ways to generate and articulate those ideas, be curious about the world, see things that other people will not see and –

increasingly – show potential to work in teams comprising individuals of multidisciplinary backgrounds, which can accelerate the problem identification and solving cycles.

Our students are particularly good at combining things that others wouldn’t have thought of combining. They operate across multiple art and design disciplines, working within them, enhancing them and producing new knowledge. It’s synthetic thinking, applied in addition to analytic thinking. It produces new ways of utilising ideas and solutions that result in outcomes that would not arise from mono-disciplinary methods and approaches.

Our students develop the confidence to tackle global problems through experimental learning: a learning-by-doing model, as well as learning from tutors. It’s a method that embeds confidence, founding deep disciplinary knowledge in trial, error and experimentation.

When they reach a solution, our students know not only that what they are doing works, but why. Co-creation, working in groups and teams, brings the ability to articulate ideas.

Initiatives such as the Terra Carta Design Lab, or the Grand Challenge in the School of Design, give students the opportunity to apply these strategies to real life problems, from environmental sustainability and plastic pollution, to loss of marine habitat and new ocean economies.