ALL - Artist Led Learning in Higher Education

Funded by Erasmus+ 
Strategic Partnership K2
(2018-2021)

ALL will contribute to improve the creative competence of learners, educators, and pracademics (practitioners + academics) by developing an experimental framework for arts-based teaching methods. It will be carried out both in the project activities and also concretely applied in pre-existing educational programmes at the partner institutions and in collaboration with cultural industries/institutions and research environments. The aim is that the framework will develop original arts-based educational materials and an established collaboration amongst partners (included associated partners) that are sustainable and will be implemented in other higher educational (HE) institutions all over Europe. 

We will increase the quality and relevance of arts-based education within and beyond the participating institutions particularly by focusing on increased originality in educational tasks, closer collaboration between learners and artists/cultural industries, co-creation, increased labour market relevance of creative education, increased learning outcome by promoting embodied learning methods based on artistic problem solving, promotion of the full integration of arts-based methods in HE, and the development of the learners' creative competences.

The partnership will involve participants and other stakeholders that are experts of, passionate about and strongly interested in arts-based methods and their application to HE. The project is about building a laboratory for free and structured arts-based experimentation, in a co-creative partnership of leading academic experts who also have practical experiences with/in artistic practices. The laboratory we want to build together is not a physical infrastructure but a social space "in between", a fully creative environment, open for knowledge to be embodied, but also challenged, reframed and rethought.

This approach makes it possible to integrate and recognise alternative methods, such as sense-making, visualising, dramatizing, and metaphor-building in existing study programmes, even the ones that do not have art content, such as the programmes we target, mainly from pedagogy, learning, leadership training, organisational learning. The arts-based methods will be targeted to teachers/educators who desire a holistic and creative approach to teaching and who wish to stimulate their learners' creativity. HE institutions that support arts-based methods will be open to a systemic cultural change that values multiple and creative approaches to education. Artists are also expected to enhance their competence in applying artistic methods to non-arts contexts.

The impact we intend to produce is more of qualitative and sustainable than of quantitative nature. We will broadly disseminate the material developed by means of open source and virtual platforms, making them publicly available for use and exploitation, and we will also make sure that the participants will find meaningful resonance in the ALL methods, so being affected in their motivation to bring these methods further in their educational practices.