Collage as pedagogy: How arts methods can enhance academic citation skills and critical understanding

Scholars worldwide are navigating fast, fluid changes to professional academic standards, which are occurring alongside technological and equity-based sectoral challenges. These factors impinge on University teaching professionals’ capacity to support student understanding of citation and authorship. Drawing on established theoretical perspectives from experiential learning, academic literacies and inclusive pedagogy, the article reports reflective practitioner enquiry into the pedagogic affordances of creative paper-collaging tasks (combining materials from different sources to create a unique artwork) within a research-led University module by a large, historic UK University with a significant international student population. The article argues that creative arts methods can play a key role in affording ethical ways of knowing and learning that suggest an alternative epistemology for academic literacies in the postdigital, global context of higher education. The article details collage as original pedagogical method, and contributes a novel conceptual model of citation as a creative, multimodal and ethical process.