Teaching Beyond the Curriculum

Abstract

In ‘A Manifesto for Creative Economy’ Bakhshi et al (2013), identified that the creative industrial society was developing rapidly into a society of technological information, telecommunication, and real-world learning. For Generation Z and Millennial students, the need and constant deployment of competition in the market and the multiplication of professional skills (Garcia& Garcia, 2010) consist of a significant factor in the embedding of blended learning, traditional face-to-face, and non-traditional online, practices to bridge the gap between academic theory and real-world practice within the creative arts HE environment. The digital escalation that has occurred across the Creative Industries post-Covid period has meant that many HE institutions operating ‘ beyond the curriculum’ (Amps 2023) as a necessity in the development of industry-relevant courses to enable future-ready graduates with the required hard and soft skills sets to succeed in a dynamically reshaped industry. It is a universities responsibility to offer services and pedagogical methods that are responsive to the diverse cultural, social and academic and radical disruptions of the ‘technological turn’ post-COVID (Amps 2023), Higher Education teeters on the brink of a revolution (Hooker 1997) as Universities push the ‘Work Ready’ Government focus (Gov 2023) and rethink their pedagogical ‘Value’ and teaching methodologies in the alignment of academic theory with industry practice, to develop ‘Work Ready’ graduates. This paper will explore the paradigms of traditional vs non-traditional blended learning approaches to enhance and transform the process of ‘Real World’ learning through re- thinking Authentic Learning (Lombardi 2007) and Social Constructivism (Vygotsky 1978 ) approaches in the development of collaborative learning approach that mirrors the technological escalation within the creative industries.