Course description
MA Arts and Cultural Enterprise acknowledges that we are living in a fast-changing, globalised world, which presents a great number of opportunities and challenges for cultural innovation. This Masters Programme takes these changing conditions as a starting point to engage you in developing new knowledge and skills in order to manage cultural projects in the UK and around the world. It has been developed specifically in response to an increasing need for multi-skilled individuals who can both generate the ideas for original arts and cultural events, as well as provide leadership for the teams that realise them. These individuals will be dynamic, responsive, and fluent in public and private sectors, and have the ability to collaborate and develop networks.
The course addresses a contemporary shift within the cultural economy towards experiences and events, and away from the artefact. It is a response to multiple new forms of artistic and creative practice (interdisciplinary, time-based, socially-engaged, etc.), which demand new, hybrid forms of cultural management and organisation, and in turn, a new pedagogical approach from higher education institutions.
MA Arts and Cultural Enterprise takes as a starting point a definition of enterprise as engaging with projects that are new, challenging and complex, in order to create a valuable difference to specific stakeholders. It aims to enable you to gain a unique skill and knowledge set to become active creators in cultural management and production, be it as entrepreneurs, or within larger existing cultural organisations, anywhere in the world. For this reason, the course values rich cultural diversity, and benefits from the broad range of cultural backgrounds of its students, staff, and the college generally. Cultural diversity and intercultural dialogue are the essential point-of-departure for cultural and creative innovation, which generates cultural capital, and in turn fosters economic capital formation.
Course structure
To achieve the Masters qualification your learning is timetabled across 83 weeks over two full calendar years. To achieve the PG Cert takes 27 weeks’ study, over around an 8-month period, and for the PG Dip, it takes 54 weeks’ study, over around a 16-month period. Both PG Cert and PG Dip are offered as an exit award only.
The course comprises six multidisciplinary, 20-credit, Level 6 units that can be combined to achieve a PG Cert or PG Dip, followed by a 60-credit unit (dissertation/major project), to achieve an MA. Each of the six 20-credit units sets out to equip you with specific skills, knowledge and insights relevant to cultural innovation; as such, the content, teaching and learning activities, and assessment evidence for each one, is distinctive and uses the lexicon and discourses relevant to the specific range of disciplines that it covers. The final 60-credit unit offers the opportunity to bring together and demonstrate your assimilation of the skills and knowledge gained. The MA award is based solely on the achievement in Unit 7.
Each summative unit assessment will be assessed either ‘holistically’ or broken down into ‘elements’:
Holistic Assessment: In holistic assessment students may be asked to submit one or more pieces of work, but tutors will look at all the work for the unit and make a single judgement about students’ performance against the University’s marking criteria. Students will receive a single grade and a single feedback form. Students will need to achieve a grade of D- or above to pass the unit.
Element Assessment: When a unit is made up of a number of different pieces of work (or ‘elements’), those elements may be marked by different tutors or submitted at different times. In this case, each element is ‘weighted’ and added together to create the unit grade and students will receive a grade and feedback form for each individual element. Students will need to achieve at least an E grade in each individual element and at least a D- grade in the unit overall in order to pass the unit.