Creative Futures Academy
The academy aims to empower creative practitioners from a range of disciplines, and at different stages of their learning, with the sustainable and adaptable skills and attributes that they will require to shape the future of Ireland’s creative sector.
Overview
Project duration: Ongoing
Partners: IADT, UCD, and the creative sector including the Arts Council, Design & Craft Council, Institute of Designers in Ireland, RTÉ and Screen Ireland
Funding: Higher Education Authority, Human Capital Initiative, Government of Ireland
Impact
The Creative Futures Academy (CFA) has fast-tracked reform and innovation within Ireland’s creative industries, building upon best practices available nationally and internationally to design radical new forms of learning.
These new modes, methods and tools support academics in the development of new programmes, modules and learning outcomes, helping them to future proof graduates with industry relevant skills for emerging creative methods, thinking and technologies.
This approach has enabled the project partners to meet the government’s strategic aims and objectives, and wider sectoral and industry objectives.
Challenge
The world needs more creative makers, thinkers, artists, designers and innovators. From upskilling to reskilling, to finding creative solutions and making new networks, academia and industry need to change the way learning works.
Process
The Creative Futures Academy – a consortium led by NCAD, in partnership with IADT, UCD and Ireland’s creative sector was awarded €10,018,526 from the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science’s Human Capital Initiative Pillar 3 fund.
The project seeks to:
- Increase provision in areas of identified skills need for enterprise.
- Future proof graduates with creative arts and industry relevant skills.
- promote and embed transversal skills.
- reform and innovate higher education provision building on best practice available nationally and internationally.
The NCAD team, in partnership with colleagues at IADT and UCD, have developed a series of pedagogical structures, frameworks and tools through a series of participatory design workshops with stakeholders from Ireland’s creative sector.
The NCAD team has developed a radical new programme architecture and set of learning development guides and tools that has enabled the development and roll out of a tranche of new postgraduate awards across art, design, visual culture and education.
The architecture and pedagogical scaffolding facilitates the acquisition of micro-credentials and mobility between three academic institutions, enabling new and more flexible ways to study that are conducive to the professional development of creative practitioners across the careers, and gives them agency over how they learn.
Underpinning the development of this new provision has been the creation of a set of learning tools and frameworks that can be used to support the planning and development of programmes in the creative arts and also empowers learners to connect curriculum to professional practice.
Output
The project has developed new Learning Development tools and frameworks, begun to deliver a diverse and agile suite of new undergraduate, postgraduate and cpd courses, and helped foster new forms of partnership with industry.
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