Creative Foundations – exploring student experience and understanding of creativity

Jonathan Wright with Frania Hall

THE PROJECT

Creative foundations is a level 4 first year unit that is taken by all the students across the media communications programme. This encompasses nearly 200 students.
It combines some teaching across all courses with course-specific elements.
The unit involves the development of creative skills – it allows students to be creative within their discipline but also see how creativity connects the different subjects

The full presentation is here and a more detailed report is here.

Now in its third year the unit has introduced refinements based on feedback year on year. In response to feedback this year the focus has been on:
Adjusting the assessment to achieve a balance between flexibility and disciplinary focus – generic assessment to produce 4 creative responses can be adapted to the specific creative skills of each course
Clearer understanding of how creative skills are assessed
Focus on helping students to feel close to their disciplines while participating across the programme (lectures were general and seminars activities were course-specific)

To understand the student experience of the Creative Foundations unit
To assess efforts to achieve a balance between wider disciplinary thinking and course-specific working
To learn more about how students define creativity and what they learn from the unit that they take forward into the second block