Art, Design, Media Creative Learning and Teaching

Ravensbourne, London
29 November 2011

ADM-HEA’s 5th Creative Learning and Teaching Day provided an opportunity for art, design and media colleagues to come together to hear about and discuss current research, developments and innovations in higher education teaching and learning. 

This last ADM-HEA event provided a platform for many members of the subject network; teaching fellows, project holders and Networks contributors to present the results of their research and development projects and share their rich and abundant experience. A potentially melancholy day was lifted by the evident good work, interest and enthusiasm of the eighty participants congregated at Ravensbourne on the Greenwich peninsula.

The higher education reforms and their implications for different institutions and disciplinary contexts provided the focus for Aaron Porter’s opening keynote. Shifted motivations, modified choices, higher expectations - particularly with regard to levels of involvement in curriculum development - were all posited as likely outcomes of the new higher education context.

The development, study and evaluation of learning and teaching strategies evident from the presentations and workshops will perhaps provide a degree of protection in these challenging circumstances. A recurring theme related to the importance of support networks for both students and staff: to provide additional learning opportunities; to facilitate continuing professional development; to enable collaborative and cross-institutional research; and to develop coherent and shared understandings of our disciplines. This theme reemerged in Professor Bruce Brown’s keynote. He spoke of a creative arts education in the 1960s ‘founded on networks of individuals who used the art school’s space to stimulate sustained conversations from which new ideas could be born…a system based on the social networking of highly creative minds so they engaged with each other.’ This dynamic approach to learning ‘had yet to evolve the scholarly infrastructures that were needed to make this intensely questioning environment sustainable and stable’; in short its teaching and learning practices lacked scholarship and articulation.

The Creative Learning and Teaching day was testament to more recent developments in the scholarship of teaching and learning in higher education art, design and media disciplines; and to the willingness of colleagues to articulate, share and discuss this scholarship across departmental and institutional borders. The event was organised by ADM-HEA in collaboration with the Higher Education Academy Discipline Leads, Carolyn Bew and John Mundy. We thank the presenters, Ravensbourne staff and students who helped to make it such an enjoyable and useful event. 

Presentations from the event are available from: www.adm.heacademy.ac.uk/events/presentations-from-art-design-media-creative-learning-and-teaching

Photos: Jenny Embleton
Listing photo: Ravensbourne windows from main lobby
Header photo: Einar Thorsen presentation