Course and Module Catalogue

 Our taught postgraduate teaching, learning and assessment strategy is learner-centred, practitioner-focused, contextually-driven, responsive and inclusive. Its experiential dynamic thrives on the interaction of diversity of perspectives and approaches leading to innovation within a community of scholar-practitioners, whether staff or students. Our curriculum design encourages and enables students to engage in enquiry-led practice and research within and beyond the perspective of their existing discipline and knowledge. In understanding how the material and conceptual behaviour of art and design acts upon and within the world, the postgraduate learner-practitioner learns to determine a distinctive path toward making and sharing meaningful and impactful work.

Our teaching and learning enable each student to develop from demonstrating knowledge and understanding of art and design to establishing themselves as a confident practitioner in their field. Students gain this confidence through experiencing new and different ways of working through navigating the transdisciplinary learning environment of the Barbara Hepworth Building. This state-of-the-art facility brings our internationally recognised expertise across art, design and architecture under one roof to create a physical and intellectual learning environment for the 21st-century practitioner.

Our teaching, learning and assessment offer a variety of learning and assessment opportunities enabling success in meeting and exceeding module and programme learning outcomes. They aim to be inclusive of diversity, to allow you to actively engage in learning and be successfully assessed in a variety of ways. You will benefit from a range of teaching, learning and assessment approaches, combined in ways thought to be most appropriate by the subject specialists to achieve the outcomes specified in Section 12. These will include, for example, lectures, seminars, tutorials, computer-aided learning packages, case study analysis and directed study. Use will be made of the University’s VLE and other e-learning methods where appropriate.  You will have the opportunity to develop your IT skills through the use of specialist software packages.  The VLE provides you with guidance for extended study and links to library resources through MyReading and Summon.

We value assessment-for-learning as much as assessment-of-learning. We strive to ensure there is an appropriate balance of formative assessment to help you improve and summative assessment that confirms your success. Formative assessment will be provided in all modules, as appropriate to the subject matter, to allow you to gain tutor feedback on your work before formal summative assessment takes place. Assessment methods are described in each module specification. All Learning Outcomes in a module are assessed, and the mode of assessment is specified for each Outcome.  The assessment methods used are varied and indicative of current practice in assessing at Masters’ level.  Where appropriate, they are consistent with developing intercultural awareness amongst students from varied backgrounds.

The programme focuses overall on each learner's development of a significant body of art and design practice and understanding how it behaves in the world. This practice-led approach emphasises assessment involving the production of designs, visualisations, drawings, prototypes, events and exhibitions of fully resolved and realised art and design work. The understanding of how this work has developed and behaves in the world is often primarily assessed through portfolios documenting and reflecting upon the developing and underlying concepts and processes underpinning the work.

You will also develop the ability to engage in different types of writing to explicate your learning and development, including proposals and reports. Written research journals can take the form of blogs and other formats. The curriculum is designed in such a way that all modules will be assessed on course work in this way. Students are provided with assignment briefs providing guidance on achieving the learning outcomes set out here in programme and modules specification documents.

The dynamic and reflective transdisciplinary experience of the programmes is sometimes achieved through group learning in the form of seminars, critiques, presentations, exhibitions, live projects, and other event-based forms of teaching and learning. Event-based learning and sharing of practice through forms of presentation can help elucidate critical findings in this respect. Ongoing formative assessment will also make use of self and peer review. Our teaching, learning and assessment strategy focuses ultimately on the individual practitioner, however, and their ability to interact and extrapolate outcomes from contexts. As such, each student is most often assessed on their individual performance in each assessment task and module according to the assessment criteria outlined in each module specification document. In modules where individual students are awarded a group mark reflecting the collaborative achievement of an assessment task (such as in this programme, TMA1402: Creative Innovation and Entrepreneurship), there is also an opportunity to be assessed on an individual evaluation of the project.