Cocchiarella, F., Booth, P., 2014.

Students as Producers: An ‘X’ disciplinary approach to collaborative Art, Design and Media pedagogy

The paper presented the findings of a cross-disciplinary project between BA(Hons) Interior Design, BA(Hons) Creative Multimedia, BA(Hons) Film and Media Studies in the Faculty of Art, at Manchester Metropolitan University. The collaboration was part of Unit X, a faculty wide credit bearing initiative to enable better collaboration across courses. The project explored cross-disciplinary approaches to problem solving and creative design. The outcomes for the students were to create a number of media and arts based interventions, responding to real clients (festival organisers, local bar and café owners) and real client briefs. The pedagogical approach to the project was to be hands off, and allow students the opportunity for autonomy and to develop their practice through developing a community of practice in order to help explore, develop and support their skills. Therefore the teaching practice was to only facilitate learning and the course provided no content. The aim was to allow students to explore how they learnt from each other, and most importantly what they learnt about their own knowledge by teaching others their skills.