Arts and Education Practices

MA Arts and Education Practices is designed for the artist educator who wants to develop and refine their skills in working with others through artistic practice. The course aims to engage students with education as a practice of freedom (Hooks, Bell. 1994), and as a site of growth and transformation.

Based within Birmingham School of Art, we provide a unique platform to work as a community comprising of both experienced and aspiring artist educators engaging with the challenges and rewards of contemporary creative education. Working with specialists, you will connect with the diverse contexts in which creative education takes place: community projects, artist-led spaces, galleries, schools, colleges, universities, and peer-to-peer and family-led learning.

The course embeds skills to enable you to work across projects exploring the creative pedagogical models that inform both artistic practice and teaching and learning. You will explore the potential for freelance and permanent employment in creative education to enhance your own practice equipping you with specialist skills to use in the world.

Focus is given to self-development through collaborative work and exploring spaces of lifelong learning and creative pedagogical models. Your studies will engage with the potential for artistic practice to inform teaching and learning and how in turn work can be informed by your own experiences and engagements with pedagogy.

What's covered in the course? On MA Arts and Education your studies will consider past, current and future creative practices and develop projects and programmes of learning in diverse contexts. Throughout your studies there are opportunities to connect with and expand your knowledge of your creative field through collaboration, live projects, and visits to explore educational situations and projects. The course ethos is one of facilitation, mentoring and collaboration, seeking to model a critical pedagogy where dialogue and mutual enquiry are emphasised.

Your independent research will lead to a professional project that can be focused through educational models, workshops, creative practice and encounters that inform and are responsive to art educational contexts and workplaces. Throughout the course, there are opportunities to develop professional skills in artist-led education through engagement with partners in creative education in art galleries, artist-run projects, schools, colleges and universities, including Ikon Gallery, Eastside Projects, Turves Green School and STEAMhouse.

An MA in Arts and Education Practices equips you with the skills to work in diverse roles and fields in creative education: as a self-employed arts professional, within creative compulsory and post-compulsory arts education, in the gallery and museum sector, as researcher and creative producers. You may choose to pursue further the research you developed on the course through a PhD.

Recent course alumni have worked with Central Saint Martins, Eastside Projects, Freelands Foundation, Grand Union, GRAIN, Ikon Youth Programme, Ikon Gallery, The Institute of International Visual Arts, Milton Keynes Art Centre, Multistory, New Art Gallery Walsall, Nishkam High School, The Barber Institute, The Gap Arts Project, The National Gallery, and Wolverhampton University.