Pedagogies at the Intersection of Arts and Academia

• Project Team: Agnes Czajka
• Subject Discipline: Social Sciences and Global Studies
• Theme: Multisensory/multimodal learning
• Project Aim: Enables more students to achieve their study goalsImproves and enhance the learning experience of students
• Status: Complete
• Date: April 2019 to July 2020

Having co-led the Open University’s Tate Exchange initiative over the past three years, I have come to realise that a number of colleagues in FASS and other faculties have worked – or have expressed interest in working – at the intersection of arts and academia. VLE and other tools that use the arts (visual arts, photography and film, among others) in teaching about salient social and political issues are being used on some modules as well as on OpenLearn, but a single repository of such tools and approaches does not exist. This makes it difficult to assess how widely such approaches and tools are used and how effective they have been.

This scholarship project aims to address both of these issues. First, it offers some pedagogical insight and advice on using such tools and approaches for teaching, through a report made available on the Scholarship Exchange. The report includes first-hand testimonials of module teams about the challenges and opportunities of using such approaches to teaching. It briefly considers the types of tools used – including visual arts, photography, video and film, illustrations, cartoons and advertising – and the strategies and approaches module teams use to incorporate them into their teaching. Second, the project aims to collate exemplary instances when arts-based methodologies, tools and approaches are used on modules across FASS to produce an annotated database of these resources. The report is thus supplemented by a database documenting 285 instances in which arts-based tools are used in module teaching.

To receive this project's database, please contact FASS-Scholarship@open.ac.uk.