Textiles

Teaching types included in your programme can consist of briefings, projects, tutorials, seminars, lectures, critical forums, technical inductions, technical workshops, offsite visits and blended learning.

• Textiles Alchemy: This unit involves the following teaching typologies: Briefing, orientation, technical inductions, technical workshops, negotiated technical learning, lectures, individual and group tutorials, group critique, independent study and summative assessment.
• Textiles Make: These units involve the following teaching typologies: Briefing, lectures, technical workshops, negotiated technical learning, group workshops, critique, individual and group tutorials, independent study and summative assessment.
• Independent Research Project: This unit involves the following teaching typologies: Briefing, workshops, seminars, negotiated technical learning, individual and group tutorials, exhibition, independent study and summative assessment (Textiles Festival).

Term 1

Textile Alchemy (45 credits): This unit will enable you to develop a strong foundation for establishing your practice through research, experimentation and exploration of colour, material and process. You are asked to identify and evaluate the most appropriate skills and techniques for your project and to critically engage with your choice and use of materials and processes. You will be expected to engage with and contribute to the studio culture of the Programme.

You'll also take AcrossRCA (15 credits), which supports you in working across disciplines to use creative and critical thinking and practice and collaborative approaches to respond to urgent contemporary themes.

Term 2

Textile Make (30 credits): This unit enables you to develop a deeper understanding and skill capability within your chosen area of practice and asks you to critically connect your making with your chosen area of practice. It is delivered through lectures, workshops, technical inductions, technical workshops, technical negotiated learning and independent study. You will develop appropriate technical knowledge, specialist skills and techniques to develop work that tests the boundaries of your practice. You will concentrate your study in a selection of these areas and develop your making skills alongside your critical development.

The content will cover current debates in the Textiles field regarding materials and topics could include Sustainability and Responsibility, Gender and Politics, Materials and Craft, Communication through Material Constructs, Textiles as Fine Art, Future Materials and manufacturing, Mixed Realities, Materials as Soft Systems, for example. Your study will be supported with individual tutorials.

In Term 2 all School of Design students will participate in the Grand Challenge, School-wide unit. The aim of this unit is to connect and challenge all students in the School through the introduction of a ‘wicked’ design problem that requires a cross disciplinary approach to problem solving which may involve external international partners. This unit and lecture series has been hugely successful in connecting and disrupting disciplines, people, philosophies and approaches to design thinking whilst providing our student body with very unique networking opportunities.

You'll also take the Core Skills unit (15 credits), which supports you in advancing your academic and professional skills to aid the development of your personal projects at the RCA and beyond in your professional practice and career.

Term 3

Independent Research Project (60 credits): This is the final Masters unit and asks students to identify, develop and present a cohesive body of work that encapsulates and demonstrates their Masters level expertise. Students are responsible for setting their own scope of work, and managing their time and resources effectively. Students must be able to demonstrate a sustained trajectory of progression through the unit that encompasses creativity, critical analysis, consolidation and resolution of their ideas. Students’ development will be supported by individual and group tutorials, seminars, workshops and technical negotiated learning.

All students will take part in a collective Textiles Festival that includes public dissemination and enables the students to critique their work in relation to others and the wider discipline of Textiles.

This MA is delivered over 45 weeks.

AcrossRCA

At the RCA we are working – as artists, designers, architects, historians, writers and curators – within physical and digital worlds that are undergoing constant change, and defined by shifting complexities and interconnections. The 15-credit AcrossRCA unit supports you in working across disciplines to use creative and critical thinking and practice and collaborative approaches to respond to urgent contemporary themes.

The unit revolves around a set of thematic pillars that reflect key areas of flux, uncertainty and complexity that cut across local, global, individual and collective contexts today. Working in interdisciplinary collaborative groups, you will develop your thinking and reflections on a key issue, question or tension under the umbrella of a larger theme as you generate a creative response. The focus is on learning through the process of the collaborative development of an idea. Rather than aiming for a completed product, solution or concrete answer, AcrossRCA is about an openness to what is generated through experimentation, dialogue and reflexivity. What happens when we move across disciplinary borders and put the kinds of knowledge, experience and skills we each bring to the RCA into conversation with others?

This provides you with opportunities to:

• share and adapt approaches from your personal practices and/or discipline;
• collaborate with peers outside your programme;
• interrogate collaboration through experimenting with and reflecting on collaborative models and approaches, and thinking about what your practice means in relation to others;
• critically reflect on your responsibilities as a creative practitioner and the role of creative practice in making our understanding and experience of the world;
• position your practice and skills and what you bring to a team and larger context.

This engagement with perspectives and practices from across disciplines and across the College is designed to complement your disciplinary studies, feed back into your individual work, and provide you with a platform to thrive beyond graduation.

Core Skills

The Core Skills unit (15 credits) supports you in advancing your academic and professional skills to aid the development of your personal projects at the RCA and beyond in your professional practice and career. The unit also supports you in moving from Term 1 to the independent work you will undertake in your IRP in Term 3, as an opportunity to more deeply and systematically develop and deploy select core skills related to your practice. The transferable academic and professional skills covered in this unit reflect those required of a postgraduate student, and are adapted by Schools and programmes according to specific disciplinary perspectives and requirements. The Core Skills complement the work you are undertaking in your programme units and underpins and elevates the development of your future direction. The Core Skills will focus on specific skills most relevant to your expanded discipline, which may come under areas including inclusive, critical, sustainable and ethical approaches, the networks of knowledge, practice and communication within which your work sits, and the positioning of your practice. Throughout, the unit emphasises how these skills are situated not only disciplinarily within art, design, architecture, communication and humanities practices, but also within larger contexts, inside and in the world beyond.

The unit is informed by the following three themes:

• Making Meaning: How does questioning and contextualising inform the development of your practice? This theme builds on skills in critical and creative thinking, reflective practice, navigating complexity and research.
• Making Together: How do we think and make in dialogue and collaboration with others? This theme encompasses skills such as inclusive, ethical and sustainable practice, and peer learning and building networks.
• Making Public: How is your work and practice positioned within larger ecologies? Exploration of this theme may include developing skills in engagement, communication, entrepreneurship and leadership.