Conference attendance

1. Summary/ reflections from the workshop I facilitated at the Music Faculty, Ionian University, Greece(22 November, 2008) can be found here.

2. The 2nd Reflective Conservatoire Conference: Building Connections took place at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and the Barbican Conference Centre from 28 February-3 March 2009. One of the key questions presenters sought to answer was ‘How should we prepare students for professional life and for life-long learning?’ I singled out two paper presentations that are particularly interesting to the CI project’s aims and objectives and the abstracts are presented below.

The first was delivered by Ms Penelope Tobin ‘Breaking down barriers – building up potential: collateral soft skills development through arts education’.

‘Within a comparatively short space of time, the artist’s way of working has shifted from an oddity to an aspiration. Without artists changing their modus operandi, the world has changed around them, and their practices have moved from maverick to mainstream. The soft skills that support their artistry – the skills of attitude and behaviour, such as communication, flexibility, teamwork, and self-motivation – are now highly prized, and perceived as lacking in all other sectors. Barrier Breakers, the charitable organisation I founded in 2000, aims to derive more value from this underused resource, for the benefit of artists and the wider society.

Soft skills are considered the essential 21st Century skills, yet they continue to be sidelined, primarily because their characteristics are too slippery to be captured by any remodelled version of currently accepted assessment mechanisms. I created Barrier Breakers Methodology (BBM) in response to this problem: it grew out of my experience as a jazz pianist/composer. The years spent performing, recording, and touring with my sextet and 17-piece jazz orchestra, along with my time in the UK and USA as an educator are the backdrop to this new approach, and the role of artists has been central to its development and application, for example:

Through arts-based training, artists provide not only their core subject, but an enriching, engaging, effective vehicle through which to deliver soft skills.

BBM provides artists with a mechanism to evidence the extraordinary soft skills capacity of their educational work, adding value and credibility.

Students undertaking arts-based training develop the soft skills essential for employability within or outside the creative industries.

Raising awareness about the extent and value of artists’ soft skills increases respect and career opportunities.

Evidence of BBM’s efficacy has been gathering during extensive R&D and piloting in a broad range of contexts, including arts education and training programmes for adults, disadvantaged young people, and woman offenders; in 2007 it won the national Performance Hub prize in recognition of its innovative approach to supporting 3rd sector organisations, and is currently receiving support from the Adventurous Capital Fund in order to plan its national rollout in 2009. At the conference I would like to outline BBM’s purpose, position and content, share findings from recent case studies, and further explore how BBM can benefit artists, educators, and employers.’

(Conference Reader, p. 129)

The second paper of interest to the project was delivered by Ms Ursula Kelly, ‘Beyond bugs and drugs: the wider economic value of knowledge transfer and cultural outreach in HEI’s’.

‘There is considerable policy interest in the economic role of HEI’s and in how HE can support wider economic growth and development through ‘knowledge transfer’ from HEI’s. The UK Higher Education Funding Councils in particular have been seeking ways to capture the impact of knowledge transfer and to devise metrics to support resource allocation for knowledge transfer activities.

The traditional approach to assessment of ‘knowledge transfer’ activity has tended to focus on those aspects of HE work that are commercial or market-based, relate to interaction with businesses and which are also relatively easy to measure (licensing, patents, consultancy contracts and so on). However, HEI’s engage in a wide range of ‘knowledge transfer’ activity (such as cultural outreach and community interaction) which is neither market-based nor intended to be commercially focused.

These non-market knowledge transfer activities of HEI’s could also have significant economic and social value linked to their support of knowledge flow to the wider community.

This paper presents a new perspective on knowledge transfer from institutions and introduces a new methodological framework, based on fundamental welfare economics, for capturing the value of at least some aspects of non-commercial HE activity. It discusses the findings of a pilot study which analysed cultural outreach activities of Scottish HEI’s, together with their community engagement and public policy advisory activity. The study proposed new ways to estimate the economic value of some of these areas of work’.

(Conference Reader, p.88-89).

3. Abstract for Learning to be Professional Conference:

'Work related learning and the development of creativity: finding one’s voice in small-group collaborative activity' 

There is now a growing body of research around the development of creativity in higher education (HE) and creativity is a key component of government education agendas. Within creative arts HE, there has been a significant focus on work-based learning –the knowledge and skills acquired as students engage in professional activities as part of their course. Yet, little is known of undergraduates’ learning experiences in work-related activities within public and third sector settings. Within collaborative work-related activities, constructing arts-based knowledge involves meaningful exchanges among perspectives within the individual and among members of peer groups. In this sense, learning is about collaborative meaning-making and knowledge construction. In collaborative arts-based contexts, where the creative object (as much as the individual, relations and contexts) becomes the focus of attention, the dichotomy between learning and creating breaks down.    

This paper presents and discusses initial findings from a small-scale research study of creative arts students’ work-related learning experiences within educational settings. Focusing on The Sorrell Foundation’s Young Design Programme (whereby school pupils act as clients by commissioning a school design project and their consultants are students of design at a college or a university), data is presented both from previous cohorts of undergraduates and a small group of current participants collaborating on the programme. The case study employs focus group discussions; individual interviews with student-group members; and participant observation of group members as they engage in within-group work and interact with their client team. Institutional documents and interviews with students’ tutors and organisers of the YDP provide contextual information. 

Ongoing data analysis reveals strong links between the development of creativity and collaborative work through the need to construct an individual identity; make connections between old and new knowledge; engage with novel ways of thinking; and deal with conflicting interests and constraints. A key outcome of this work-related experience is the development of students’ voice, in that it provides a framework where opportunities to take initiatives and greater responsibility for their own learning abound; and, essentially, an empowering experience where autonomy and independent thought are highly prized as a result of valuing individual students’ ‘expertise’. Implications for learning to be a professional through acknowledging the value of and embedding these experiences within a life-wide curriculum are discussed.