This was a collaboration with Chi Roberts, then Head of Foundation at The CASS as part of a wider CASS Foundation and London Metropolitan University Diversity and Creativity agenda. Over several years, disabled artists worked with foundation students in the studio.

These activities were supported by an Arts Council England (ACE) funded project – entitled Moving to the next level: Disabled Artists Make Dis/ordinary Spaces and running nationally throughout 2018 – which enabled three different disabled artists (Joseph Young, Zoe Partington and Tony Heaton) to co-design and co-partner on teaching activities in the studio with foundation tutors for the academic year 2017-18. This followed an ACE-funded pilot with disabled artist Joseph Young for the academic year 2016-17.

Whilst these initiatives were captured through observation and recording, there was not enough resources to do more in-depth evaluation or wider dissemination and debate, or to develop recommendations for diversity and creative practice in the CASS Foundation more generally. With an award of CASS pedagogic research funding, from the London Metropolitan University Employment Enterprise & Research Outcomes Committee (EEROC), we were able to undertake an evaluation of the collaboration.  

 This evaluation was undertaken through 2 focus groups (one with each of the Foundation groups involved), offered to students who participated in the project; interviews with participating Cass staff; and reflective logs undertaken by the three disabled artists involved.

 The report concluded that in in the context of the CASS Foundation it was possible to propose both a set of conditions (some of which already existed) that can enable diversity and creativity to flourish; and some questions around tensions and ambiguities for art, design and architectural education more generally, both at Foundation level and beyond, that need further exploration. The central conditions for embedding creativity from difference in arts education were outlined as follows:

• A diverse intake, bringing and sharing a rich range of perceptions and experiences;

• The valuing of, and building on, different kinds of knowledges, histories and identities;

• Introductory learning centred on taking notice, both as a detailed focus on all the senses,

  and as investigations into different (and differential) social, spatial and aesthetic practices;

• Developmental learning that builds on the personal, connecting it to the wider world;

• Educational, conceptual and material ‘spaces’ that enable the development of creativity

  that starts from difference;

• Explicit embedding of resources in support of diversity throughout courses.

   

Download the 2018 Evaluation Report here.