Audio artists assemble!: designing a creative pedagogic methodology that promotes collaboration and artistic cross- pollination

Contemporary employers are increasingly seeking graduates with strong creativity, communication, leadership and team work skills. Therefore, the curricula and pedagogies of creative higher education (HE) institutions need to ensure they teach these core skills and thus produce graduates that will be competitive in the job market. As students whose education has been disrupted by the pandemic where separation and isolation were enforced, current HE students need to be offered opportunities to reconnect and catch up on lost time socialising and working collaboratively with others. In this context the academics built on previous experience to design a collaborative project that would address this gap and enhance teaching and learning potential. Rather than teach students in their traditional modular silos, the HE staff involved sought and found synergies amongst their modules which would allow students to work together to produce immersive audio dramas. Together teams of students from the University of Derby School of Arts contributed their input from their area of specialism to create original collaborative works of art. The students represented five different programmes at UG and PG levels with media, performance and music the key disciplines. The findings are based on the observations of the academic staff teaching on the modules and thus employs a form of autoethnography as its methodology. This paper will contribute to the future development of arts-based curricula in HE whereby interdisciplinary cross-programme project-based approaches are taken on a wider scale. The projects involve using cutting edge audio production technology, Dolby Atmos, making them innovative research pieces and an example of research informed teaching.