Abstract

This session traces how one educator’s MA action research journey transformed into living curriculum. Beginning with Growing Concerns: Co-Creating Climate Narratives, an action research study with international Level 3 students, the practice evolved into a full reimagining of units – Collections, Culture and Heritage – grounded in student experience and social purpose. With library space repurposed as a teaching and exhibition environment, and a cross-institutional collaboration with Paris College of Art expanding the work internationally, this session asks: what happens when your own professional development becomes the curriculum? Three voices – curriculum lead, social purpose support, and library partner – share what was built together.

Session and activities

This panel brings together three colleagues whose distinct roles converged to create something none could have built alone. At its centre is an ongoing action research cycle that began as an MA project and grew into a model for culturally responsive, socially purposeful curriculum design at Level 3.

Michelle Lin Braby, Curriculum Lead for L3 International Introduction to the Study of Design, Media and Screen, will open by tracing the arc of this practice. The original Growing Concerns Co-creating Climate Narratives action research – exploring how international students respond creatively to environmental photography – revealed that methodological flexibility and student partnership don’t just enrich learning: they demand curriculum that makes space for them. This insight directly drove the rewriting of Level 3 units including Collections and Culture and Heritage, now redesigned to foreground student cultural capital, embed social purpose, and position the exhibition as both outcome and methodology.

Omolara Obanishola will speak from her role providing social purpose funding support, reflecting on how institutional structures can either enable or constrain the kind of relational, student-centred curriculum development this project represents – and what it took to make the conditions right.

Lisa Harris will share the perspective of library support at Lime Grove, where the library space itself became a co-created teaching, learning and exhibition environment. Repurposing an institutional space for student-led exhibition-making raised questions about access, authorship and what a learning space can be when students are treated as practitioners.

The panel will then turn to the next stage: the Personal Project unit, which opened a collaboration with Paris College of Art, enabling students to co-create an exhibition in Paris – extending the action research internationally and testing whether the model travels. Growing Concerns: Co-creating Climate Narrative Part 2 continues this trajectory.

The session will close with 15 minutes of structured discussion, inviting attendees to reflect on their own practice: where does professional development end and curriculum design begin? How do we build the institutional partnerships that make student co-creation sustainable?