Living Archives – Supporting Creative Practice Students Learning Leaps in Interdisciplinary Workshops

Understanding students’ creative process in order to identify meaningful ways to nurture, support and develop creative-practice students and enhance teaching and learning is a major challenge within Higher Education (HE). This paper evaluates a project that studied creative writing and visual-practice students’ experiences of specific creative workshops at the University of Brighton. By providing opportunities for students to identify the things within their experiences, memories and even within themselves that inspire their creativity, the study found that it was possible to effectively support and enhance their creative processes. We suggest that the principles of this project can be applied to interdisciplinary academic work and help us to make links between teaching, learning and research. The paper identifies and explores opportunities for interdisciplinary teaching events and collaborative research and considers the potential impact on the authors own practices. We suggest that opportunities for interdisciplinary work and this process of learning through doing have implications for how we design and implement Creative Writing teaching and also on how we manage and carry out our research.