Unsigned stories
with Apple Europe
The project in 50 words. A punchy first section that allows the reader to immediately understand why this is such a kick-arse project. Key facts, who was involved, what happened and what everybody learnt from the experience collectively.
In 2004, I was employed by the University of the Arts, London (UAL) to lead a new vocational initiative at Camberwell College of Arts. This involved launching a series of Foundation Degrees (FDA’s), which were being promoted at that time as a two-year alternative to a traditional academic degree. Over the years that followed we set about building relationships with London’s rapidly expanding creative community and established a genuinely new approach to learning and teaching at the University. We coined the term ‘learning with industry’ to describe the way we worked and celebrated this through a blog of the same name.
The necessity to reach out to the professional community in London started a series of exciting conversation. In 2007, Matt Wade and Sophie Walter from Moving Brands were part of an advisory panel for the revalidation and re-design of our curriculum. The relationship we established at this time has shaped my approach to curriculum design and has been hugely influential to the development of my career. Initially, Sophie and Matt worked with us to organise a collaborative project that involved their teams mentoring small groups of our students and culminated in team presentations in the studios at Moving Brands, but in the later years we worked together on more ambitious and innovative projects. Sophie left Moving Brands soon after to work with the director of groundbreaking digital arts organisation, onedotzero and asked me to be involved in an educational initiative they were developing. As a result I was part of the team that developed ‘Cascade’, the award-winning education program designed to support the ‘onedotzero, Adventures in Motion’ festival at the BFi. Cascade provided the opportunity to test models for educational practice that would better respond to the shifts in behaviour that new technology was bringing to contemporary society.
The insight I gained from projects such as these and the partnered approach we established on the FDA led to a secondment funded by the UAL Centre for Learning & Teaching in Art & Design (CLTAD) during which I set out to examine best practice models for ‘work based learning’. Findings from this project informed some exciting curriculum initiatives at Camberwell and laid the foundation for ‘Alt/ShiftUAL’.
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