Initiative Lead
Mary Immaculate College

Primary Contact
Anne Marie Morrin
annemarie.morrin@mic.ul.ie

€20000

Enhancement across Disciplines

The primary focus of this T&L initiative is to promote innovative ways for students and staff to engage and respond to innovative pedagogies and assessments. The initiative offers a professional development approach to use arts-based instructional strategies, offering an accessible gateway to understand and foster creative pedagogical approaches and adapting Studio Habits of Mind into teaching.

The initiative will develop a framework that focuses on the pedagogical approaches that are traditionally found in the methods of an artist’s studio and to explore how educators can utilise these methods to inform teaching, learning, and assessment within their own subject area. The collaboration will develop expertise and pedagogy to enhance both the educators’ and students’ experiences promoting creativity, imagination and to generate critical thinking skills.

PHASE 1 will be a scoping exercise to identify best practices for staff from different disciplinary backgrounds to develop collaborative ways of working as a team that will help us to approach problems from different perspectives. It will involve testing out ideas, reformulating them, and evaluating and reflecting together about what works.

PHASE 2 will involve working with students across a number of B.Ed. specialism modules (Visual Art, Music, Drama, Sociology, Geography and Science). The aim is to develop a creative toolbox of learning and assessment approaches, to be negotiated with the students – a suite of options from which they can choose to work. The project team will evaluate the student’s experience, exploring the successes and challenges and make recommendations to inform future implementation.