Creativity with Communities and Young People
Description
The module aims to address fundamental questions about cultural democracy and human rights, with a particular focus on practical strategies to develop cultural literacy and cultural capital. It seeks to achieve this by combining a theoretical understanding of the issues that arise in community-based cultural activity with practical approaches to exploring the significance of creativity in community and youth work. This practical exploration will focus in particular on the aesthetic and ethical issues arising from the tensions between product and process in community-based cultural activity. The module aims to encourage and enable an exploration of these issues, by providing an experiential context, conceptual frameworks and a forum for examining and exploring the role of the arts in community and youth work. The module will also seek to address and explore the contemporary debate on sustainability and creativity, and will situate an understanding of community as part of the inter-relationship of social, cultural, environmental and psychological factors as key determinants of human well-being.
The module should provide students with a context for subsequent learning, enhance their power of independent judgement, enrich their perspectives on human society and encourage reflection on the interface of culture, sustainability, human rights and community development in community and youth work.
Learning Outcomes
Demonstrate a deeper and broader knowledge and understanding of culture, cultural literacy, cultural capital, cultural rights and cultural democracy.
Analyse differing views on the arts in community, sustainability and youth work and the role of the artist and volunteer in this work.
Demonstrate a familiarity with contemporary debates on art and sustainability.
Appraise and evaluate issues of social well-being, culture, community and sustainability in relation to their own professional and personal lives.
Demonstrate an enhanced capacity for thought, self-reflection, autonomous learning and expression through the arts, including the ability and confidence to articulate an internalised personal world view, manifesting solidarity with others and engaging creatively with them