We have all been experiencing change lately.
Our resources have been challenged and our resilience has been tested.
It has been a trying time!
The Festival of Creative Learning was on hiatus for much of the past year or so thanks to covid and all the resulting complexities. However, we are waking up again, refreshed and reimagined.
While we are not currently distributing funding for Festival events, we hope anyone interested in the Festival of Creative Learning will find useful tools and ideas on our website. We are also encouraging you to adopt a ‘Festival mindset’ as you design your own creative learning and teaching pathways.
By this we mean prioritising what the Festival holds dear… experimentation, dreaming, play, collaboration and innovation… a right to try and to ‘fail’, and to try again. By this we mean remembering that you can make and hold the space you need to imagine what it is you really want in your learning and teaching experiences and to make what you imagine come true. By this we mean considering and, where useful, embracing our aims and values and adding your own.
Plans are afoot to revive the Festival in new and exciting ways. Keep an eye on this space for news, and in the meantime also check out the University of Edinburgh’s Curriculum Transformation programme, with which we are likely to be engaging.
What the Festival was as of 2019:
The Festival aims to provide space for staff and students at the University of Edinburgh to play, to experiment, to innovate, to collaborate and, occasionally, to fail. A space where the emphasis is not on how many seats we fill, how many tickets we sell, how many answers we get right, but rather on truly exploring and pushing boundaries, communicating in radically new ways and leaping into the dark to find out what new ideas await us there. Our goals are to help staff and students create innovative, experimental and collaborative ways of teaching and learning in a safe space, to give people the training and support they need to design and run events, and to celebrate the work of all our event organisers and the discoveries we make together along the way. By its very nature and commitment to openness and diversity, the programme covers an enormous range of disciplines and activities. Rather than running each of the events ourselves (we have a small but efficient staff of two), we seek proposals from staff and students, distribute funding, provide a networking platform and communications umbrella for the events and aim to empower our staff and students to get the most out of what we provide. We hope that the Festival is a learning experience not just in terms of the research being conducted but also in events design and management, imparting vital skills to organisers that they can make use of in future employment, study and enterprise. We want to celebrate the idea that we learn better when we are enjoying ourselves, when we are treated with care and respect, and when we are encouraged to use our imaginations and to play.
Festival Aims and Values
At the Festival of Creative Learning, we aim to:
Recognise, celebrate and inspire creative learning at the UoE
Help participants to gain new skills and broaden mindsets
Support the UoE community in developing creative learning practices by providing a platform for experimentation and exploration
Enhance the UoE experience in line with strategic learning and teaching priorities
Develop a pipeline of innovation at UoE through encouragement, training and self-directed learning opportunities
Explore the definitions of innovation and creativity and how they can be further embedded into the learning experience
Cultivate the effective design and delivery of innovative and creative events
Foster meaningful and interesting collaborations and learning communities
Use our resources and knowledge to enhance our local and global community
And we value:
Openness – nurturing an open mindset and curiosity about learning
Collaboration – creating meaningful connections
Creativity – taking risks and implementing original ideas
Mindfulness – celebrating thoughtful and holistic ways of working
Experimentation – building and prototyping ideas in a supportive environment
Suggestions and Questions for the Future of the Festival
- Can you challenge yourself to embrace the Festival aims and values (mindset) when planning Festival-inspired activities?
- Think about what the Festival represents and how that can be helpful in the context of your own projects. What can the Festival bring to the project? What does this creative, open space for learning mean for you? Apart from hosting events that could offer learning points, can the Festival model and mindset itself offer inspiration to your project’s process and outcomes?
- The Festival was always based around in-person events. What does the Festival look like in a world where so much is now online? If your Festival-inspired projects and events go online in future, how do you maintain the warmth of in-person dynamics?
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