Course summary

The Arts, Creativity and Education (ACE) thematic route offers students the opportunity to explore urgent themes in arts and education research taking place globally today. By ‘urgent’, we mean contemporary debates, practices, policy agendas and epistemic dialogues currently shaping the way art and education are practiced across a variety of contexts, that we might want to further explore or that we are committed to changing. It includes contributions from specialists in a range of disciplines, including performing arts, drama, theatre, visual art, design and technology. This course recognises that artistic practices can serve as an essential research tool in our respective fields and therefore makes available studio and performance facilities as well as alternative forms of assessment. The main education aims are:

• examine contemporary theoretical frameworks used in the study of education and its constituent disciplines (including decoloniality; posthumanism and materialism; critical pedagogies past and present)

• provide training in research methods appropriate to arts and education, including artistic research practices;

• advance students’ capacity for professional reflection and judgement by thinking through real world dilemmas and complexities;

• cater for a range of specialists interested in the field of education or one of its constituent disciplines

• a comprehensive understanding of research techniques, and a thorough knowledge of the literature applicable to their specific educational domain;

• demonstrated originality in the application of knowledge, together with a practical understanding of how research and enquiry are used to create and interpret knowledge in their field;

• shown abilities in the critical evaluation of current research and research techniques and methodologies;

• demonstrated self-direction and originality in tackling and solving problems, and acted autonomously in the planning and implementation of research.