Supporting creative practice, enterprise and professional development through PDP
The initiative to implement PDP (Personal Development Planning) across the HE sector has been embraced at CoventryUniversity, where each School/faculty has developed its own response specific to their requirements and student population. At CoventryUniversity’s School of Art & Design we have developed a PDP programme which spans and integrates with the undergraduate curriculum. PDP is presented in a module, but necessarily connects and is embedded within each course. It aims to provide a holistic approach whereby students are encouraged to embrace reflective practices in order to better understand their creative direction and potential professional futures.
At level one the approach to the module is atypical in its structure and delivery, and is somewhat anomalous in that it necessarily sits outside of the curriculum whilst simultaneously drawing from within. At this level PDP aims to encourage students to develop a reflective approach to their learning and creative practice. Level two builds on this by asking students to begin to identify potential communities of practice that might be relevant to their aspirations, and thus to consciously start to prepare for their professional positioning. For many students this also allows them to test this out in the context of a professional experience opportunity that they might undertake in the same year. Supporting also the culmination of the undergraduate program with degree show preparations and portfolio development, PDP at level 3 aims to directly support students’ exit strategies into their career aspirations.
The narrative the programme creates supports principles of PDP in that it encourages students to become independent learners and to learn how to learn, and it also takes a holistic view of students learning to be practitioners, developing enterprising behaviour and becoming professionals. Ultimately, this allows them to use the reflective process to prepare and plan for their learning, and thus potential futures. This paper shares our approach to the PDP undergraduate programme.