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CETL Final Self-Evaluation The CAPITAL Centre, University of Warwick Creativity and Performance in Teaching and Learning CAPITAL Centre, CETL Final Self-evaluation. 1

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Page 1: CETL Final Self-Evaluation · Web view5.2 That despite using a number of dissemination methodologies (presentations, open registration conferences, colloquia by invitation, website,

CETL Final Self-Evaluation

The CAPITAL Centre, University of WarwickCreativity and Performance in Teaching and Learning

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EVALUATIVE REFLECTION

Question 1 : Please reflect on how effective your CETL has been in contributing to the objectives set out for the CETL initiative when it started. Be concise and do not exceed 1,000 words for the whole of the question

1.1 To reward practice that demonstrates excellent learning outcomes for students.

See 2.8 below on Creative Fellowships.

1.2 To enable practitioners to lead and embed change by implementing approaches that address the diversity of learners’ needs, the requirements of different learning contexts, the possibilities for innovation and the expectations of employers and others concerned with the quality of student learning.

a. CAPITAL has applied, embedded and disseminated practices, methods and modes that address these approaches (see 7 below for further details). CAPITAL’s ‘workshop’ model of teaching and learning enables students to develop their subject expertise rapidly and thoroughly, but the social constructivist nature of the work means that students also acquire and enhance ‘soft’ and transferable skills in areas such as collaboration, teamwork, dialogue, self-management, and self-direction.

b. Practice-based workshops allow students to work on the content of their disciplines but in different ways to the standard lecture and seminar format, promoting diversity of approach. Warwick’s MA in Creative and Media Enterprises (Centre for Cultural Policy Studies) offers a module entitled ‘Cultural Entrepreneurship’ and CAPITAL’s task was to replicate the difficulties associated with pitching a business idea. We were asked to suggest ways in which participants could be taken out of their ‘comfort zone’ and forced to confront difficult situations. The purpose was to prepare participants for difficult situations they might encounter in the workplace while pitching a challenging, unusual or complex idea/product/service. The group of 21 students participating this year (there were 24 last year) represented 14 different nationalities and a range of learning styles. Feedback was almost universally positive with 80% of participating students over two years saying in their evaluations that the sessions had improved confidence and forced them to address the notion of ‘risk’.

c. Similar practice-based workshops have been devised and/or delivered for the Graduate School Skills Programme (GSSP) and the University’s Learning and Development Centre (LDC) on ‘Networking’ and ‘Performing Expertise’. Both sessions are designed to offer postgraduates, researchers, and early-career academics the opportunity to develop confidence, communication skills, and self-management skills by confronting them with a simulation of an academic conference then working through their responses. The sessions are supported by CAPITAL’s student ensemble (see 12.2 for further details). 500 individuals have taken part in these generic vocational sessions.

d. For the Warwick Business School MBA programme, CAPITAL has devised sessions on ‘Presence’ to develop in participants the skills they require to command attention and present themselves with confidence in the workplace.

1.3 To enable institutions to support and develop practice that encourages deeper

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understanding across the sector of ways of addressing students’ learning effectively.

CAPITAL has disseminated its findings across the sector in three ways:

a. Exemplar sessions: to demonstrate developing models of good practice, conducted at the University of Hull, the University of Central Lancashire, Oxford Brookes University, the University of Liverpool, the University of Sheffield, the University of Strathclyde, University of Newcastle, University of Teesside.

b. Conferences and colloquia: A major dissemination event in September 2009, ‘Creativity and Performance in Teaching and Learning’, brought together high level players in innovative practice from diverse institutions from Russell Group members to post-1990 Universities: Kings College London, The University of Wolverhampton, University of Chester, Nottingham University, York St. John University, Northumbria University, Queens University Belfast, and the University of Surrey, the HEA, National Union of Students, English and Media Centre, English Subject Centre and UKLE. As a result workshop events were requested by Queen’s Belfast, Hull, York St John. A tour of Warwick partner universities in the USA is planned in spring 2010 to include Vanderbilt, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Loyola (Baltimore) and San Francisco State.

c. Work with the English Subject Centre: co-organisers of ‘Devise Wit; Write Pen’: Teaching Shakespeare conference (Stratford-upon-Avon, 2006); contributing to Renewals: Reconfiguring English in the 21st Century (Royal Holloway London, 2007) and to Sounding it Out (Leeds Metropolitan, 2009).

1.4 To recognize and give greater prominence to clusters of excellence that are capable of influencing practice and raising the profile of teaching excellence within and beyond their institutions.

a. Exploiting the work of award-winning teachers: working with Warwick’s National Teaching Fellows (Professors David Morley, Jonothan Neelands and Ed Peile, Paul Raffield, and Robert O’Toole), and holders of Warwick Awards for Teaching Excellence (Professors Carol Rutter, Gary Watt, Tony Howard and Drs Nick Monk and Jane Kidd), to produce innovative teaching and learning.

b. Recognising good practice in other departments: Warwick’s School of Law offered innovative performance-based learning in two of its modules: Law and Literature and Origins, Images, and Cultures of English Law. CAPITAL provided the module leaders with open teaching spaces and collaborative support from the RSC\Warwick Playwright in Residence, Adriano Shaplin who offered a professional perspective on theatre practice. From this emerged an interdisciplinary module available to English and Law students, ‘Shakespeare and the Law: On Trial’ which is recruiting successfully (18 in 2009/10; 6 in 2008/9). Both module leaders subsequently received Warwick Awards for Teaching Excellence (WATEs); one has a been awarded National Teaching Fellowship that was based on this work and one has been promoted to full professor.

c. Forming special interest groups: CAPITAL’s Space, Performance and Pedagogy termly seminar brings together innovative teachers from across the University to discuss and demonstrate new methods in teaching and learning. The SPP group has

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65 members, working alongside the Faculty Teaching and Learning Fora, and includes academics from heads of department to postgraduate tutors from all faculties. Collaborations with the Medical School on the ‘Sleep Special Study’ module (60 trainee GPs over two years) have emerged from these sessions, as well as work with the University’s commercial managers (30 individuals).

d. Work with other CETLs: Collaborations have included work with Reinvention Centre, CILASS and QUB’s Centre for Excellence in the Performing Arts.

1.5 To demonstrate collaboration and sharing of good practice and so enhance the standard of teaching and effective learning throughout the sector.

See 1.3 a-c above; 4; 8.5 and 10.

1.6 To raise student awareness of effectiveness in teaching and learning in order to inform student choice and maximize student performance.

a. Over 10,400 FTEs have now experienced the practical teaching and learning methods developed at CAPITAL, and special events, word of mouth and internal advertising ensure regular contact with students pass. CAPITAL has excellent links with the Students’ Union through the University’s four student drama societies. The SU Educational Officer is ex officio a member of the Advisory Board.

b. There have been 9 student performance projects. Students are invited to propose projects which support and demonstrate an active connection between student drama and the curriculum engaging with learning through performance. Projects should emphasise learning experiences and be interdisciplinary: e.g. a continuation of an idea coming out of an academic course; performance of a set text or course-related text; new writing connected to academic work; collaborative work exploring the process of learning through performance.

c. A longitudinal study of the compulsory 3rd year Shakespeare module in the Department of English, begun in 2007, has shown a 10% increase 1st class degrees among students who selected the performative seminars that use CAPITAL’s methods.

d. An annual survey of prospective students in the Department of English, begun in 2010/11, seeks to measure CAPITAL’s impact on students’ choice of university. Based on a sample of 20% of those attending interviews for places on the courses offered by the Department, 18% said that the existence of CAPITAL would/had influence/d their decision to attend.

e. CAPITAL 's collaboration with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and English Speaking Union on The Great Shakespeare Debate is in its fourth year. This event for UK schools was inaugurated in 2006. Encouraging students to embody and perform their ideas in debate, to participate actively with Shakespeare and to work together as a team, is central to the CAPITAL ethos. AS and A2 students are supported and mentored by students from Warwick, Birmingham, Oxford, Exeter and other universities. Since 2007, 23 students (15 from Warwick) have served as mentors and 36 schools have participated in the finals in Stratford-upon-Avon. In 2009 Warwick hosted the regional heats involving 120 school students.

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Question 2: Please set out the aims and objectives specific to your CETL at the start; and for each one reflect how well these have been achieved. Be concise and do not exceed 1,000 words for the whole of the question.

Please See Appendix 3 for CAPITAL’s two-year aims and objectives (2005-2007) and 13 below, and Appendix 4 for CAPITAL’s Five-Year objectives. Please see, also, Appendix 5 for a list of all CAPITAL events and activities.

Reflection:

2.1 The CAPITAL Centre was originally conceptualised on the double foundations of ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘performance’. Under the motto ‘Good teaching is like good rehearsal’, it set up a partnership between the Royal Shakespeare Company and the University of Warwick to bring the creative and working practices of each organisation into play in the partner’s domain.

2.2 While CAPITAL’s initial focus was on English and Theatre Studies, one of its key

objectives was to draw in expertise and excellence across the University to share experience and disseminate creative practice. The Space, Performance and Pedagogy Group set up by CAPITAL has achieved this and has gone on to set the agenda for interdisciplinary collaboration across the University. CAPITAL currently works with the Warwick Writing Programme, the Institute of Education, Philosophy, Chemistry, Medicine, Law, Warwick Business School, Cultural Policy Studies, the Institute of Health, the Learning and Development Centre, the Graduate Skills programme, Warwick Arts Centre and ELab, and is in discussion with Psychology about future collaborations.

2.3 From the first, CAPITAL aimed to build on Artistic Director Michael Boyd’s vision of the RSC as ‘a learning organisation’, to enhance the company’s education programme, and to effect a rich knowledge transfer, both for students and actors. Its ambition was to take Warwick’s internationally-recognised Shakespeare scholarship, most significantly, Shakespeare performance studies, into the heart of the acting company while, in the university, establishing a notional ‘third room’. This space would certainly not be a classroom but not, exactly, a rehearsal room either. Rather, it would be a space that, inventing a rigorously academic HE workshop model of learning, would put students on their feet, working practically on Shakespeare’s scripts, testing the claim (that shifts literary studies from passive to active learning) that ‘all writing is performance’; that ‘until the writing is performed, it isn’t really read’.

2.4 The CAPITAL team has achieved all but one of its 2-year objectives and all but three of its 5-year objectives (see Appendices 3 and 4). It has re-formalised its partnership with the RSC (the company having made the strategic decision, two years into the CAPITAL project, not to develop an HE programme but to concentrate its education initiative on under-19s). CAPITAL continues to contribute informally to the RSC’s Artists’ Development programme. The RSC at CAPITAL now comprises the RSC/Warwick International Playwright in Residence, a number of Fellowships in Creativity, the RSC Learning and Performance Network, Post-Graduate Certificates in Teaching Shakespeare for Teachers of Drama and English and Postgraduate Awards in Teaching Shakespeare for Actors. By 2010 over 120 teachers and artists will have graduated from the CAPITAL/RSC postgraduate programme that is based in the Institute of Education. When the new Royal Shakespeare Theatre opens in 2010 over a quarter of the actors on stage

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will have gained a PG Award from Warwick. In addition, the success of the CAPITAL-funded and inspired relationship between the RSC and the Institute of Education has attracted external research funding (see Section 1.7).

2.5 CAPITAL has introduced own-brand modules that develop open-space teaching and learning (‘Shakespeare without Chairs’; ‘Teaching Shakespeare: A Practical Approach’; ‘Shakespeare and the Law’; ‘Drama, Performance and Identity Post 1945’), introducing innovative forms of assessment, examination, and evaluation (creative projects; commonplace books; group projects; practical demonstrations). It has appointed Creative Fellows from within the University and outside whose practice-led research feeds back into curriculum development and training: e.g. Tom Abbott (Communications) on digital communication; Claudette Bryanston (Institute of Health) on the cost of dying; Tony Howard (English) on Paul Robeson and black theatre history; Rob Clare on verse-speaking; Perry Mills on boy players. It is contributing to the development of IGGY (which replaced NAGTY).

2.6 CAPITAL is collaborating across the university, delivering innovation in teaching and learning impacting every faculty, and CAPITAL staff have disseminated its practice across Britain and beyond, delivering conference papers and workshops. In the last year it has organised a major dissemination event, presented at the British Shakespeare Association, the Shakespeare Association of America, the Renaissance Society of America, the International University Theatre Association and at pedagogy conferences in the UK. The Director has by invitation given Shakespeare workshops and high-profile public lectures in the USA and the CAPITAL team will tour five US universities in the spring.

2.7 But more than meeting its targets, CAPITAL has exceeded the bid’s original vision in ambitious ways to develop practical research into performance and curriculum. It has supported novice and experienced teachers in new creative methodologies of teaching and learning by contributing to the Learning and Development Centre, especially to PCAPP and to the Graduate Skills programmes. Through the “Re-Performing Performance” project, it has explored new pedagogies for digital archives (including re-formulating the MA ‘Shakespeare and Performance’ module) and is developing auto-intuitive search strategies for digital resources through the AILAS project, a collaboration with STPCPS, Computer Science and the University Library. It has created a diverse programme of content-rich webcasts (now available on iTunesU); has embedded a theatre company – Fail Better – in CAPITAL to deliver a range of performance-based learning experiences, producing high-profile theatre projects with students as collaborators and developing an ensemble to contribute to inter-disciplinary teaching and events; and has appointed an Artist in Residence who is also CAPITAL’s first research student (which means that CAPITAL is now operating across BA, MA, and PhD programmes). It has established new collaborations with theatres and theatre companies like Cheek by Jowl, Northern Broadsides, Footsbarn and Shakespeare’s Globe. It is sustaining conversations about future work with the V&A, Advantage West Midlands and Stratford upon Avon District Council; collaborating on projects and grant applications with The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (including student involvement as mentors and specialist advisers for the annual schools Great Shakespeare Debate); has scoped an International Shakespeare Summer School in Venice and is developing new MA modules.

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2.8 What all of these projects share is a stake in CAPITAL’s core mission: to take the lead in changing the culture of teaching and learning. We deliver, via open-space learning, creative and innovative pedagogy (including proposing and testing new forms of undergraduate research, assessment and examination) that is content-rich, subject- expanding, and student-driven.

Question 3: Please add any objectives that emerged as the CETL developed, and reflect on these as for question 2 (500 words maximum).

3.1 Developing interdisciplinarity in teaching and learning across the University.

a. CAPITAL has undertaken practical teaching and learning projects based on OSL (see 7 below) with the following academic departments: Law, English and Comparative Literary Studies, Theatre Studies, Cultural Policy Studies, Philosophy, Chemistry, Psychology, History, The Medical School, The Warwick Business School, the Institute of Education, and Biology. Also, individuals from the following departments have attended demonstrations and seminars: Physics, Mathematics, Engineering, German, French, Italian, Statistics, Computer Science, Sociology, and Economics.

b. In addition we have worked with the University’s academic and staff training body, the LDC); the University’s training programme for postgraduates; the University’s commercial managers, and University administrators. Sessions for the LDC and the GSSP have fed directly into the training of academics across the University.

c. CAPITAL is collaborating with Chemistry, Philosophy and Cultural Policy Studies on articles concerning teaching methodology.

Evaluations show that 80% of academics and staff involved in these practical and experiential sessions feel they have benefited from the sessions, and a further 60% express an intention to incorporate the methods used in their own teaching.

3.2 The development of a co-ordinated teaching and learning strategy for the academic work of the University. CAPITAL’s regular and frequent discussions with other key players in Warwick’s teaching and learning strategy, the LDC, GSSP and the Teaching and Learning Grids, reflects this.

3.3 Promoting the idea that closing the gap between teaching and research at all levels in HE will assist the University in addressing the impact agenda. CAPITAL’s contract

with Bloomsbury for a book entitled Open-space Learning: A Study in Interdisciplinary Pedagogy is the first step towards developing the publication and dissemination of this research in a ‘global’ fashion.

3.4 Improvement in the exploitation of the University’s open and creative learning spaces. The example of CAPITAL’s theatre-style teaching spaces and its writers’ room have demonstrated clearly the potential of non-traditional learning spaces. Increased demand for such spaces has led to the conversion of traditional teaching rooms into ‘open spaces’.

3.5 The development of a unit that is entrepreneurial in its outlook, a motor for the generation of income from research councils and from the commercial sector.

A market for new learning styles has been identified. A summer school programme based on OSL is currently being devised, as is a Master of Fine Arts programme that

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features a significant range of contributions from CAPITAL: new performance-based modules, for example, and support for pedagogy across the project. See also 2.15.

Question 4: Irrespective of your answers to questions 2 and 3 above, please reflect on, and draw out the achievements and benefits of the CETL (1000 words maximum) (Think about different audiences, types of output, impact internal and externally, on professional / staff development, on student learning, work over an extended period, use of money for facilities development etc).

4.1 Participants in the CAPITAL project have included undergraduates, postgraduates (10,400), early-career academics (150), senior academic staff (60), and non-academic staff at the University (200), as well as members of the public who have attended special events, and professionals from outside the University who have experienced training sessions here (1,500 in total for both the latter categories). CAPITAL’s dissemination programme has reached 500 individuals working in HE outside the University. 1.2, 1.5 and 7 detail why this has been beneficial.

4.2 In schools, the RSC Learning and Performance Network (LPN) designed by the RSC’s Education Department and supported by Warwick’s Institute of Education was created to mobilise the pedagogic and artistic principles underpinning the RSC’s Stand Up For Shakespeare (SUFS) manifesto. The manifesto challenges the status quo of Shakespeare teaching, performing and learning in schools at all ages and stages. It identifies an active approach based on the RSC rehearsal room experience. The LPN provided the means for the RSC Education Department to develop and embed this best practice in a wide range of schools many of which faced challenging circumstances or which were unlikely to access the RSC’s resources by other means. The LPN also offered hub teachers M level accreditation through a PG Certificate in Teaching Shakespeare (60 CATS) delivered in partnership with Warwick Institute of Education. LPN has operated in 300 schools since 2006, directly reaching at least 7,500 young people.

4.3 By 2010 over 120 teachers and artists will have graduated from the CAPITAL/RSC postgraduate programme that is based in the Institute of Education. When the new Royal Shakespeare Theatre opens in 2010 over a quarter of the actors on stage will have gained a PG Award from Warwick.

4.4 More recently CAPITAL has also been an active participant in Warwick’s International Gateway for Gifted Youth (IGGY), and the Aiming for College Education (ACE) and AimHigher programmes.

4.5 CAPITAL’s specialist teaching spaces provide a lasting legacy for the culture of the theatre rehearsal room and the development of Open-space Learning projects. The same is true of the Writers’ Room, the design and layout of which promotes innovative teaching in itself (see 6b).These performance spaces have created an environment that has exposed 13,000 individuals from across higher education and schools to CAPITAL’s methods.

4.6 See Annex A for CAPITAL’s publications.

4.7 CAPITAL methodology has been introduced in core 1st, 2nd and 3rd year modules in

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English (‘Shakespeare and Selected dramatists of his Time’, ‘Literature in the Modern World’; ‘European Theatre’, ‘British Theatre Since 1939’; ‘Teaching Shakespeare a Practical Approach’) and core 1st year modules in Philosophy and Literature and Chemistry. Also in optional modules in English and Law (‘On Trial: Shakespeare and the Law’), WBS (‘Critical Issues in Law and Management’), Cultural Policy Studies (‘Cultural Entrepreneurship’). CAPITAL methods have impacted upon 45 modules across the University curriculum in 16 different departments (see 3.1). They have been incorporated into the LDC’s Postgraduate Certificate in Academic and Professional Practice (PCAPP) for early-career academics, and its Introduction to Academic and Professional Practice (IAAP) for postgraduate tutors. According to a senior member of the LDC team these interventions have created a ‘shift in culture’ in teaching and learning across the University, with academics increasingly willing to think about embodiment, space, learning styles, and the development of creativity in teaching and learning.

4.8 At undergraduate level the entire cohort of English Literature students (600) across 3 academic years have been exposed at least once to CAPITAL’s methods. In Chemistry, 2 entire cohorts have had a similar experience (240 students). The Warwick Business School’s 1st year cohort of MBAs have taken part in a workshop at CAPITAL (80 students) (see 1.2.d). These activities will continue should the University decide to continue to fund the Centre. CAPITAL, through the OSL project, is now conducting longitudinal research into the activities of a sample of students across the faculties after they have left the University in order to track the effects of their exposure to OSL.

4.9 ‘Re-performing Performance’ online resource (see 10.2 for details). Since its launch in April 2009 the site has received over 15000 page views with 75% from outside the University.

Question 5: Have there been any disappointments in how the CETL has developed/what it has achieved. What are they, why did they happen? (600 words maximum).

5.1 That the take up of the CAPITAL approach and methodology has been limited in the CETL’s home department (English and Comparative Literary Studies) where the relevance of this approach to interpreting text might have been most attractive. CAPITAL’s work has been embedded in only 25% of undergraduate English modules available in 2009/10.

5.2 That despite using a number of dissemination methodologies (presentations, open-registration conferences, colloquia by invitation, website, personal contact) other UK HEIs have been, to date, somewhat reluctant to engage practically with CAPITAL’s work. Interest in the US has been much more positive with 10 US institutions in the last two years inviting CAPITAL staff to offer exemplar sessions.

5.3 That the RSC made the strategic decision, two years into the CAPITAL project, not to develop a formal HE programme but to concentrate its education initiative on under-19s.

Question 6: Please reflect on the difficult and easier aspects of getting the CETL going and of getting your messages across. For example: Has action/change followed; where and why did you meet success or resistance. What worked, how did you discover this, how do you know it worked? (1000 words maximum)

Difficulties:

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6.1 Timing:

a. The April start date for the CETLs, clearly meant to allow for preparation time before the beginning of the academic year in October, did not provide sufficient time to plan the implementation of the CETL proposal, recruit and train staff and put in place a coherent embedded programme for the first year. Activities focussed on enhancement of modules in the core departments of English and Theatre Studies, as outlined in the bid. This had the unwished-for effect in the University community of associating CAPITAL exclusively with those disciplines and with theatre performance which it took some time to dispel.

b. The RSC Complete Works Festival (April 2006-April 2007), and the redevelopment of the Stratford theatres (begun in 2006 and due for completion in 2010) created a challenging environment for the establishment of the CAPITAL collaboration. RSC resources (practitioners, spaces, time) were stretched and for two years the repertoire was exclusively Shakespeare. This limited opportunities to involve nvolve Warwick students in placements with a range of RSC activities and community Warwick students in placements with a range of RSC activities and community theatre/creative projects as hoped nor was there capacity to offer a wide range of theatre/creative projects as hoped nor was there capacity to offer a wide range of performance practice across the disciplines and beyond the formal curriculum.performance practice across the disciplines and beyond the formal curriculum.

6.2 Location:

a. The obstacles presented by the physical separation of the University in Coventry and the RSC in Stratford-upon-Avon were underestimated. It proved impossible to negotiate suitable workshop space in Stratford-upon-Avon nor would it have been practicable to bus large numbers of students there although it might have facilitated a closer engagement with members of the RSC.

b. However, perhaps the most important factor in the ultimate success of CAPITAL is the HEFCE-funded accommodation on campus: a self-contained suite of six offices clustered around a reception/work area, an IT room and three open learning spaces: a black-box studio with basic lighting and sound equipment, a white box rehearsal room and the so-called Writers Room, a large room dedicated to the University’s community of writers. And inspired by the Arvon Foundation’s retreats, furnished flexibly with sofas, work tables, informal lighting. The essential feature of all three spaces is that they are limitlessly flexible places, where teachers and learners can create a number of different environments to suit their work.

c. CAPITAL’s brief was to develop arts of creative thinking through forms of teaching and learning that emphasise active performance on the part of both teachers and students. The delay of nine months in the availability of these spaces for CAPITAL’s work had three outcomes: the delay of full implementation of CAPITAL’s teaching programme; the encouragement of valuable collaborations with other Stratford organisations, the Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, whose spaces were utilised; but, most importantly, the realisation of the crucial importance of specialised open learning spaces to kinaesthetic pedagogy.

What worked:

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6.3 Shakespeare: Shakespeare has always been at the heart of the CAPITAL project (naturally so in a collaborative project with the Royal Shakespeare Company) and the University’s Shakespeare teachers have, through their use of CAPITAL’s spaces and a will to innovate

in their undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, become a motor for creative teaching that CAPITAL’s staff have been able to apply to other disciplines. The use of

Shakespeare, however, had to be carefully managed. Workshops on Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, for example (used with the University managers to explore barriers to communication), were not wholly successful and consideration of events such as this, combined with the RSC’s strategy to avoid involvement in leadership training such as provided by Olivier Mythodrama Associates, led to an approach in which models of good practice derived from Shakespeare teaching became more generic as demand increased for University-wide pedagogical support and training. (See 1, 7, 10).

6.4 To promote its interdisciplinary work the CAPITAL team made direct contact with University departments offering to tailor learning interventions to the curriculum, working in collaboration with module and course convenors. The successful outcome of this approach is the embedding of CAPITAL methodology across the University. (See also 1.2, 3.1, 4, 7.6).

6.5 Length of the funding period.

a. One of the greatest benefits the CETL programme conferred was the generous length of the funding period. Five years has enabled us to understand and develop practice and research in ways that would have been impossible in a shorter time. It was not until midway through the funding that it became possible to identify what was working, what was not, what needed to be developed and what needed to be abandoned. Clearly, innovations in teaching and learning do not become an integral part of university practice overnight. Five years offered the freedom to adapt the initial objectives in the light of practical experience, and to embed new work and ideas in modules that take a year or more to realise from the original idea to the delivery of the first seminar.

b. New initiatives have to be ‘sold’, first internally, then externally, and then to the sector more broadly, if active and committed interest is to be generated to put them into practice. Collaborating with departments ‘on the ground’ is an excellent method of discovering quickly what works and what doesn’t. A practice-as-research agenda of this kind is entirely performative of CAPITAL’s methodologies. (See 7.)

c. HEFCE’s light touch has allowed for failure on the path to the creation of models that work for both students and tutors: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better’ (Beckett).

6.6 Using University teachers to teach University teachers.

CAPITAL’s first experiments in bringing together theatre practitioners and students met with limited success. Actors, directors, voice and movement teachers and learning

practitioners offered inspiring and energising interventions in the teaching of Shakespeare which were enthusiastically received by many students but feedback

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indicated simultaneously that students (and their teachers) wanted more course-related content, and content delivered at an appropriate academic level. Attempts by members of the RSC’s Learning Department and Warwick English teachers to formulate a jointly delivered HE model workshop led to academics taking what they had learnt directly into their classrooms, resulting in the ‘Shakespeare without Chairs’ seminars now embedded in the core 3rd year Shakespeare module, and new modules, such as ‘Drama, Performance and Identity’, which incorporate active learning and creative performance- based assessment. For some subjects and teachers, as the methodology was extended beyond Humanities into other Faculties, that immersive experience was not appropriate so a third scenario was created: for members of the CAPITAL team to devise and in many cases to deliver course-specific work, for example with Philosophy, Chemistry, Law, Cultural Policy Studies.

6.7 Using theatre learning practitioners to teach generic teaching and learning skills.

The CAPITAL collaboration has brokered successful input from RSC staff and associates to University training programmes for teachers, from postgraduate tutors to early career

academics to experienced academics. The kinaesthetic and practical methodology used in the rehearsal room transfers effectively into HE pedagogy and resulted in high scores in participants’ feedback: routinely, 90% of participants rate these sessions as ‘good’ or ‘excellent’.

6.8 Having a resident theatre company.

A number of different strategies were tried to engage theatre practitioners in the teaching and learning process: a dedicated member of the RSC Education Department to develop and deliver HE programmes; a part-time Artist in Residence drawn from the RSC’s Assistant Directors; a part-time Artist in Residence from outside the RSC; the International RSC\Warwick International Playwright in Residence, ad hoc visiting artists; Fellows in Creativity and Performance. These strategies were successful in providing enhancements to the curriculum mainly in the core departments of English and Theatre Studies, to a relatively small number of students (210 FTEs). However the most effective means to embed a performative element across a wide range of subjects has been CAPITAL’s resident theatre company whose Artistic Director is also CAPITAL’s Research Associate (see 12.2). Responsive to the requirements of University module structures and assessment requirements, experienced in practical theatre techniques and available to suit the teaching timetable, the company has made a substantial contribution to the Centre’s interdisciplinary work through direct interventions in modules in Philosophy, Chemistry, Business, and Cultural Policy Studies. 1,250 FTEs have been exposed to CAPITAL’s methods in this way.

6.9 Providing tailor-made postgraduate courses, qualifications and evaluation for theatre education projects. See 4.2.

Question 7: Has your CETL adopted/used/been based around any specific theories, e.g. of change, or of student learning? If so, what, how have these underpinned your work, have they been useful? (1000 words maximum).

7.1 CAPITAL has focused on three areas in which it has developed or applied theory:

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creativity, space, and performance-based embodied/kinaesthetic learning. CAPITAL has combined these areas to form a theory of Open-space Learning (OSL) in which each informs the others. OSL develops directly from the practices of the theatrical rehearsal room, and Michael Boyd’s re-invigoration of the ensemble at the RSC has proved particularly relevant to much of this activity: ‘At the heart of our developing practice at the RSC, there’s a set of values and behaviours which we have found are both required and enabled by ensemble working. They are the foundations of our ability to achieve community amongst wildly diverse artists, as well as our creativity’.

7.2 Creativity:

CAPITAL’s practice demands that students are offered the opportunity to ‘create’ their own knowledge with the guidance of tutors. Students are now increasingly required to come up with ‘a question worth answering’ (Jackson 4). CAPITAL’s focus on student-centred learning allows them the space, the freedom, and the means to devise these questions, and this is fostered by a commitment on the part of tutors to ‘uncrown power’, to temporarily suspend hierarchies, and to create a laboratory in which knowledge is discovered and owned by the group as a whole. Without an authority figure ‘play’ is much more likely to occur, and out of play develop ideas. This combination of mindfulness and playfulness has been significant in our work, and is another practical way we have tried to render ‘creativity’ tangible.

7.3 Space:

CAPITAL acknowledges and incorporates recent thinking around the design and implementation of specialised learning spaces. ‘Universities recognise the importance of providing smart and exciting environments in order to attract and retain students. This is combined with a growing awareness of the educational value of providing spaces which enhance students’ learning – in terms of both experience and outcomes’ (Lambert). The construction and implementation of these spaces tend to be predicated on shared theoretical notions concerning the ‘passive’ versus ‘active’ role of students as learners. These notions have informed – if not determined – the University of Warwick’s specialist teaching and learning spaces: the CAPITAL Centre, the Teaching Grid, the Learning Grid, and the Reinvention Room. As Lambert suggests, students become ‘producers’: ‘hierarchical academic/student relationships change to produce more fluid and elaborate collaborations between producers of scholarly work’. CAPITAL’s ideas concerning space have connections with the thinking of Lefebvre and Foucault.

7.4 Kinaesthetic learning:

In these open spaces CAPITAL presents a direct challenge to the lecture/seminar format that dominates in UK universities. At the practical level the ‘workshop model’ (see Glossary) of teaching and learning is the basis of CAPITAL’s work in this area and at the theoretical level we use elements from ‘experiential learning’, ‘enactive’ learning, ‘kinaesthetic’ learning and the various methods of teaching developed by practitioners such as Boal and Freire, and related to the work of thinkers like Vygotsky, Gardner, and Kolb, and their ideas concerning learning styles and multiple intelligences. Our work has also been informed by theatre education, ‘applied drama’, ‘applied theatre’, ‘applied performance’, and ‘ethnodrama’. In addition we have applied work in neuroscience by academics like Andy Clark and Antonio Damasio who seek to re-connect mind, body and world.

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7.5 Open-space Learning:

In addition to the ideas and practices mentioned in 7.2-4 above, OSL is grounded in social theory and notions around a ‘third space’, in which teaching and learning take place in ‘between’ spaces that are both actual and metaphorical. They exist separate from traditional teaching rooms, for example, but are not ‘real’ rehearsal rooms either. Such spaces free participants from the constraining roles of omniscient pedagogue and eager acolyte, as knowledges and skills from students, subject experts and practitioners, are brought into constellation in the creation of understanding. OSL addresses, thereby, intelligences other than the merely linguistic, and learning styles beyond the auditory, as the teaching spaces draw participants into an acknowledgement of their physicality. This has the effect first of radically unsettling them, but then of liberating them. Working collaboratively, sharing ideas, moving around and through the open space where they’re doing their thinking, students see themselves ‘trying things out’, rehearsing possibilities. They are freed to be provisional, to take risks, to offer and own ideas, but also to make mistakes, and to change their minds. Students learn not only the detail of their academic speciality, but are permitted to discover for themselves an understanding of how to ‘be’ in an increasingly complex world.

7.6 An example of OSL theory and practice joining to create change is in CAPITAL’s OSL work with Chemistry.

The collaboration over two years has been successful because teaching in the ‘open-space’ environments of the CAPITAL Centre has enabled students and teachers to challenge boundaries to creative thought that are generated by their disciplines – the common view of the solitary scientist experimenting and recording findings entirely unaided is one such boundary. These boundaries tend to be reinforced by the lecture/seminar/laboratory model as the system continues to rely on the ‘banking’ or ‘download’ theory of education in which knowledge is fed by well-informed minds into less well-informed minds. There is a growing body of evidence that the ‘download’ model is inefficient and benefits only particular types of learner, e.g. 70% of Chemistry students who have experienced workshops with CAPITAL tell us that their knowledge of inorganic Chemistry has been expanded as a result of their sessions. In other disciplines - English for example - there has been a rise over three years in students choosing a practical version of the Department’s compulsory 3rd year Shakespeare module from 20% to 50%, and students are 10% more likely to achieve 1st class marks for essays in which OSL methods are consistently employed. In all, 17 departments have now collaborated with CAPITAL on OSL projects.

7.7 OSL has also been extended into academic and staff development (see 1.2.c).

Question 8 : Reflecting on the last five years what other important messages are there that you want to convey about your CETL - its successes, difficulties, impact etc. (1000 words maximum)

8.1 That bringing external practitioners/facilitators into modules, workshops or training sessions can often have an enriching and positive effect but, if the intention is to embed work rather than simply enhance it, there must be direct collaboration between subject specialists, students and practitioners.

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8.2 That increasingly students entering Warwick as undergraduates already have experience in studying English Literature (and other Humanities subjects) in a ‘practical’ or embodied way, and that HEIs should position their teaching and learning to exploit and build on this. Of the 70% of students in the 2008-9 third-year cohort who responded to CAPITAL’s survey, 60% had experience at school of learning Shakespeare beyond reading and discussions.

8.3 That in any group of individuals (who are not self-selecting) across the disciplines who participate in a well-run practical workshop, roughly 70% will find the experience rewarding and beneficial, 15% will be ambivalent, and 15% will see no academic benefits. Factors in the latter two statistics include outright resistance to anything that might be construed as ‘acting’; an inability or unwillingness to see embodied learning as relevant in an environment in which academic work is wholly centred in the brain and the body is merely a mode of transport; and the fact that in any group there will be several different learning styles.

8.4 That the planning and execution of a successful practical workshop requires as much – if not more – detailed planning than a seminar or lecture and more time to deliver, normally between 90 minutes and 3 hours. A single workshop which accommodates a maximum of 20 students cannot reach the same number of students as a single lecture and is, therefore, less cost effective.

8.5 In response to increased demand, the CAPITAL Centre is now proposing a 30 CAT postgraduate module to be available in October 2010. The module is a PG Award in HE Workshop Pedagogy and will be made available internally to current academics and postgraduate tutors, and to practitioners from outside the University.

8.6 That new methods of assessment are needed to match new methods of teaching (see 10.3 below).

Question 9: Reflecting on the last five years what important messages are there that you want to convey about the experience of being part of a wider ‘movement’/experience of other CETLs. (600 words maximum).

9.1 Beyond the initial excitement over this generous and welcome investment in teaching and learning, CAPITAL did not benefit from the CETL ‘movement’ in its early stages. Attention was focussed on internal challenges: the recruitment of the right people, the discovery and development of best practice in our field, and the clarification of the collaboration between the partners. Even within our own institution, where there are now plans to merge its two CETLs, collaboration was not operationally active during this period. As the funding period draws to an end and the imperative to disseminate findings and practices become urgent, there has been a greater sense of a collective experience, and it has been useful to compare CAPITAL’s experiences with those of other CETLs and to work with them to disseminate our findings. The CETLs provided valuable support, and we hope that a long-term repository of information and resources will ensure that the good work made possible by the CETL initiative does not simply melt away. Clearly this is most important for those CETLs that will not be funded beyond HEFCE.

9.2 Warwick has another CETL, the Reinvention Centre, whose aims and objectives

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focus on reinventing the undergraduate curriculum, and with whom CAPITAL has formed a close relationship. On a formal level, a representative from each CETL sits on the Management Committee / Advisory Board of the other. On a more informal level, the Reinvention Centre’s Academic Manager and the CAPITAL Centre’s Administrator (the equivalent post) hold regular meetings in order to identify any shared areas of work or potential joint activities. The two teams have collaborated on the formation of a group interested in ‘Space, Performance and Pedagogy’, and a Reinvention Centre grant has allowed CAPITAL’s lecturer to develop the ‘Faust’ module (see 2.3 and Glossary). The CAPITAL Centre continues to make regular use of the Reinvention Centre’s innovative teaching space at Warwick’s Westwood campus. A joint proposal for sustainability has been put before the University (see 11 below).

Question 10: Please reflect on work emerging from your CETL that has been ‘transferable’, i.e. useable beyond the home audience for which it was originally developed. (You may wish to comment in terms of materials produced, a community created, understandings that CETL work has illuminated and which are useful to others, etc) (1000 words maximum). It would be useful to hear ‘messages’ and lessons learnt that you would like to continue to be disseminated.

10.1 The OSL model of teaching and learning is eminently transferable (see 3.1 and 7.6 above). Universities both in the UK and abroad (Hull, QUB, Chester, Rutgers, and York St. John) have already implemented elements of the techniques CAPITAL has developed, or have expressed a desire to do so, and the impact in our own university has been significant (3, 7.6 and 11) resulting in a proposal to create an Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning. Readily transferable materials include module proposals, assessment, workshop plans, and the practical demonstrations we offer to those interested in developing their teaching and learning in practical ways – some of these materials exist on the CAPITAL web site. See also Annex A for publications. An example of practical transferability is CAPITAL’s workshop on ‘Presence’ (see 1.2 above) for postgraduate researchers working in 20 universities in the midlands, organised by Vitae, supported by Research Councils UK.

10.2 Re-Performing Performance: Shakespeare Archives in Teaching and Learning is a collaborative digital project between the CAPITAL Centre, Warwick Arts Centre, Footsbarn Theatre Company, Northern Broadsides, and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Co-ordinated by CAPITAL’s Research Associate, this space offers a range of possibilities for using theatre records in a variety of performance-based learning experiences and encourages students to engage practically with the complexities surrounding performance as well as offering downloadable introductions to specific collections. Users of the web site are challenged to generate their own content ‘live’ by browsing the resources and ‘re-performing performance’ in their own teaching and learning spaces. The project represents a readily transferable example of collaboration between a university and theatre companies that benefits not only the institutions themselves but also the wide range of students accessing the resource. The web site receives an average of 2000 visits per month and provides an interactive space for many of CAPITAL’s dissemination events.

Beginning with materials from Northern Broadsides, a digital archive of promptbooks, production photographs, costume bibles, set designs, programmes, and posters (now available as learning resources) was developed. Working with Footsbarn during their 2008 visit to Warwick with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a student research team

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documented the performances and associated events. This material is now being developed by subsequent students contributing to this unique research-informed learning resource. The web site is a record of CAPITAL’s pedagogic work with archival material, structured as a guide of good practice.

10.3 Assessment: Neill Thew’s 2006 report on teaching Shakespeare for The Higher Education Academy remarks on the ways in which ‘a wider range of appropriate assessment methods might help promote high quality student learning’. Whilst Thew refers specifically to the assessment of Shakespeare, CAPITAL interrogated and re-imagined assessment procedures more broadly, emphasising the notion of assessment for learning as rather than assessment of learning across a range of modules. Results from the 2009 National Student Survey highlighted the fact that students’ most reoccurring criticism of the academic process was to do with assessment. Of the seven categories on which students are invited to pass judgment, ‘Assessment and feedback’ receives the lowest satisfaction rating – 65% compared to an average of 78% across the other six categories.

Students undertaking the CAPITAL-designed ‘Drama, Performance and Identity’ module in the Department of English , for instance, are required to spend Term Two developing a performance piece that incorporates the key theories and ideas explored throughout the module. Students are marked according to (a) the extent to which they ‘show [through performance] a depth of understanding of some or several aspects of the material presented and discussed on the module’; (b) a viva with the course facilitator, discussing the intellectual relevance of the performance; (c) a journal composed of both written, visual, and online materials recording the development of their performance piece, which is checked fortnightly by the course leader, with students being expected to demonstrate a sense of critical awareness and theoretical engagement with their process. These methods are now being used in interdisciplinary modules such as ‘Faust’ and ‘Shakespeare and the Law’.

10.4 Another important ‘message’ is that the CETL programme has enabled us to work across disciplines in ways we could not have envisaged at the beginning of the project. CAPITAL’s work has developed from the ‘enrichment’ and enhancement of existing modules and courses and has spread across faculties, into postgraduate skills training, into the training of academics, into interdisciplinary modules, and into other universities and schools as detailed above. The performative and embodied aspects of the work have challenged and excited many of those who have encountered them and something that appears initially difficult or frightening (‘performing’) has enabled participants to give free reign to the creativity in ways that they would not have considered possible before. What CAPITAL seeks to do (with rare exceptions) is to make participants feel safe in workshop environments and to give them permission to ‘fail’. At its best, the OSL work initiated by CAPITAL echoes the best of the theatrical rehearsal room in that ‘failure’ is honoured. Failure acknowledges experiment and recognises risk: it is creativity’s shadow. We have attempted to establish in practical ways, supported by pedagogic theory, that performance-based or embodied learning promotes a rich and complex engagement with the subject matter irrespective of the academic level or the discipline. This is the message we would most like to see transferred and disseminated.

Question 11: How will the work and achievements of your CETL continue after HEFCE funding ends (1000 words maximum)? Please reflect on how far you think CETL work has

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become embedded in your institution or discipline and indicate if any structures have been put in place to ensure its legacy is not lost (1000 words maximum)

11.1 The University of Warwick’s two CETLs (CAPITAL and the Reinvention Centre) have offered a proposal for a merger into an Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning (IATL) which is now under consideration by the University Financial Planning and Steering Committees.

Combining the practice and expertise of the CAPITAL and Reinvention Centre teams, the IATL would be ideally placed to address the challenges of teaching in a research-led context and provide the locus for delivering curriculum development across the disciplines, new assessment practices, an international approach, and the promotion of academic literacy through active student engagement, all grounded in real-world contexts.

It is proposed that the IATL would address the following:

a. Performance-based Learning:

IATL would work with departments to introduce methodologies which promote the use of intelligences other than the linguistic, and learning styles beyond the auditory; specifically demanding that students develop both their subject knowledge and enhance their ‘soft skills’ in areas such as responsibility, sociability, self-esteem, self-management.

b. Academic Literacy:

The IATL would work to promote academic literacy across all its activities to support students in writing and speaking clearly and effectively and thinking critically and analytically. It would develop and embed teaching methodologies and pedagogic interventions using OSL to bridge formal academic study with the practical, professional applications of theory in practice.

c. Students who engage with global culture:

It is proposed that, collaborating with existing partners, e.g. with Warwick’s Centre for Applied Linguistics (CAL) and International Office, Shakespeare networks, international theatre companies and practitioners, and other HEIs both nationally and internationally, the IATL would support:

Initiatives aimed at a globally-oriented curriculum. A multiplicity of learning styles for different futures. How students from different educational backgrounds experience practice-

based teaching and research-based learning.

d. Students who participate in interdisciplinary activity:

Collaborating with departments, the Board of Undergraduate Studies and interdisciplinary Doctoral Training Centres, the IATL would:

Make available to all students the option of an interdisciplinary module. Create a portfolio of interdisciplinary modules developed with departments.

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Host interdisciplinary projects and seminars to bring together academics and research-active students across faculties.

e. Students who benefit from innovative pedagogy:

Working with departments, Faculty Teaching and Learning Fora, PCAPP, Centre for Student Careers and Skills, and IGGY, the IATL would ensure that all students experience innovative pedagogy.

f. Students who have experienced innovative learning spaces:

The IATL would:

Co-ordinate the provision and further development of effective, flexible, open learning spaces to enhance the University’s prestige;

Offer a research-informed approach to the planning and use of learning spaces, exemplified by CAPITAL's Open-space Learning initiatives and Reinvention’s extensive work on social learning spaces;

Ensure, in conjunction with CPARG, that students in all faculties have access to spaces which will enable them to benefit from innovative teaching practice;

Develop interdisciplinary Open-space Learning projects.

Inform and support the creation of a landmark Teaching and Learning building on campus.

g. The IATL would raise the status of teaching excellence and foster a high level of student engagement with curriculum development.

h. The IATL would work to provide for all teaching staff access to, and support in using, environments appropriate for open-space and research-based learning.

11.2 CAPITAL’s work is now embedded in modules and training programmes across the University. Under the leadership of this new Institute this work would continue and develop. (See 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 10 above.)

Question 12 : Do you think there are any emerging aspects of your CETL activity that will have greater importance in the future? (600 words maximum)

12.1 Transferable skills: Universities are the ‘providers of life chances for individuals in an environment where skills and the ability to apply those skills are essential preconditions for employment’. (Department for Business, Innovation and Skills).

a. In addition to becoming specialist in a particular discipline or area of knowledge, students in Higher Education must also be equipped to meet the employment demands of the modern workplace. The 2008 CBI Survey found that 86% of firms ranked employability skills as the most important factor when recruiting graduates (CBI 2008). The CAPITAL Centre expects its students to become participants in the process of education and encourages them to develop and utilise a range of important and transferable skills. The CBI Survey established that ‘employers want graduates who can communicate well and work as part of a

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team’, both of which are addressed by CAPITAL’s approach to teaching and learning.

b. In addition to being effective writers, students involved in CAPITAL-led teaching and learning are expected to present their ideas verbally in a confident and articulate fashion (academic literacy). The CAPITAL Centre’s approach to pedagogy not only makes use of dialogue and group discussion (as in traditional seminars), but enhances and expands that dialogue by harnessing the educational potential of kinaesthetic learning. Ideas and concepts are explored three dimensionally, with students (as outlined in the CAPITAL Centre’s stage two CETL bid) engaging in ‘role-play and improvisation’, ‘risk-taking and playfulness’, as well as exercises that facilitate ‘the interconnection of mind, body and emotions’. Students’ means of articulation are enhanced by undergoing processes of discovery, in which they try, dismiss and improve their ideas through verbal, physical and creative expression. Students, therefore, become accustomed to a constant cycle of involvement and participation with the curriculum content – becoming increasingly confident, critical and articulate.

12.2 CAPITAL’s Company in Residence Fail Better has led an innovative programme of work over the two years of its residency which demonstrates the value of such an association for HEIs. Through the residency, students gain real experience of both creative practice and the world of work, and the University gains numerous benefits from the integration of students into the company’s training activities:

a. A world premiere of a new translation of Federico Garcia Lorca’s Play Without a Title (published by Oberon Books, 2009) performed at The CAPITAL Centre and the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry by an ensemble of Warwick undergraduates for students from 4 modules studying Lorca with digital materials on i-TunesU;

b. Practical workshops for 1100 students in 8 modules led by the Artistic Director, exploring a range of literary texts;

c. An annual new Work Festival which showcases students’ creative projects, course work and individual writing;

d. The development of a student ensemble, which continually refreshes itself as students move through the University, to assist in the provision of practical roleplay sessions for the LDC, the GSSP, and will be a significant element in future pedagogical collaborations across the University;

e. As part of this work the company delivers applied performance across disciplines; student production placements and practice-as-research investigations.

12.3 Impact across the sector. See 10.1 on transferability, and 10.3 on assessment.

Question 13: Any other comments (600 words maximum)

Alongside the ongoing development of postgraduate qualifications for teachers and actors there are two additional areas of collaboration between Warwick and the RSC which we hope to continue, though in revised form, supported by external funding: Fellowships in Creativity and the International Playwright in Residence. Students have benefited from involvement in fellowship projects and fruitful relationships have developed between academics and practitioners. In both cases the reward element rested mainly in release from normal duties to focus on a creative project but the lack of structure, seen as a benefit, was

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not helpful to some postholders in achieving their goals, especially over a longer period. It is recommended that future fellowships be shorter and more intensive.

Future collaborations between the University and theatre companies and individual practitioners will benefit from the experience of the CAPITAL partnership in establishing a ‘shared space’ which demonstrates that a successful outcome is more likely when it is conceptual rather than physical, when it is cross-disciplinary and when there is clear mutual advantage.

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