A Manifesto for Creative Training and Education
If you’re reading this post, you’ve found our website. Welcome! We’re really excited you’re here. BRICK is a new project for our team, but we’re building it on deep foundations. Our team has been working closely together for more than a decade and we have over fifty years of combined experience as creatives, artists and educators. Until recently, we were responsible for one of the UK’s most innovative theatre training degree courses. Now we’re setting out on a new venture, bringing our unique combination of creative collaboration, social mission and academic experience to a new set of clients, communities and participants.
Prior to creating BRICK, we were responsible for an innovative set of undergraduate and postgraduate theatre programmes. As well as teaching, our work encompassed curriculum design and rigorous quality assurance, ongoing professional development (we are all Fellows and Senior Fellows of the Higher Education Academy, a widely-recognised professional standards framework), as well as many creative projects, partnerships and productions over the years. Our approach to teaching and learning was founded on three key philosophies, which this article will describe – giving you a flavour of how BRICK works and the values we bring to our projects and clients.
Collaboration is key
Theatre is a collaborative art-form, and it relies on collaboration for its very existence. The director Trevor Nunn puts it best, saying:
“Theatre is a collective art, best undertaken in generous collaboration. Plays are illuminated and communicated by actors, directors and designers, but their work is individually incomplete, and entirely interdependent.” [1]
This might be true of theatre, but it’s useful everywhere. The ability to collaborate effectively relies on a wide range of highly versatile soft skills such as interpersonal communication, working in diverse teams across different specialisms, articulating complex ideas in engaging ways, and making effective decisions – often under time pressure or with tight resources. We believe that developing, practising and applying collaborative skills is the best way to achieve productivity, innovation and a sense of collective endeavour, whatever the context. We are all interdependent!
Interdisciplinary approaches
Closely related to this is our interdisciplinary approach. When we say “theatre training”, it’s understandable that many people might think of things like acting, singing or dancing, and perhaps wonder why that’s relevant to them – especially if their day-to-day work is in a field not conventionally thought of as being “creative”.
Of course, teaching some of those skills was relevant to the work we were doing with young theatre-makers, but we emphasised a much more interdisciplinary approach than other more traditional training providers. We were particularly interested in research that shows how 88% of people with a theatre background go on to work in other industries such as film, television, media and design. In this way, theatre training can be seen as a “gateway” to the wider creative industries, because of its unique mix of hard and soft skills as well as its emphasis on testing things out in real life. More than any other industry, creative people say that theatre is where they get their first big break. [2]
Instead of focusing on a narrowly-specialised skillset, we encouraged students to expose themselves to a wide range of disciplines which were all relevant to their interests in different ways, and particularly to consider theories and approaches to design, technical skills and project management. For some, this allowed them to discover career paths they didn’t even know existed, allowing them to broaden their portfolio and work in a more diverse range of settings. For others, even though they remained highly specialised, they developed a deeper understanding of the other disciplines that support their practice, allowing them to collaborate more effectively and gain new insights and perspectives on their own work.
For all students, the interdisciplinary approach meant that they developed a much larger toolkit of graduate skills, making them more employable and giving them a more confident understanding of the industry. We think this philosophy translates into many other contexts.
Bespoke learning Experiences
One of our core beliefs is that learners – whether they are students, clients, workshop participants or anything in between – should be facilitated to be co-creators of their own learning. Good teaching is not about didactic professors transferring their knowledge in a one-way exchange. Instead, it is about having a shared experience, encountering problems in practice, and solving them together.
One influential theory for this is David Kolb’s cycle of experiential learning. Kolb proposed that all learning can be broken down into four stages: concrete experience (doing), reflective observation (reviewing), abstract conceptualisation (concluding) and active experimentation (planning) – before starting the loop again with another experience based on your new plans. The idea is that you can enter the cycle at any point, but it is necessary to go through all four stages in order to learn. [3]
Imagine you are giving a presentation for the first time. You get through your slides (concrete experience), but afterwards you feel you didn’t get your key points across (reflective observation). You conclude that, although the content works well, perhaps you were moving through your topics too quickly and not giving the audience time to absorb your points (abstract conceptualisation). You review your presentation, building in a brief summary to each section so that your key points are clearer (active experimentation), before trying it again with a new group – and so the cycle continues. Each time, you have a practical learning experience that actively builds on your knowledge and skills.
Student-centred learning is about understanding that all of our practical experiences have the potential to be learning experiences. In this way, our focus as teachers and educators is less about communicating content (although that’s still important!), and more on facilitating shared experiences and tailoring them to each learner in terms of their needs, abilities, interests and aims. In this way, diversity becomes a vital resource, allowing us to place a firm emphasis on inclusivity as a way of sharing high-quality experiences.
Our Success
We’re really proud of the impact we’ve achieved with these three simple philosophies. In a higher education context, this included a consistently high graduate employability rate, peaking at 100% of students in skilled work or further study the year after they graduated. Independent assessors recognised our interdisciplinary approach and our emphasis on flexible, student-centred learning as an enviable model for innovative teaching. Our inclusive approach means that community and wellbeing are at the heart of our practice, providing a supportive foundation which allows learners to take more risks and learn through experimentation.
From working in a large and diverse university, to bringing that experience to new organisations, communities and clients, BRICK’s values are deceptively simple – but they contain multitudes! We can’t wait to get started.
Sound good? Want to talk about ways bespoke creative training might benefit your organisation? Send an enquiry today!
[1] Trevor Nunn, ‘Introduction’ in Ralph Koltai: Designer for the Stage, ed. by Sylvia Backemeyer (London: Lund Humphries, 1997), pp. 8–9.
[2] Alexandra Albert and others, ‘Publicly-funded arts as an R&D lab for the creative industries? A survey of theatre careers in the UK’, Creative & Cultural Skills (2013).
[3] David Kolb, Experiential Learning: experience as the source of learning and development, 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2015).
