Contemporary Arts Practices The Specialist Arts College and You

Finding your future through a degree in contemporary arts practices may seem a bit frivolous, a bit of a dream. But while it will certainly open up a hugely enjoyable and rewarding college experience, it may also turn out to offer you a pathway to a future where you can enjoy your individual creativity, your skills and talents, at the same time as gaining a valuable career. Evidence of the increasing significance of the creative industries in the UK and overseas has led colleges and universities to realise that there is a real demand for graduates who have learnt to work with their creativity and to develop their own ideas. And the value of this realisation is not only good for higher education professionals, it is a gift to the right kind of student: one who is curious, enquiring, interested in working with others, willing to experiment and to take risks in his or her work.

There are many degree level and postgraduate opportunities to develop your particular skills in the arts – both specialist and vocational courses which provide a pathway into a particular niche, and an experience which combines a more diverse education with opportunities to develop your own voice and individuality in your practice. These courses are often best provided by a specialist college – one where the arts are the focus of everyone’s work. Usually in such colleges the learning and teaching context is one which respects and understands the way most artists learn: through practice, through collaboration and through exposing their work to critical attention. The staff are almost always practitioners themselves, and bring live experience of working at the cutting edge of the arts – whether as a musician, a dancer or choreographer, a writer, a theatre-maker, or a curator or manager of arts exhibitions and projects. Often the multi-disciplinary context stimulates a culture of innovation. Making your own work in such a context allows you to experiment with different art forms, and you will often be able to collaborate with other artist-students working across art forms.

Working with practitioner-teachers means that you are able to access the extensive networks in which they operate – international as well as embedded in the local and regional arts scene. You naturally make connections with these social and cultural contexts. And student communities in specialist arts colleges are often very international, bringing in a breadth of opportunity to collaborate on work overseas. Many specialist courses in the arts encourage students to take advantage of overseas exchanges, professional placements and work-experience opportunities – often incorporating the learning gained into the credits you achieve, and described in your final transcript. How often do you see high-achievers in the arts and arts-related industries recommending work experience as the key to gaining the kind of flexibility of approach that you will need for success? As a successful graduate recently said: ‘You’ve got to show initiative; you can’t sit back and expect work to come to you. It’s important to get work experience, and you’ve got to be really pushy just to get that!’ Whatever work experience means in the world of the contemporary arts, the professional approach and the persistence to learn and adapt are indispensable attributes.

Specialist colleges in the arts are particularly tuned to the needs of the professional world: with staff whose teaching role intersects both with research and practice. There is at present a lot of interest in the way students gain what has been rather clumsily called ‘employability learning’. One thing is clear though, that the creative industries (and that includes any number of applications of the arts – including new technologies) which are often very small scale businesses or project-based enterprises, provide new ways of thinking about the links between teaching, research, the needs of industry and employability of graduates. Small businesses can create collaborative partnerships between specialist colleges and creative industries to provide undergraduate and postgraduate students with opportunities to dissolve barriers between work and college. And that provides really useful experience for many graduates in the contemporary arts who create and manage not only their own arts projects but make their own career pathways using just these same skills.