May 15th 2008, The CAPITAL Centre

The CAPITAL Centre hosted a one-day symposium exploring space, performance, and pedagogy. The programme included presentations and workshops delivered by practitioners and academics involved in a range of collaborative projects within the university, including material from Medicine, Business, the Institute of Education, and English. The symposium was attended by representatives of nine different departments in the University including Mathematics, Sociology, Theatre Studies, Film, and Law. The aims of the day were to promote performance as a learning strategy, to consider the functions and use of teaching spaces in this context, and to foster further development of interdepartmental and cross-disciplinary collaboration. In a series of interactive and dynamic presentations, symposium participants attempted to reflect the principles of enactive, embodied or "open-space" learning. The events were extremely well received as the following anonymised feedback demonstrates:

"I wanted to thank you for an amazing event yesterday that had a real buzz of excitement and configured people differently from across the university. The representation of other departments from the Life Sciences, Medicine and Social Studies showed that the CAPITAL centre and the notion of pedagogy through performance is reaching out beyond the Arts and Humanities Faculty - even leaving at lunchtime, I had time to talk to colleagues from WMS, Law, and WBS."

"A day very well spent . . . fascinating in the diversity of presentations and subject matter."

"The symposium offered a great opportunity to gather experts/practitioners from different areas/genres and helped me to think about future collaborations with them."

Out of the symposium has emerged the "Space, Performance, and Pedagogy" group which meets once a term to discuss - amongst other things - collaboration, ideas for projects, and bids for funding.

A full schedule for the day's events may be found here.