Introducing Shared Campus (and the main challenges of its development)

Description

Shared Campus is currently one of the most comprehensive and ambitious initiatives to embed transcultural awareness, cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary practice as a cornerstone of contemporary art education. The idea of Shared Campus is not only based on bringing different interests, competencies and resources of the partner universities together, but to jointly develop and run education programmes and research networks from the very beginning and by that, implement transcultural perspectives in all its activities in a sustainable way. But the primary goal of Shared Campus is not to harmonise, but first of all about the perception and understanding of differences, which is helpful to become aware and reflect ones’ own system and cultural imprint.

Timetable

Video presentation (beforehand) 10min: Introduction to Shared Campus (idea/goals/approach) by Daniel Späti, Chair Project Team Shared Campus

5-10min: Introduction to the challenges of developing SC by Daniel Späti & Paul Haywood

20min: Discussion with 3-4 members of the SC Project Team (operational group, existing of seven representatives of the SC full partners): Paul Haywood (Dean, Central Saint Martins, UAL), Masahiro Yasuda (Kyoto Seika University), Daniel Späti (Zurich University of the Arts), Chi-sui Wang (Director Int. Office, Taipei National University of the Arts)

QUESTION: Do we need to list the participants of the discussion as presenters?

Takeaway

1. Get insights into the idea and approach of Shared Campus, which might help to develop a strategical approach to long-term international collaborations and the understanding of art future art university and education.
2. Developing awareness for the challenges in developing meaningful cooperation
3. Empowering your students and giving them confidence to seek out international community

Abstract

Shared Campus is a cooperation platform for international education formats and research networks launched by seven higher arts education institutions. Shared Campus establishes connections that generate value for students, academics and professionals, and enables participants to share knowledge and competencies. The platform is designed around themes of international relevance with a distinct focus on transcultural issues and cross-disciplinary collaboration. For Shared Campus close cooperation is imperative to tackling issues of global significance. Especially the arts can, and indeed ought to, play an important role in this respect.

In this panel, we introduce the general idea, goals and approach of Shared Campus, but will specifically focus on the challenges in developing this collaboration platform between seven partners, which not only have with different university structures like credit and rating systems, financial years, decision making processes and hierarchy structures, but of course many cultural differences be it language, value systems, political or economical conditions, the understanding of the role of art or design, or teaching methods.

If you would consider to evaluate and solve all these issues from the beginning, Shared Campus would not exist. We therefore understand the fundamental approach of Shared Campus as one of trying, improvising, finding most pragmatic ways with and inbetween the different systems and circumstances, and probably the most important, as a long-term endeavour.