Artist-Led Learning in Higher Education Erasmus Project

Project Title

Artist-Led Learning in Higher Education

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for higher education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2018

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Research and innovation; Creativity and culture

Project Summary

ALL will contribute to improving the creative competence of learners, educators, and pracademics (practitioners + academics) by developing an experimental framework for arts-based teaching methods. It will be carried out both in the project activities and also concretely applied in pre-existing educational programmes at the partner institutions and in collaboration with cultural industries/institutions and research environments. The aim is that the framework will develop original arts-based educational materials and an established collaboration amongst partners (included associated partners) that are sustainable and will be implemented in other higher educational (HE) institutions all over Europe. The approach is scalable, and provides clear benefits for the training of creative skills, methods, and tools for the participating students/learners, teachers, institutions and artists, while at the same time being fundamental to a positive valuing of creative methods in HE. We will increase the quality and relevance of arts-based education within and beyond the participating institutions particularly by focusing on increased originality in educational tasks, closer collaboration between learners and artists/cultural industries, co-creation, increased labour market relevance of creative education, increased learning outcome by promoting embodied learning methods based on artistic problem solving, promotion of the full integration of arts-based methods in HE, and the development of the learners’ creative competences.

The partnership will involve participants and other stakeholders that are experts of, passionate about and strongly interested in arts-based methods and their application to HE. ALL will develop new models for arts-based education, which are immediately applicable to pre-existing educational programmes. This application during the ALL project period will be part of our ability to test, evaluate and continuously adjust these methods during the three yearly cycles. The project is about building a laboratory for free and structured arts-based experimentation, in a co-creative partnership of leading academic experts who also have practical experiences with/in artistic practices. The laboratory we want to build together is not a physical infrastructure but a social space “in between”, a fully creative environment, open for knowledge to be embodied, but also challenged, reframed and rethought.

The arts-based methods can (and will) take different forms, by using a number of artistic media, traditions and approaches. Common to all will be the fact that teachers will be able to challenge the learners to work creatively across disciplines, by using original methods, and on real-world artistic problems. This approach makes it possible to integrate and recognise alternative methods, such as sense-making, visualising, dramatizing, and metaphor-building in existing study programmes, even the ones that do not have art content, such as the programmes we target, mainly from pedagogy, learning, leadership training, organisational learning. These are important steps for allowing for a widespread take-up of arts-based methods in HE, ensuring so the impact and sustainability of the project. The arts-based methods will be targeted to teachers/educators who desire a holistic and creative approach to teaching and who wish to stimulate their learners’ creativity. Learners will be targeted as end-users of the creative methods, but also in their role as future educators, facilitators of change, leaders developers and trainers. HE institutions that support arts-based methods will be open to a systemic cultural change that values multiple and creative approaches to education. Artists are also expected to enhance their competence in applying artistic methods to non-arts contexts. The impact we intend to produce is more of qualitative and sustainable than of quantitative nature. We will broadly disseminate the material developed by means of open source and virtual platforms, making them publicly available for use and exploitation, and we will also make sure that the participants will find meaningful resonance in the ALL methods, so being affected in their motivation to bring these methods further in their educational practices.

By the end of the project the aim is to have presented the work to at least 200 teachers at HE (multipliers) and involve actively min. 12 actively participating students/learners from the partner universities. The project partners include six universities from different countries, as well as three associated partners from as many universities. On average, each yearly cycle will involve min. 15 actively participating educators from across the six universities. While the project has a clear international scope, with the co-creation across nationalities and disciplines, we expect that the results are also useful on a local/regional/national scale, and will support more of such arts-based methods in HE.

Project Website

http://theallproject.net

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 377966 Eur

Project Coordinator

AALBORG UNIVERSITET & Country: DK

Project Partners

• UNIVERSITA CATTOLICA DEL SACRO CUORE
• HASKOLI ISLANDS
• CENTRO DE ESTUDOS SOCIAIS
• UNIVERSITY OF CHESTER
• LAPPEENRANNAN-LAHDEN TEKNILLINEN YLIOPISTO LUT
• AUDENCIA
• HOGSKULEN PA VESTLANDET