UAL’s annual Education Conference returns this July as the newly reimagined Creative Education Festival (CEdFest)!
Organised by the Learning and Teaching Directorate, CEdFest creates space to come together in-person across a full day of in-person activity focused on creative education. Join us to reflect and explore how we respond to challenges and imagine new possibilities as educators, practitioners, and as a wider creative education community. The festival format builds on the traditional conference programming and engages deeply with the host location, creating space for meaningful exchange between students, staff and colleagues across all job families.
We welcome colleagues from across all 6 UAL Colleges, Institutes, Central Services and Arts Students’ Union, alongside guests from across the sector this year. This expanded invitation creates new opportunities to connect, share practice and learn from perspectives beyond UAL.
Creative education is being shaped by complex and rapidly changing technological and socioeconomic landscapes. Questions of authorship, ethics and how we equip students with the skills to thrive in creative industries are becoming increasingly urgent. At the same time, creativity has a vital role to play in responding to global challenges, from conflict to the climate crisis, and in imagining more just and sustainable futures.
We hope you can join us for a day of connection, creativity and collective thinking on these topics and more.
Location
This year, we are delighted to be hosted by UAL’s School of Pre-Degree Studies at Lime Grove. This offers a timely opportunity to engage with the full UAL educational journey, and to reflect on the future of creative education from the point at which many of our students begin.
Open Call for Contributions
We invite you to contribute to the Creative Education Festival (CEdFest) and help shape a programme that reflects the richness, challenges and possibilities of creative education today.
This is an opportunity to share your work in whatever form it takes, from research, teaching practice, student collaboration, critical reflection or new approaches to technology and learning. Whether your work is fully developed or still emerging, we welcome ideas that open conversation, challenge assumptions and connect us in shared experience.
We are interested in what matters to you and what feels urgent, unresolved or full of possibility in your practice and work.
This is an opportunity to:
- Share and develop your practice with colleagues across UAL and the wider sector
- Contribute to critical conversations shaping creative education
- Build collaborations across roles, disciplines and communities
- Work in partnership with students
- Explore new formats for sharing ideas and creative work
- Support your own professional development.
Alongside a core programme of sessions, CEdFest is designed as a multi-modal day, offering ways to engage at different paces, in different formats and through different styles of participation.
We welcome a wide range of contributions, including:
- Talks, panels and workshops
- Practice-based or experimental sessions
- Student-led or co-created work
- Exhibitions, screenings or installations
- Podcasts, posters, zines or other asynchronous materials
- Collaborative sessions with external colleagues.
As an access requirement, we will be facilitating a space to include colleagues who may not be able to present in person. If you need to present online, please indicate this in your application.
Full details of session formats and requirements can be found on the proposals information page.
CEdFest is a space for curiosity, criticality, generosity and mutual support but also for questioning established narratives and making space for all voices in our shared community. Bring the ideas you’re still working through, the practices you’re testing and the tensions you haven’t yet resolved. This is a space to challenge, to imagine and to shape discourse in creative education.