Please note

This document only provides information for the academic year selected and does not form part of the student contract

Awarding Institution

University of Huddersfield

Final Award

MA Master of Arts

Teaching Institution

University of Huddersfield

School

School of Arts and Humanities

Department

Department of Music and Design Arts

Subject Benchmark Statement

Characteristic Statement - Master's Degree

Date of Programme Specification Approval

2024-01-12

Version Number

2023.01

Educational Aims of the Course

Built upon the heritage of textiles creation and fashion innovation in Huddersfield this specification relates to Masters’ provision in the area of Fashion and Textiles within the School of Arts and Humanities. This provision offers three named awards delivered through an integrated framework of programmes, enabling acquisition of fashion and … For more content click the Read More button below. As befits a School of global significance where excellence in research and teaching meet creative practice, our fashion and textile Masters’ graduates succeed in positioning themselves as innovators and creatives in both the niche and mass markets of the global design and retail industry. You will achieve this too by acquiring advanced subject knowledge and developing expertise in sustainable and ethical approaches to creative design, material futures and fashion promotion. Our integrated framework programme structure and expert staff guidance also enables you to become creatively adaptable, resilient and innovative to the highest of standards. You will be able to operate at the forefront of the fashion retail renaissance, driven to positive impact, choice, innovation, and creation of high-quality products and processes.  You will broaden and deepen your existing expertise, developing as a professional fashion and textile practitioner with an emphasis on individual ability and analytical skills, thus building your confidence to practice professionally at the forefront of the international fashion industries. Our integrated framework programme structure and expert staff guidance also enable you to become creatively adaptable, resilient and innovative through cross-disciplinary exchange and collaboration. As part of a dynamic and interactive community of advanced practice, we will guide you to explore your individual style and interrogate the boundaries of the specialism through practice-based enquiry and experimental research processes. This programme of Fashion and Textile Masters courses is underpinned by subject-specific themes and topics linked to research generated throughout the School, inviting opportunities for participation, collaboration and exchange between staff and students in a variety of activities through our research centres and external projects. Intensive personal research and portfolio development facilitated through workshop and studios enables our students to explore visual research methods, design thinking, new technologies, and new markets appropriate to their named award.  A marriage of digital technology and traditional techniques are offered in the development of advanced textiles, material experimentation, patterning with 3D digitization, advanced technology and communication innovation. The aims of the programmes are to: Provide a postgraduate teaching and learning experience exploring emerging issues, stimulating debate, new models of innovation and opportunity for fashion and textiles in the contemporary world, based on the professional and research strengths of the School's highly qualified and experienced staff. Encourage confidence in your academic and creative potential through reflective practice and concept generation, mastering and challenging core fashion and textile knowledge and understanding through interweaving new concepts, materials and technologies. Empower you to craft and facilitate new multi-disciplinary and transferable skills and attributes relevant to your future success through collaborative creative exchange and inclusive partnerships with students and practitioners from diverse disciplines and cultural backgrounds. Enable you to realise and apply your ideas, skills and abilities in real-world cultural contexts and creative industries through understanding and experience of facilitating change, educating people, and creating alternate product through creative innovation and entrepreneurship. To develop your capability for independent judgment, strategic decision making and critical self-awareness leading to advanced knowledge and professional practice within and beyond existing subject specialism The Core educational aims of the Fashion and Textiles Master’s suite of courses are: To stimulate practice-based research activity to cross conventional boundaries. To develop innovative and imaginative approaches to materials, processes and methodologies in fashion and textiles, and rigorously test these ideas against trends within current practice. To experiment, expand and encourage progressive thinking in the sustainable practices of fashion and textiles to meet future industry opportunities and customer demands. To support the realisation of a major project that combines knowledge of advanced ideation and the application of creative, aesthetic, technical and analytical skills appropriate to the fashion and textiles discipline.

Course Offering(s)

Full Time

Full Time - January
Full Time - September

Part Time

Part Time - September
Part Time - January

Learning Outcomes

On successful completion you will be able to:
1.
Demonstrate systematic understanding of knowledge at the forefront of fashion and textile practices in respect of factors shaping emerging techniques, standards, and processes applicable to the subject area.
2.
Evaluate and substantiate how fashion and textiles knowledge is advanced through research to produce sustainable creative and critical frameworks for practice.
3.
Develop and apply advanced conceptual thinking to established, emerging, advanced and alternative technologies.
4.
Critically appraise the importance of social, technological and cultural dimensions of Fashion Marketing as applied to your personal practice and that of others.
5.
Evidence advanced knowledge and understanding of communication strategies to build compelling experiences in the creation of products and services for customers.
6.
Evaluate and apply a comprehensive range of visual, oral and written communications to test, analyse and critically appraise project proposals.
7.
Communicate clearly a conceptual and critical self-reflective understanding of creative practice relating to fashion and textiles.
8.
Work efficiently as part of multi-disciplinary teams, drawing on the sum of experiences to inform practice.
9.
Systematically plan, negotiate, and implement a coherent body of work underpinned by advanced practice and research in Fashion Marketing.
10.
Contribute to the principles and processes critical to commercial and creative fashion communication strategies.
11.
Initiate, manage and take responsibility for sustainable development of personal professional practice, receiving and reciprocating support of team members and peers.
12.
Demonstrate initiative, self-direction and leadership in contexts of uncertainty, change and complexity.
13.
Evidence awareness and relevance of your practice in relation to professional standards in Fashion Marketing.
14.
Exercise personal management and negotiation skills, self-confidence, personal motivation, future career development and personal enterprise.
15.
Develop and apply decision-making skills and ability in contexts of complexity, uncertainty and change for the fashion and textile industries.
16.
Demonstrate increasingly independent learning and research ability for continuing professional development.

Interim Award

Postgraduate Certificate
Postgraduate Diploma

Teaching, Learning and Assessment

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 … For more content click the Read More button below. Our teaching and learning enable each student to development 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 Arts and Humanities 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 approach, 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 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. Personal Development Planning (PDP) is integrated into the course.  Learning Development components are embedded within core-shared modules within the course with additional support from the Academic Librarian.  Full use is made of the University’s Careers and Employment Services to develop your career related development.  The PDP process will be supported via the personal tutor system. To record and audit PDP, your will be encouraged to develop a portfolio of your development using an appropriate system (e.g. within the VLE). The course is delivered on-campus and you are expected to attend the taught delivery sessions (largely studio/classroom/library based).  The course requires significant engagement with studio culture. The course also requires substantial reading of academic materials (e.g.; journal articles, books etc.).  Students are typically required to make an oral contribution to in-class discussions and prepare written work to accompany any portfolio submissions.  Workshop facilities and visualisation tools are used frequently.

Support for Students and their Learning

Each programme has a named course leader, normally based in the subject area, who has responsibility for the smooth operation of the course. The course leaders are also available for academic support, as are module leaders and other teaching staff.

Details of academic and personal support within the School and University are listed in the Student handbook

In addition, you can also expect support in the form of:

  • Course Handbook, updated annually, which gives all relevant information about the course and includes the key regulations and advice on the presentation of written work;
  • Module Handbooks and a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) for each taught module;
  • Induction programme for new students;
  • Personal Tutors; Module Leaders
  • All students have access to PDP through regular meetings with your Personal Tutors and the Module Leaders;
  • The course will make any necessary adjustments to ensure that disabled students receive fair and equal treatment;

Criteria for Admission

The University of Huddersfield seeks and encourages applicants in order to widen participation, improve access and apply the principles of equal opportunities.  We provide support for applicants who require additional assistance in order to select the right course of study and make a successful transition to studying at University.  We encourage local, national and international applications.  Further information for International Students can be found on their website.

If you were educated outside the UK, you are required to have International English Language Testing System (IELTS) at a score of 6.0 with a minimum score of 6.0 in writing and a minimum of 5.5 in any single component. If you have alternative qualifications or do not meet the IELTS requirement we also offer a range of Pre-Sessional English Programmes.

The University provides opportunities for the accreditation of prior learning (APL) as stated in Section 3 of the Regulations for Awards.

 The University’s general minimum entry requirements are specified in Section 1.5 of the Regulations for Awards.

Every person who applies for this course and meets the minimum entry requirement – regardless of any disability – will be given the same opportunity in the selection process.  General advice and information regarding disability and the support the University can give can be found by contacting student services as follows:

Telephone: 01484 472675

Email: disability@hud.ac.uk

Further information is available on the disability services website.  

Further advice on the specific skills and abilities needed to successfully undertake this course can be found by contacting the admissions tutor and by visiting our course finder website page.

However, the specific entry requirements and admission criteria for the courses are detailed below:

  • An Honours degree (2:2 or above) in a relevant subject or an equivalent professional qualification.
  • Alternative qualifications and/or significant experience may be accepted, subject to approval.

If your first language is not English, you will need to meet the minimum requirements of an English Language qualification. The minimum for IELTS is 6.0 overall with no element lower than 5.5, or equivalent will be considered acceptable.

Assessment of your application will also include review of a selection of your work in a portfolio which can also include relevant support and research material. This review can take place through a discussion of the portfolio in person with an academic tutor or, as is the case often with international applicants, through digital submission.

Please note

University awards are regulated by the Regulations for Awards (Taught Courses) on the University website.

Quick links to the Regulations for Taught Students, procedures and forms can be accessed on the University website.

Indicators of Quality and Standards

This programme specification document provides a concise summary of the main features of the Programme and the Learning Outcomes that a typical student might reasonably be expected to achieve and demonstrate if he/she takes full advantage of the learning opportunities that are provided.  More detailed information on the Learning Outcomes, content and teaching, learning and assessment methods of each module can be found in the module study guide and course handbook.