This project is a result of several years of collaboration between the partners organizations and other institutions, under the network École des Écoles. EdE addresses mainly practice based research workshops for teachers and teachers’ debate – lifelong learning. This previous activity assures therefore the internal coherence and mutual knowledge of the partners organizations and their importance in European theatre higher education context, the assumptions on which this project lays, the commitment to cross-border cooperation and collaborative learning, the pertinence of a particular set of needs and objectives, the enhancing of skills and competences. The objectives of the project are related to the modernization of European performing arts / theatre higher education, namely through activities that explore and debate the pedagogical, creative, and managerial potential of an entrepreneurial approach in arts and theatre higher education. Implicit to these objectives are conspicuous changes in the professional context of performing arts, characterized by new configurations of employability that demand new skills and competences, hence new methodologies in training and teaching. The increasingly necessity of building up an autonomous, transnational and flexible artistic career criss-crosses itself with new ways of making theatre, new forms of theatre displaying modes and practices. Schools should address these needs and work as the first platforms for education and professional sustainability, fulfilling their social dimension These are the general motives that congregate the partner organizations that will develop and implement specific activities along this two years project, being Instituto Politécnico de Lisboa - Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema (IPL-ESTC) the leading partner. The methodology underlying these activities is clear and its main core consists in practice-based research in the ideology of the project and collaborative learning, in planning, observing and exchanging practices of teaching/learning and training in an entrepreneurial context, in developing and practicing mentoring and coaching skills. These will be implemented through intensive programmes for staff and students, with international classes and seminars /workshops, described here as Learning/teaching/training activities, and intensive research activity, responsibility of the artistic research and steering group, resulting in intellectual outputs for future impact and transference. It is also of particular significance the position and history of Prima del Teatro, the only participating organization that is not a formal school, having, though, an already experienced structure of cross learning, collaborative creation, civil community impact and international teaching in an integrated learning environment. Being a project in the context of European higher education, partner organizations acknowledge and aim for high results in terms of quality standards and impact factors. In what regards to quality standards, functioning as ‘other organization’, EdE supplies a broader context of expertise and dissemination capability to and with other institutions, teachers and professionals, that otherwise would be almost unaware of the project and its activities, fulfilling at the same time an important function of assessment. EdE network multiplies therefore the impact of this project’s activities, outputs and results. This necessarily means that the project expects results in four basic domains: - the domain of teaching and learning process and methodologies, promoting, exploring and testing a creative, collaborative, problem-based pedagogical environment; - the domain of knowledge producing and exchanging of good practices, through intellectual outputs and guidelines; - the domain of developing skills and competences, understood as urgent answers to new configurations of art and theatre productions and to the demands of the professional market; - the domain of curricula development and curricula by-products, including the debate about theatre higher education and digital means of teaching, learning and art / theatre producing.
This project is related to observable changes and circumstances in the professional and social context of theatre acting and theatre related professions that imply to rethink the way theatre higher education schools judge their educational missions, design and implement their curricula and disseminate knowledge. The vanishing of a linear and safe art career, individual cross-border professional activity of teachers, students and creators, corporative creation, entrepreneurial strategies in arts education, imply changes in pedagogical methodologies that, though being felt as needed, are not common in the context of a conventional and often very technical teaching. Arts Entrepreneurship or artistic entrepreneurship forms the conceptual framework of the project and its objectives, not only as the capacity to explore and develop an innovative idea and transform it in a value creating reality or object, something that seems very akin with arts creation, but also as a source for different pedagogical methodologies focused in building a position of discovery of possibilities and mainly of creating possibilities. This calls for new learning spaces where both students and teachers, the two direct target groups addressed by the project, dare to create and curate new unstable and uncertain processes and dare to investigate new circumstances for performance creativity through the developing of artistic and social competences. Hence the primary goals of the project are, as stressed in Erasmus + Guide, in what respects strategic partnerships supporting exchange of good practices “to develop and reinforce networks, increase their capacity to operate at transnational level, share and confront ideas, practices and methods” (p. 120) in order to promote changes in curricula, pedagogical methodologies and principles in theatre higher education schools and enhance national and transnational employability. It is not expectable that the achievement of these goals, as the domains mentioned above, is a mere consequence of the completion of the project – some of them are long term, but it is equally true that the project contributed clearly for all these objectives and expects further continuity in what regards curricula development and improvement. In some respects, though, some of the project’s activities led to a personal strong impact, a collective feeling of an integrated learning context and practice, a scholarly resonance in the future shaping of the institutions, by responsible people, a pedagogical insight with immediate decision for changing. EdE is an associated partner of the project mainly with the function of dissemination and peer discussion of the outcomes and continuity of its study. EdE works also as a common forum for schools that decided not to be participating organizations. Participants were teachers, researchers, students, alumni, and administrative people. There were three different groups: the research group (7); the teachers’ group (7-10); the administrative group (7). The profile of the members of the research group is related to: high level of responsibility in the partner organization; specialized knowledge, research and experience in the topic; research interest in the topics and priorities of the project. Teachers’ group profile was mainly determined by interests in international cooperation and exchanging of good practices; students were chosen by a diversity of criteria according to internal decisions of each school. Admitting that this could have been problematic, the result was the opposite, since there was a diverse population of students regarding, not only to the fact that they were original from 6 different countries, with national and cultural specificities, but also to their original formation (several theatre-related or performing arts related programs), graduation, which managed to support each other offering diversity as one of the project’s fundamental assets. The activities, further described, were the main product of the project and the actual analysis of artistic entrepreneurship, as well as, to some point, the cause of the final specificity and format of the intellectual outputs. These activities are not the place or the support of the research, but the actual research. In synthesis, we started for answering the meaning of artistic entrepreneurship to us and by establishing conceptual relations with other areas (c1), by doing this it came naturally to discuss and experiment an entrepreneurial approach in a craft based learning (c2) and, thus, we asked ourselves how to project the school of tomorrow and with whom (c3); we tried to envisage build and inhabit a radical form of that school in the longest activities (c4, c5), and finally we designed a disruptive, and yet functional, multiplier event that obeyed to the project’s dynamics in an academical context, presenting the project outcomes and continuing in the creation of perceptual awareness of the materials and knowledge producing.