Entrepreneurial Challenges in Theatre Higher Education Curricula Erasmus Project

Project Title

Entrepreneurial Challenges in Theatre Higher Education Curricula

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 2017

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: International cooperation, international relations, development cooperation; Entrepreneurial learning – entrepreneurship education; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses

Project Summary

This project is related to observable changes and circumstances in the professional and social context of theatre acting and theatre related professions that imply to rethink the way theatre higher education schools judge their educational missions, design and implement their curricula and disseminate knowledge. The vanishing of a linear and safe art career, individual cross-border professional activity of teachers, students and creators, corporative creation, entrepreneurial strategies in arts education, imply changes in pedagogical methodologies that, though being felt as needed, are not common in the context of a conventional and often very technical teaching.
Arts Entrepreneurship or artistic entrepreneurship forms the conceptual framework of the project and its objectives, not only as the capacity to explore and develop an innovative idea and transform it in a value creating reality or object, something that seems very akin with arts creation, but also as a source for different pedagogical methodologies focused in building a position of discovery of possibilities and mainly of creating possibilities. This calls for new learning spaces where both students and teachers, the two direct target groups addressed by the project, dare to create and curate new unstable and uncertain processes and dare to investigate new circumstances for performance creativity through the developing of artistic and social competences.
Hence the primary goals of the project are, as stressed in Erasmus + Guide, in what respects strategic partnerships supporting exchange of good practices “to develop and reinforce networks, increase their capacity to operate at transnational level, share and confront ideas, practices and methods” (p. 120) in order to promote changes in curricula, pedagogical methodologies and principles in theatre higher education schools and enhance national and transnational employability. It is not expectable that the achievement of these goals, as the domains mentioned above, is a mere consequence of the completion of the project – some of them are long term, but it is equally true that the project contributed clearly for all these objectives and expects further continuity in what regards curricula development and improvement. In some respects, though, some of the project’s activities led to a personal strong impact, a collective feeling of an integrated learning context and practice, a scholarly resonance in the future shaping of the institutions, by responsible people, a pedagogical insight with immediate decision for changing.
EdE is an associated partner of the project mainly with the function of dissemination and peer discussion of the outcomes and continuity of its study. EdE works also as a common forum for schools that decided not to be participating organizations.
Participants were teachers, researchers, students, alumni, and administrative people. There were three different groups: the research group (7); the teachers’ group (7-10); the administrative group (7). The profile of the members of the research group is related to: high level of responsibility in the partner organization; specialized knowledge, research and experience in the topic; research interest in the topics and priorities of the project. Teachers’ group profile was mainly determined by interests in international cooperation and exchanging of good practices; students were chosen by a diversity of criteria according to internal decisions of each school. Admitting that this could have been problematic, the result was the opposite, since there was a diverse population of students regarding, not only to the fact that they were original from 6 different countries, with national and cultural specificities, but also to their original formation (several theatre-related or performing arts related programs), graduation, which managed to support each other offering diversity as one of the project’s fundamental assets.
The activities, further described, were the main product of the project and the actual analysis of artistic entrepreneurship, as well as, to some point, the cause of the final specificity and format of the intellectual outputs. These activities are not the place or the support of the research, but the actual research. In synthesis, we started for answering the meaning of artistic entrepreneurship to us and by establishing conceptual relations with other areas (c1), by doing this it came naturally to discuss and experiment an entrepreneurial approach in a craft based learning (c2) and, thus, we asked ourselves how to project the school of tomorrow and with whom (c3); we tried to envisage build and inhabit a radical form of that school in the longest activities (c4, c5), and finally we designed a disruptive, and yet functional, multiplier event that obeyed to the project’s dynamics in an academical context, presenting the project outcomes and continuing in the creation of perceptual awareness of the materials and knowledge producing.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 305390 Eur

Project Coordinator

INSTITUTO POLITECNICO DE LISBOA & Country: PT

Project Partners

• Fondazione Teatro di Pisa
• HOCHSCHULE FUER MUSIK UND THEATER HAMBURG
• ENSATT
• Guildhall School of Music and Drama
• LIETUVOS MUZIKOS IR TEATRO AKADEMIJA
• Den Danske Scenekunstskole