Friday 8 September 2023
Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London

After the most challenging period for higher education in recent history, there is a need to gather our thoughts and resources within the creative arts HE sector, in order to understand what has occurred in our field in the last few tricky years, where we are now, and where we wish to go from here.

To this end, GLAD (Group for Learning in Art and Design in Higher Education) invited contributions to the 2023 annual symposium Gathering Ourselves. This was our first in-person event since 2019. This networking event facilitated collective sector-specific reflections, showcased case studies of pedagogic developments.

We wished to surface and discuss ideas, opportunities, needs, issues and concerns being faced across our sector. We were keen to include subject-specific debates, provocations, examples of contemporary arts higher education pedagogic research projects, student-staff collaborations and/or curriculum innovations. We were especially interested in proposals that identify or share surprising avenues of development from within creative arts HE specifically in response to the challenges of the pandemic and its after-effects.