How a music festival helped me to rethink how we support graduate outcomes
What if entirely fabricated, in-University experiences are actually far more authentic and impactful than the gold standard 'placement'?
On Friday, 26th July 2021, a global audience tuned in to celebrate music, live-streamed from a studio set in Manchester, UK. Over two consecutive nights, eight bands played intimate studio sets accompanied by dynamic visuals and interspersed by a showcase of new artists, animators, designers and filmmakers.
The festival was faultless. It would be forgivable to mistake the work for that of seasoned professionals. In reality, students from Manchester Metropolitan University worked across disciplines and beyond subject expertise to contribute everything from camera operations to marketing, journalism, and event management.
I became involved with Art School Live as director of our co-curricular programme, Man Met Rise. One of the joys of my role is digging out innovation that can impact more broadly. I found just that talent in Evan Wilson and Sam Heitzman, whose roles as Technical Specialists are all about creating possibilities. They did this with ambition.
Art School Live is a vibrant rebuttal to the view that creative subjects are 'low-value'. It supported employability across the university: a microcosm of the contribution of the creative industries in generating jobs that reach far beyond 'the studio'.
Responding to the loss of live music through lockdown, Evan and Sam corralled students to run virtual gigs, evolving in ambition and involvement to an entire festival. The result is a vibrant rebuttal to the view that creative subjects are 'low-value'. It supported employability across the University: a microcosm of the contribution of the creative industries in generating jobs that reach far beyond the direct work of artists.
Employability, at least, ain't viral.
Art School Live delivered clear employability benefits: by interrogating how we can contribute to a collective insight on experiential learning. This insight can enrich understanding and support employability without falling back on presumptions.
One of these habits of thought is what I call the 'viral fallacy', which situates employability gain as a simple function of immersion: that students 'catch employable'. It manifests in the reach for placement or the presumption that graduate attributes result from a university experience. It is problematic because it conflates outcome with cause, failing to account for myriad transactions and processes, the net result of which may be an employability gain.
The viral fallacy presents employability gains as a simple result of immersion.
'Black boxing' experiential learning brings the allure of cheap, 'bolt-on' solutions to complex challenges. It fails to trouble the marginal status that employability often plays in educational missions; as a venue for applying learning rather than a focal subject. The viral fallacy will be tempting and dangerous as we orient to intensifying pressure on outcomes.
We need to resist easy answers in favour of a more nuanced understanding. Unless we own experiential processes as 'teaching', they will be left weakly assured. I think the persistent patterning of employability improvements across existing privilege is in no small part a consequence of this. Without attention, the gains derived from new investments in employability will be iterative and reinscribe rather than closing gaps.
One vector of the viral fallacy is the intuitive correspondence between graduate outcomes, placements and mobilities. We know that students with these experiences have strong prospects. It would be facile to suggest that these experiences are not a Good Thing, and there is a reason that the Sandwich Year is a gold standard for employability. We should do more of them for more and more diverse students.
However, this embrace should have a critical refrain. We should be mindful of an input bias: placement students are often those already more likely to have positive outcomes. It is crucial to untangle causation from correlation: it is not the placement that improves employment prospects; it is the set of transformative processes within that placement.
The University as Authentic
I have found the voices of students working in Art School Live provocative in helping me to think more about these 'transformative processes'.
Placements are authentic experiences, and perhaps this is core to their impact. They create a platform to recontextualise learning in response to unknown challenges, to inhabit unfamiliar relationships and behaviours. But this raises a curious question: is the best way of supporting employability to get students away from Universities?
We actually got to press the buttons! Who lets the work experience kid do that?
I think authenticity can be a double-edged sword: each opportunity carries a hidden limitation. 'Real world' settings must prioritise business needs above educational ones, and there are boundaries to the access and responsibility they can justifiably give to a student. It is challenging to persuade employers to overlook confident students and favour those for whom developmental gains would be significant. The demographic skew in students who access these opportunities is likely to be compounded by this.
Art School Live unsettled these tensions by engineering an environment with overtly educational priorities but many qualities of placement. It was more than a simulation or roleplay, implying self-referential purpose rather than the real and meaningful public output. Perhaps, then, a form of contrived-authenticity?
The impact of this configuration is significant; it situates the students' development as its locus of priority, rather than business need, and therefore justifies their involvement in more profound and authentic ways. As one student told me: "...but we actually got to press the buttons! Who lets the work experience kid do that!".
It was more inclusive of the varied starting points of students:
In delivering Art School Live, confident and competent participants worked alongside those with less experience. I also noted a thread of students who did not join the project because it aligned with their aspirations but wanted to develop a transferable skill or test themselves in unfamiliar settings. There is much to be applauded in this. It resonates with a seemingly long-lost sense of Universities as sandpits for experimentation and rehearsal of self. As a scaffold for employability, holding space for uncertainty in our students' destiny is every bit as valuable as conveying them to it.
Learning is about the People
Our students valued mentorship in their Art School Live experience. However, this was a mentorship with deep and overtly educational tones. Art School Live was a site for the application of learning, but I observed overtly 'teacherly' interventions. Evan, Sam and events expert Lesley Fair were skilful at spotting the 'teachable moment', expanding degrees of possibility through introducing new ideas.
Beyond its impact on employability, this is an exceptionally exciting pedagogy. From the earliest stages, our education system does 'purpose' really poorly. It grounds learning in disciplinary terms ('because I say so' or ' because its canon') or in reference to a hypothetical future ('it'll be relevant when you have to...'). Experiential learning cycles tend to begin with abstract conceptualisation and rarely with active experimentation. It is a controlled and convenient approach to teaching - but, I think, not the best way of learning.
From its earliest phases, our education system does 'purpose' really poorly.
Art School Live upends this by situating students in the thick of things, with mentors introducing new concepts to enable agency. This learning hygiene is chaotic, but it leaves ideas more deeply learnt, as they are grounded in meaning rather than begging for it. And their origin leaves them flexibly actionable, and the learner more agentic in that action.
The approach makes struggle normal. Indeed, moments in which the learners lack the conceptual tools to address immediate challenges are necessary. Handled humanely, the act of resolution also positively impacts the learner's self-efficacy, confidence, and capability to solve problems independently. As an approach, supporting the means of success feels a more robust response to questions of resilience than focusing on coping with failure.
That would have been me tanking in a placement .. but we could talk through what was happening and then re-engage.
Art School Live could oscillate from intense, authentic participation to reflective pause because of its educational framing. It did not coddle students, but its facilitators could invest in enabling them. One student told me: "there were moments at which I was just in too deep, I was flapping about, and that would be me tanking in a placement ... but we could more spend time talking through what was happening and then re-engage".
In It, Together.
Student collaboration was significant to Art School Live. It was driven in entirety by student activity, unlike placement settings in which they are likely to be isolated novices amongst a more expert community. Many students noted the interdisciplinary working and benefits of understanding the interactions of course knowledge. They also spoke of the development and exercise of transdisciplinary skillsets.
I am fascinated by how co-productive processes between students were themselves an educative platform. Students negotiated, collaborated, corrected, scaffolded, and synthesised to produce new possibilities. These dynamics enable sophisticated learning in the best traditions of dialogic learning: exposing how the social manipulation of ideas is as essential as pre-learning inputs and practical outputs. It is all the more interesting is that these 'dialogic turns' are embodied and not just linguistic. In short: doing things together, the various physical manipulations and translations of arrangement, made learning happen.
This co-production also means that students genuinely owned the end accomplishment - a dynamic that we should not undervalue. It punctures the deep-embedded attachment to individualised rather than collective accounts of achievement. And, of course, it leaves our students bathed in pride that should bolster their self-confidence and act as CV collateral, speaking to their capability to deliver on complex plans.
Employability, Joy and Ambition
At its heart, education is the engineering of future potentials. It should be unavoidably cut through with joy and possibility by its very definition. And yet, too often, it is reduced to a grey-drab shadow. Transactional pressures contort the social relations on which it subsists, and instrumental reductionalism curtails possibility.
A doubling down on employability as the primary function of Higher Education seems destined to harden this. Art School Live drew my attention as it countered this with technicolour ambition, evidencing how creative enthusiasm can meet policy challenges in vibrant ways. The project taught me a great deal.
Art School Live drew my attention because it countered a drab instrumental version of employability with technicolour ambition.
Viewed from one perspective, Art School Live deconstructs work experience and reconstructs it in an educative space, where it shows how authenticity and challenge in a scaffolded framework can promote development. But viewed from the opposite direction, it exposes important counter-messages about teaching and learning in Higher Education: about participation, ownership, emergence, belonging and purpose.
Art School Live constructs a valuable curriculum space between 'course' and 'placement'. It shows how we can understand transformative processes, bottle and redistil them in ways that can take impact to a broader range of students. It has set down a gauntlet which Man Met Rise will take to heart; to explore further these contrived-authentic collaborations with more in-house 'proto-enterprises'. In doing so, I am curious to explore how we can re-interweave the voice of the employer lost as we extracted 'placement' from its external setting.
But most of all, these spaces come to life because educators inhabit them to mediate and facilitate student learning. Whilst the sector braces for a hardening of policy around graduate outcomes, it should also seek to elevate practitioners like Evan, Sam and Lesley. It is through the hands of educational dreamers that a constraining employability discourse will be translated into a creative celebration of potential. And, paradoxically, it is through this translation - from instrumental driver to thoughtful pedagogy - that the much needed answers to challenges around impact and inequity will be found
In the meantime, I wait in anticipation to share more of my adventures with these pioneers.
Art School Live broadcast on the 26th and 27th July. The recordings of the events can be viewed here and here.
This article was first published by Mark on the 2nd March, 2022 through LinkedIn.