Session Three, 1.45pm-2.45pm

Spaces and performance transcending professional pedagogies

 

Professor Allan Owens, Faculty of Arts and Media/Faculty of Education, University of Chester
Professor Clive Holtham, Director of the Learning Laboratory, Cass Business School, City University

This presentation is the result of four years of collaboration between academics in two widely separated disciplines; business management and performing arts/education.

This collaboration has been underpinned by a belief in the importance of:

(1) an enactive, high-performance learning philosophy

(2) developing innovative spaces for learning: physical spaces, virtual spaces and mental spaces.

Specific outcomes and deliverables from the collaboration have included:

1. A new MBA module on arts-based perspectives to business, particularly including theatre, storytelling and arts-based spaces such as museums
   
2. Joint development of a “reflective space” – a sketchbook exercise used with both business and drama education student
   
3. Learning by walking about – appropriation of the dérive, a technique invented by anarchic French situationists in the 1950’s, for modern professional development in the UK
   
4. Promotion of exhibitions as a tool to engage learners and audiences outside the fine art areas to which exhibitions have typically been confined
   
5. Extreme collaboration workshop – to stimulate collaboration across wide disciplinary boundaries
   

The presentation will involve very brief introduction of some of the above approaches, an exercise relating to the approach, and a brief summing up of the lessons learnt.