External Projects

Learning Outcomes

Knowledge and Understanding

Having successfully completed this module, you will be able to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of:

• the conceptual grounding of your approach to your discipline;
• contemporary and historical critical debates and developments within your discipline;
• the justification of selected technical approach to your discipline.

Subject Specific Intellectual and Research Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• identify approaches to your discipline that are appropriate to realise your ideas;
• recognise and reflect on innovation and originality in your discipline;
• develop research methodologies relevant to your pathway discipline.

Transferable and Generic Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• apply professional standards to communication and documentation;
• demonstrate how to solve problems effectively and efficiently.
• connect with increasing sophistication your research activity and studio practice;

Subject Specific Practical Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• use advanced pathway technical skills with informed judgment;
• apply intellectual rigor and technical sophistication to pathway related practice.

The module offers the opportunity to engage with specialist staff at the forefront of your discipline. You will be encouraged to be independent and self-motivated, and to strive for ambition and confidence in the presentation of your work.

You will continuously question and evaluate your work to arrive at increasingly focused creative outcomes which communicate qualities of originality, coherence and a detailed understanding of how to apply specific media and techniques, appropriate to your discipline and subject area.

Although the work undertaken in this module may resemble output produced in previous levels, the quality and depth of discipline contextual awareness will be markedly higher. The work and outcomes of this module can inform and influence the focus and thinking of the Final Major Project.

External Projects is built around project briefs and competitions that are set by individuals, partners or organisations outside the environment of the Graphic Arts course. In this context students are given the opportunity to begin to measure themselves against their peers locally, nationally and in some cases internationally. The module requires students to consolidate all elements of their practice into a professionalised process by understanding more about the efficiencies of thought and process required in a professional work environment. In addition, the module asks the student to employ critical, conceptual and contextual thinking to their approach to research in their discipline. The intellectual scrutiny that this module requires will prepare students for further study.

Teaching methods include:

• project briefings;
• seminars;
• group critiques;
• lectures;
• tutorials.

Learning activities include:

• proactive engagement with project briefings;
• independent research initiated by seminars;
• reflection from group critiques;
• reflection and independent activity initiated by peer group discussion;
• study skills hub.

Relationship between the teaching, learning and assessment methods and the planned learning outcomes:

In this module learning and teaching activities focus on helping you to explore and investigate ideas, methods and techniques particular to your discipline-specific practice. As in the preceding practice modules you will be encouraged to make links between methods, skills and practices, within your programme of study that you have explored and developed. To support this process you will be involved with specialist staff who will help you to advance your work in relation to current discipline-specific thinking and practices. Increasingly this will involve anticipating the issues connected to the effective completion of art and design work and its interaction with and reception by an audience.

Critical contexts will be outlined through briefings and seminars. Discussion in seminars will help you to become increasingly sophisticated in your ability to communicate the processes and outcomes of your work as well as help you to evaluate your thinking and skills, whether specialist or transferable. In periods of independent study, you will be guided to learn how to manage your time effectively outside the taught sessions.

Feedback on your progress and development will be given during tutorial and group critiques. The formal assessment of your work will include a portfolio of work that demonstrates your experimental process, the products of your testing and examples of work which creatively address the concerns of your project.

Formative

This is how we’ll give you feedback as you are learning. It is not a formal test or exam.

Portfolio

• Assessment Type: Formative
• Feedback: Feedback on project brief. You will experience formative feedback during the module in different learning situations, for example: tutorials, crits and written feedback, contributing to the written summative feedback given at the end of the module.
• Final Assessment: No
• Group Work: No

Summative

This is how we’ll formally assess what you have learned in this module.

Referral

This is how we’ll assess you if you don’t meet the criteria to pass this module.

Repeat

An internal repeat is where you take all of your modules again, including any you passed. An external repeat is where you only re-take the modules you failed.