RecSpace reflections: Cultivating cross-disciplinary engagement through creative practices in higher education

RecSpace was conceived as a STEAM-informed, interdisciplinary initiative, led by academics from within the Division of Arts and Media at University of the West of Scotland. Driven by creative-practice education principles and practices, the initiative provided opportunities for students from a range of subject disciplines, levels of study, and points of entry to work collaboratively with stakeholders within the university and the wider community. From the outset, the initiative was premised on offering students a unique opportunity to engage with locally situated community issues as a collective. By considering the different skills, knowledge and experience that their varied disciplinary backgrounds brought to the group, students were encouraged, through creative practice techniques, to consider how they, as a collective, might tackle real-world challenges creatively and innovatively. The focus was on empowering students to make a tangible impact on pressing concerns facing the university population and wider community which it is part of, as well as developing an appreciation for how their learning and developing communities of practice might have impact outside of the classroom. In this case study, we will argue that RecSpace embodies the ways in which creativity within an educational environment offers routes to address a range of strategic institutional priorities and sectoral challenges including campus reimagining, retention and progression, socialization and student experience, and the efficient pooling of resources for collective and shared interests. These benefits prevail despite extreme cuts to the arts. An account of how the project evolved highlights the challenges faced in developing inter/multi/trans/disciplinary working beyond curricular silos and outside of established university schools and structures. We will explore the project's strategies for tackling these barriers and how it attempted to address these challenges. We will reflect upon the outcomes of the project, including exploring possible applications, and future directions, before drawing conclusions as to how lessons learned here could be applied across the wider sector.