The Undergraduate Experience of SCL: The Core and the Media Production Major

Abstract

This chapter outlines the undergraduate experience of students in the Bachelor of Communication at the University of Newcastle in Australia where the theories about creative practice are coupled with the teaching, in this case, of media practice and production. While our higher education students, studying media production, are led toward very specific creative projects, ones they develop and work on themselves, this approach to their creative education would not work if they were not, firstly, given some grounding in the ideas that led up to these actions and practices. Our approach of heavily interlinking theory about creativity with creative media practice has produced an iterative set of learning cycles that enable students to frame and inform their practice as they develop as practitioners. In doing so, they acquire a set of tools and a research grounded language they can increasingly apply to their own creative practice. They begin to analyse what they do while they are also learning how to do it. This process is staged across three years, from introduction of the ideas through to consolidation, and by the time they reach the capstone creative production course they are well prepared. They enter this course with a highly relevant set of pragmatically useful skills to engage in and use to think deeply about their own creative practice. This is not just the development of technical skills but a solid and well integrated melding of theory with practice.