Creative industries and higher education: what curriculum, what evidence, what impact?

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the choices made in undergraduate creative degree curricula across higher education institutions in Australia as a way of exploring and unpacking the extent to which creative industries ideas have permeated learning and teaching practices. The curricular and pedagogic choices made are taken to reflect prevailing attitudes about what is important for students of creative degree programmes to learn. More broadly, this chapter asks what an ‘effective’ creative curriculum might involve given what we know about creative graduate career trajectories, and where and how we need to deepen our understanding of what is required to prepare creative students for life and work. In so doing, this chapter weaves a path through bodies of literature relating to creative labour and creative workforce mapping at population and graduate levels; creative industries and graduate employability discourse; and skills debates.