Leveraging the 7th Art of Management & Organization Conference 2014 at the Copenhagen Business School (CBS), Stefan Meisiek from the CBS and Moura Quwayle from the Sauder Business School at University of British Columbia organized a “Studio Summit” with a limited number of participants (25-30) to explore the state of the art in using the studio method for education and how the envelope could be further pushed.
The 3-day conference was very rich in exchanges and learning so no blog can really do it justice. However, it might be useful to inform about some of the insights gained through the perspective of this one participant.
The first insight was that the studio method is being used in a very broad spectrum of variations and interpretations. There were examples of almost every medium from performing arts to film making to creation of art objects and strong interaction between learners and learning facilitators. What surprised many participants is the discovery that the use of the studio method is more widely spread in business and engineering education than previously expected. This included for example several programs at Harvard’s School of Engineering & Applied Science (SEAS), a film making approach to teaching leadership theories and emotional intelligence from Sacramento State University and an interesting use of art object creation for business students from ESCP Europe (École Supérieure de Commerce à Paris) France.
Second, there are may emerging developments and a strong appetite for developing the method further, which may indicate the increasing need that educational institutions face to “scale up” their programs that use the studio method. This need is also observed in corporations, governments and NGOs mostly stemming from the drive to innovate in order to maintain competitiveness. One of the outcomes of the Studio Summit is the creation of a LinkedIn group to host the network connections resulting from the summit.
Several interesting models for the studio model were developed during the summit and will be highlighted in a number of places. We’ll only mention here the so-called “Chair” model (later also dubbed the “divan” model), which was the result of a break-out group led by Richard Blythe, Dean of the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT with Daved Barry (Copenhagen Business School), Hakan Ozcelik (Sacremento State), Sylvain Bureau (ESCP Europe), Jaclyn Wilson (ESADE Business School) and Nabil Harfoush (OCAD University). A special blog will be dedicated to that model soon.