Performance Teaching

The Post-Graduate Certificate (PGCert) in Performance Teaching is a Masters-level course designed to support professional musicians, actors, production artists and dancers who teach as part of their practice, either as their main employment or as part of a portfolio career. It offers a unique opportunity to develop creative and reflective practice in teaching in performing arts contexts. You will be encouraged to identify a personal pathway for your development, focusing on the pedagogy of performance and creative practice in performing arts contexts that are most relevant to your career aspirations.

Who is it for? The programme attracts applicants who are interested in creative, innovative and evidence-based teaching. You could be at any stage of your career as long as you’re willing to take a fresh look at your practice. Equally, you might teach in a range of contexts, including schools, Higher Education, junior conservatoires, community and lifelong learning.

*Please note home students will not be eligible for a UK government postgraduate loan on this programme.

Ethos We take your existing experience and expertise as a starting point, enabling you to bring practice and theory together, through engaging with cutting-edge pedagogy. You will be part of a community of artist-educators, learning from each other and building practical skills. Transformational learning involves trust and rapport with your students, openness to change, supporting independence, resourcefulness and resilience. You will embrace diverse perspectives and different learning styles.

How you'll learn The PGCert is part-time over one year. Learning takes place online with approximately 13 days of online workshops combined with shorter webinars, plus study groups and support from a one-to-one tutor. We take a ‘flipped classroom’ approach – you prepare material ahead of the live sessions in order to maximise the interactive opportunities of those sessions; and we follow up the sessions with comprehensive online resources – video recordings of the sessions, a webinar library, all the required readings, and a selection of past student work.

The course is 60 credits, which equates to 600 nominal learning hours. In practice, given that the bulk of this is your own self-directed study time, there is a lot of variation from student to student, but this should give you a reasonable idea of the overall commitment involved.