Curriculum Development Fund: Awarded Projects

SEE and CLTAD have announced their winning curriculum development projects, a funding scheme to support staff at University of the Arts London to experiment, research and develop new knowledge of enterprise and employability or sustainability within curricular.

Full list of projects:

‘Self-publish and Disseminate’
Awardees: Alex Schady, Louisa Minkin, Eva Weinmayr (AND Publishing)
College: CSM and CCW Disciplines: Fine Art and Design

A partnership development between CSM Postgraduate Fine Art and AND Publishing in order to devise a pilot program that could be embedded in the MA Fine Art curriculum linking the Fine Art postgraduate community across CCW and CSM. In 2011/12 AND received SEED Funding to develop AND Public, a self-publishing platform allowing artists, designers and curators to produce and disseminate their print-on-demand publications. www.andpublishing.org

The project will explore publication as pedagogical space and enable MA students to test new ways to circulate their work, create sustainable networks, and develop new publics and debates around their work. This inquiry into “publication” aims to enhance students’ competencies to connect their practice with a wider discourse and the world at large. It will explore the process of “making public” and its role for enterprise and employability for Fine Art graduates in relation to current Fine Art pedagogies.

‘The University Gallery: programming, publishing and practice’
Awardees: Joyce Cronin, Karen Di Franco
College: CSM Afterall and CCW Chelsea Space   
Disciplines: Contemporary Art, Publishing, Research and Exhibitions

This project looks at two distinct elements within enterprise and practice: the role of the university gallery as a space for pedagogy through exhibitions; and the role of publishing within the university and how this could benefit student enterprise. We will organise events, establish a network of university art galleries and produce new research with students.

We will work with the MRes Art programme and MA Culture Criticism and Curation at CSM and MA Curating and Collections at CCW, to embed our project into their respective curriculums, using UAL’s galleries and publishing culture as both a physical site and a research methodology for engaging students in ways to disseminate their research.

‘Access Through Tools’
Awardees: Paul Bailey, Sophie Demay, Ken Kirton, Catherine Smith, Sarah Temple
College: LCC Discipline: Graphic Design

‘Access Through Tools’ is a student-led design festival, exploring the construction of knowledge through design production, whilst bringing the students to the world and the world to the students. It will exhibit output from multiple projects from across courses in the School of Design and incorporates a programme of workshops and talks, curated by and featuring a mix of students, staff and professionals. ‘Access Through Tools’ adopts an embedded enterprise and employability approach; aiming to transfer the site of enterprise and employability learning to craft-led technical resource areas as a mode of engagement with both students and the design industry.

‘Source’
Awardees:  Artquest
College: SEE, CCW Wimbledon & Camberwell, CSM  Discipline: Visual Arts

Source creates new employability and enterprise learning resources and the pedagogic framework/support to enable tutors to use them, equipping art graduates with knowledge and skills to sustain and develop their careers as artists and freelancers. Source will be developed, tested and evaluated in collaboration with key staff at participating colleges, ensuring it’s responsive to student and academic’s needs, providing the peer advocacy required to embed it within the broader UAL fine art curriculum. These materials will holistically articulate the impact and relevance that enterprise and employability have for artists post-graduation in the context of an arts career, providing a template to be rolled out to other art colleges. Source will exist as an online resource rationalising and increasing accessibility to a wealth of data for students, graduates and academic staff.

‘Look At The (E)state We’re In (LATEWI)’
Awardees:  Jordan McKenzie, Patricia Ellis
College: CCW Camberwell              Discipline: Fine Art Social Practice

This project is designed to champion Camberwell College’s key values, and enhance students’ experience in engaging with their local environment and community.

LATEWI supplements and expands upon the content and skills delivered in Cambewell’s Undergraduate Fine Art Programme and can offer students the opportunity to further explore these by participating in and contributing to a large-scale professional project. In the course, students learn about social practice from the position of their own practice. LATEWI proposes to offer students the opportunity to test and try out possible career paths in preparation for graduation and consider social practice, not only in relation to their own work, but to think about how their interests and skills might transfer to employment or self-employment opportunities, such as curating, arts media, technical knowledge, and education.

Take To The Streets: Place, Site, Situation
Awardees: Jordan McKenzie, Annette Robinson
College: CCW Camberwell              Discipline: Fine Art: BA Drawing

Take To The Streets (TTTS) is a project that addresses how students engage with the cultural, physical and social spaces of Camberwell and Peckham, in order to provide a transitional period from the individual mode of study in the first year to a consideration of collaboration and environments beyond the studio in the second. TTTS will expand the notion of the studio as a place of practice by expanding it into the ‘outside’ world. TTTS is an intensive one-week workshop using the street as a test bed to create collaborative art works that test the ethics and sustainability of material use and consider the impact on a variety of contexts with a particular focus on the community in and around the Art College in Camberwell. 

The ‘Adaptive’ Student: The Industry of Nature 
Awardees: Sarah Temple, Tara Hanrahan
College: LCC      Discipline: Cross-disciplinary

In biological science, adaptation is a trait that allows a dynamic evolutionary process to occur. Adaptations contribute to fitness, survival and improvement. This project will ask students to apply (natural) biological and scientific processes to problems and challenges (known as bio-mimicry) thus developing a series of sustainable and insightful case studies and projects, useful to students (and practitioners) in relation to their discipline.

‘Organisms create what they need. There is a notion of self sufficiency and built-in sustainability.’  Janine Benyus (American Innovation Consultant and Author of Innovation Inspired by Nature)

Waste-Off  – A Green Week University Challenge and waste recycling resource
Awardees: Tara Hanrahan, Sarah Temple
College: LCC      Discipline: Cross-disciplinary

A University-wide project, which explores sustainable challenges and environmental design-thinking via upcycling, reinvention and student engagement, putting UAL Colleges head to head in collection and innovation.

This project will draw upon University connections (Conscientious Communicators, Integrating Sustainable Practice Network and the Learning, Teaching & Research Working Group / Sustainability Board, Meet the Tide…) and Industry collaborators Hendzel + Hunt (award-winning UAL alumni and upcycling duo).

Waste-Off will see four UAL sites (LCC, CSM, LCF and CCW) enter a week-long challenge to reinvent their own particular waste and create relevant and engaging items with local partners (business or community) that will inform and inspire. Taking place during Green Week 2015, but providing a legacy beyond this via the establishment of a waste network and site specific spaces for materials and object recycling.

Botanical Follies
Awardees: Carole Collet
College: CSM     Discipline: Material Futures

This is a 3 weeks project to be run on the first year MA Material Futures in May 2015. The aim of the project is to explore principles of permaculture, botany and synthetic biology to develop new design and manufacturing models for biological fabrications.

The project will invite contribution from an expert in permaculture, as well as a botanist and a synthetic biologist. Students will be developing their knowledge of an emerging landscape of new materials which can be grown, some following ethical organic farming principles, others arising from controversial, yet potentially sustainable high tech biological innovations.

Students will be challenged to develop a critical and ethical stance by confronting low tech to high tech proposals for bio material fabrications and by developing design and material prototypes. The project will be documented in an Pdf e-catalogue which will be a available for public download and will be featured both on the MA Material Futures website and the Design & Living Systems Lab at CSM.

Outside is Inside is Outside and So On…
Awardees: Stephen Carter, Ben Cain, Margot Bannerman
College: CSM     Discipline: Fine Art, Socially engaged practice, Narrative, Environments, Architecture, Spatial Practices

To develop and realize an ambitious public project for all Fine Art stage 1 XD students which considers the artist’s role in production and representation of public space, one of the key questions being how can artists create and shape social relevance?

The aim is to implement and further develop pedagogical practice that explicitly focuses upon the student’s ability to negotiate and realize outward facing independent projects. The learning outcomes of this process will provide a foundation for working collaboratively in the public sphere across commercial and creative spaces.

Students will work in small collaborative groups that are mentored, therefore learning to self-organise within a broad and safe structure. Using surveys, testing activities and reflection techniques the students will develop work that engages directly with a specific area in the immediate vicinity of Kings Cross.

The bulk of project will take place over one month in the Spring term when the collaborative projects will take place in public space during the course of a one-day event. This will then be reinterpreted for presentation within the Kings Cross building. Outcomes will also be made available via a dedicated new online resource.

This project will enhance the XD Stage I curriculum by prompting a practical enquiry that proposes that each student reflects upon their relationship to the social, cultural and built environments of Kings Cross, this being central to the development of our student’s pro-active involvement in sustainable practice.

Sustainability Factory
Awardees: Rob Lakin
College: LCF       Discipline: Fashion

The ‘Sustainability Factory’ a platform for Inter-disciplinary sustainability education will host a one-day co-curricular event delivering a variety of interactive co creational, workshops, lectures and seminars led by industry professionals and practitioners. The Factory is designed to develop undergraduate sustainability literacy and enhance graduate competencies and entrepreneurship through a day of experiential and problem based learning and importantly exposure to an exciting range of sustainability industries and thinking.

The factory will be open to all three LCF undergraduate schools in the summer term 2015 and students from across all year groups will be invited to participate.

The day will host 8/10 x workshops that will be delivered simultaneously and then repeat throughout the day, allowing students to self-select and create a ‘personalised bespoke one day curriculum’ that will enable the integration of new knowledge and the opportunity to expand upon prior learning and experience. The factory architecture will remove all discipline barriers thus promote greater opportunity for developing sustainability literacies through a dynamic interdisciplinary and co curricular learning environment.

Sustainability Factory Key Thinking:

Sustainability; Sustainability Literacy; Problem-Based Learning; Intellectual Development, Interdisciplinary Practice; Graduate Competencies, Entrepreneurship and Collaboration; Learning Communities; Co Curricular…

Protest Project
Awardees: Rob Philips
College: LCF       Discipline: Design for Sustainability

Fashion is a message. Our dress carries as much of a moral and political message as it personifies beauty, individuality, character and affiliations. This project engages systems thinking to recognize global challenges through design analysis and communication. Students’ visual responses act as catalysts for change through conversations they encourage with each other and public audiences. The Protest Project is a medium for students to develop their design ethic and voice. Artifacts are created through critical discourse exploring environmental, social and cultural issues and learning through practice. These are communicated digitally to encourage a reciprocal process of communication towards better lives.