By Dr Rebecca Scollen
Although 2020 was a difficult year, both professionally and personally for all involved, I am pleased to report that the staff and students in the School of Creative Arts at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) achieved a great deal together and we have entered 2021 stronger than ever.
The USQ School of Creative Arts (located in Toowoomba and Springfield) consists of a variety of creative arts disciplines, chiefly taught on campus in studio. Most of our students study fulltime and are recent high school-leavers. As such, when we were instructed to “lockdown” in March and remain home until July it required a tremendous effort to swiftly shift courses to online, and to retain a disrupted and anxious cohort of students. It provided a creative challenge to our lecturers who with a week’s notice needed to arrive at comparable approaches to teaching “hands-on, collaborative, and specialist equipment-based” subjects such as acting, music, film, and ceramics. Strong dedication to our students and their learning needs meant that all lecturers rose to the challenge and each arrived at workable solutions. Their tireless efforts, which included endless compassion and care, successfully retained our students in our courses.
USQ is known for its flexible delivery with the majority of the University’s students choosing to study online. So as a School with an on campus focus, we were fortunate to be able to turn to our University’s online expertise when needing to shift to this mode. Although the shift to online-only was difficult for staff and students alike, it demonstrated the possibilities of teaching creative arts in this way. By necessity it led to alternative ways of teaching students and including them in practical project work. Rather than cancel practical courses and direct students to theory subjects only, we adapted how we taught the practice and assessed the work. Not only did this work well for our students’ learning, but in some cases it increased the impact of their output. In one example, a film course where students usually work together in person to make a documentary saw them instead make solo mini-documentaries each week from their homes about the pandemic and their experiences of it. The compilation of these led to the creation of an interactive online documentary which then became part of the Campus Reboot Project administered by Hartford University, Connecticut. This international interactive documentary project recorded student experiences of COVID-19 from across the world in 2020 and is now continuing into 2021 recording how the world is changing for university students.
Overall, the need to teach online-only in Semester One 2020 proved timely as this year we have launched seven new undergraduate creative arts programs, with three offering a choice of fully online or on campus and the other four including a much stronger emphasis upon digital first, online delivery. We are now in a better position to engage our current and future students across a range of platforms. During 2020 we retained our staff levels and grew even closer as a collective. All staff supported each other; sharing ideas and words of encouragement. Together we devised our return to campus and undertook the many risk assessments and COVID-19 safety plans necessary. Our School was one of the first in our University to return to campus and our students were grateful for our efforts. Upon their return students happily adhered to the COVID-19 safety protocols. Their attendance levels were very high throughout the semester, as was their productivity and the quality of outcomes.
Now as we enter Semester One 2021, we are pleased to see our enrolment numbers have increased from this time last year. At a time when some universities are unfortunately closing down creative arts programs, our University has invested in us and we are excited to offer the following: Bachelor of Creative Arts and Community Wellbeing; Bachelor of Design and Interactive Technologies; Bachelor of Film and Screen Production; Bachelor of Music; Bachelor of Television and Radio Production; Bachelor of Theatre; Bachelor of Visual Art; Bachelor of Creative Arts (Honours); Master of Editing and Publishing; and Doctor of Creative Arts.
Dr Rebecca Scollen is Head of School of Creative Arts at The University of Southern Queensland.