AFTRS

Facilitating teaching and learning at AFTRS

At AFTRS we believe that research-enhanced and supported learning and teaching is a lifelong engagement for all creative practitioners.

Our teachers learn from interaction with students while our students learn from interactions with their teachers and the creative tasks they engage in while at AFTRS, all at the same time. That's why we are committed to the provision of learner-centred programs with the expectation that teaching and learning, as human activities, transform each other.

We embrace a comprehensive theory of learning as articulated by Peter Jarvis, an internationally renowned expert in the field of adult learning and continuing education:

Human learning is "the combination of processes whereby the whole person - body (genetic, physical and biological) and mind (knowledge, skills, attitudes, values, emotions, beliefs and senses): experiences a social situation, the perceived content of which is then transformed cognitively, emotively or practically (or through any combination) and integrated in to the person's individual biography resulting in a changed (or more experienced) person" (Jarvis 2006)

The Education Unit, within the Division of Research & Education, is responsible for the implementation of the AFTRS Learning and Teaching Plan (LTP) to nurture and enhance the experience and the quality of learning and teaching

The objectives of the LTP are to:

• Cultivate within our students the AFTRS graduate attributes
• Provide quality learner-centred programs
• Support and encourage excellence in teaching
• Develop quality curricula and learning designs that are content and needs specific
• Develop a culture and environment where 'regimes of practice'* can emerge
• Provide quality flexible programs of study that meet the needs of a range of student profiles throughout Australia and overseas
• Facilitate, oversee and review the learning and teaching plan and other relevant educational strategies

* a 'regime' of practice incorporates the values and aspirations of a "community of practice" (see Wenger 1998) and further incorporates a recognition that diversity, conflict, competition, relations of power and dynamism also shape the participants' experience of, and engagement with, such communities.