Creative Futures Academy was delighted to host a national forum for academic institutions entitled ‘Exploring Creative Pedagogy’ on Tuesday 23rd April. This one day symposium was held in Trapdoor @ UCD, the new home of CFA on the UCD campus. The event saw the coming together of staff from all three institutions: National College of Art and Design, The Institute of Art Design + Technology, Dun Laoghaire and University College Dublin to share their insights and experience of creative practice and pedagogy.
The symposium offered the opportunity to explore the innovative approaches to teaching & learning as experienced through the CFA partnership over the past three years. Staff presented a series of case studies and perspectives on key learnings related to the delivery of the CFA programme within creative education.
The first section of the day saw staff and members from the Academic Development Group present their experiences and findings across the various institutions and explore the benefits to learners they have experienced from cross collaboration.
A series of prompts were issued in advance for afternoon breakout sessions. These discursive sessions explored pedagogic themes and areas of collaboration and overlap and were facilitated by members of the CFA Academic Development Group. Topics for discussion were as follows:
Being ‘creative’ in education often mobilises emotional responses for educators and students. In this session, we will consider how emotion influences and informs the teaching encounter. We will also exchange experiences and explore our motivations for undertaking this kind of work.
Creators can leverage extended reality (XR) technologies to engage audiences with their work in innovative ways, blurring the lines between the physical and virtual realms. In this session we will be demonstrating and discussing how augmented reality installations and virtual galleries offer many possibilities for exploration and expression.
Archives are invaluable collections of records, data, cultural artefacts, images, sounds and textual documents preserved, controlled and cared for in formal public and private institutions. This discussion group will consider the potential for creative practitioners’ use of archives; the challenges of maintaining archival integrity in creative outputs; cross methodologies, and the ethical use of archival material.
Sarah Glennie, Director of NCAD and David Smith, President of IADT presented closing remarks with Louise Allen, CFA Director and Regina Uí Chollatáin, College Principal and Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities at UCD. They spoke about the importance of working together on behalf of creative industries and education in Ireland. CFA is an enabler to provide opportunity for collaboration and allows for traditional educational silos to be broken down and offers a richness in the sharing of perspectives.
