Pedagogy 2025

Abstract

As students and staff navigate increasingly flexible and mobile lives, the notion of a fixed learning environment is evolving into a more fluid and process-oriented framework for engaging with creative and critical thinking. Learning is no longer confined to traditional spaces but unfolds across diverse contexts, – on the bus, at the kitchen table, around family and work commitments, within shared, distributed physical and digital environments. This shift invites educators and students to rethink how learning is facilitated and where it can meaningfully occur. Studio-based learning has long placed process at the heart of teaching, valued for its implicit relationship with creativity and its ability to foster ways of understanding that challenge habitual perspectives. By cutting across disciplinary boundaries and illuminating the significance of relationships, it cultivates the kind of innovative, integrative, and relational thinking that is essential for transformative higher education in the 21st century. Traditionally rooted in creative arts and architecture, studio based learning is increasingly being explored as a model for transdisciplinary higher education. This paper brings together the growing need for flexible, responsive learning environments and the enduring pedagogical strengths of studio education. Drawing on interviews with creative arts academics, it explores how the disruption of COVID-19 reshaped studio-based teaching and catalysed new thinking about its future. Rather than attempting to replicate the studio online, we asked how digital modes might enrich and extend studio pedagogies, responding to shifting student behaviour and increasingly digital lives.