AFTRS.
In Q1 2023 we conducted interviews with our youth arts partners. Below is a summary of AFTRS’s programs as told through the interview with Jane Newton.
Who Are AFTRS?
AFTRS is the national screen and broadcast school
They empower Australian talent to shape and share their stories by delivering world-leading future-focused education, research and training
Source: https://www.aftrs.edu.au/
Courses are informed and taught by top industry practitioners and combine theory and practice to develop industry ready graduates.
Their students and recent graduates have access to a wide range of internship and placement opportunities.
Offering unrivalled facilities and a dedication to enabling Australian storytellers to take their next step, the school’s alumni have won a slate of awards globally including AACTAs, BAFTAs, Golden Globes and Oscars.
Their radio degree course achieves high employment for graduates, many of whom go on to be leaders in the industry.
Programs and How They Work?
AFTRS is currently redesigning some of their degree programs to integrate microcreds within them. This would involve modularising individual subjects within their degrees into 2-3 blocks (e.g. classes in their BA degree). External students could potentially join for a 2 week block and complete a microcred without completing the full subject, or enrolling in the broader degree. These microcreds would give partial subject credit if a student decided to enrol in the full degree.
This will require restructuring their current programs (Jane emphasises that trying to retrofit microcreds into existing programs would not be possible, needs to restructure the programs to suit the microcred framework)
Probably implement the new program in 2025 for the Bachelor of Arts Screen: Production degree AFTRS usually has two assessment pieces in a subject, a formative and summative assessment - students who were only attending for a microcred would need to do one of these assessments only (probably the formative assessment) - this will require AFTRS to review their assessment structure
It’s important that these changes don’t create too much extra work for teaching staff – formal assessment processes for both the full degree program as well as the embedded microcreds should align/take the same approach.
CRMs are also a factor - AFTRS currently uses one CRM for short courses and a different student management system for award courses - these two systems don’t speak to each other - how to manage microcred students within broader award courses? Which system do they sit in? Do they use an external provider like Badgr or Credly?
Jane Newton (Head of Curriculum)
“Having the architecture to actually have them recognised, have them sit alongside your existing programs, has been a much harder task than anyone anticipated. I think initially it was like ‘oh, we can just chunk everything down into little chunks and it'll be easy’ and it hasn't been. And that's part of the reason that we've held off trying to integrate them and we're really like, ‘let's just wait until we're doing course reviews and then consider that in part of the curriculum design’. It just feels like a manageable way to do it.”
Bachelor of Arts Screen: Production
This course is full-time over three years and is designed for students with a passion and commitment to creating stories that are powerful and distinctively Australian
The course is split into seven interrelated pillars of screen storytelling – Story, Image, Sound, Character and Performance, Rhythm and Juxtaposition, Screen Business, and Production – each one designed to explore and model current industry practice.
As a Bachelor of Arts Screen: Production student, you will combine theory and practice to explore ideas through your own projects. During the course, you will work on several learning production exercises and conduct regular mini exercises.
Source: https://www.aftrs.edu.au/award-course/bachelor-of-arts-screen-production/
Cohort of 75 students per intake
Jane Newton
“So the BA course really is grounded in story and it's all about how we use our different disciplines and craft skills to tell new stories.”
“Particularly thinking about the BA, it’s so rigid in its delivery. And everything's kind of core/corequisite, everyone's on the same journey until they get to 3rd year and they finally get to say, ‘you know what I really want to do screenwriting I don't want to do cinematography’. So in its current model, it would be very difficult to retrofit micros. I think it would be really asking a lot of the course team to go, ‘You need to reimagine the way that you deliver this content.’ So I think it feels to us most logical just to be dovetailing the design of micro credentials into the development of new programs. So we're going to call it a new program, but actually fundamentally the BA will, it will still have the same sort of rationale. We're still wanting to create some generalists who have some really great transferable skills. But we just want to be able to enable a bit more choice for them and some agency. So introducing electives in year two, not just making them wait until year three. So that then we can start to scaffold the learning as well. So you know potentially if a student is really wanting to pursue directing there could be a “directing 2” and then a “directing 3” the next year or whatever and then they can follow that pathway or they can just do that. m You know, another student could do a mixed bag of electives and just a little bit of everything and just stay generalist. So it just gives students that agency but like I say it also gives us a chance to really modularize our work and really figure out ways to scaffold it. But in doing that really chunk it down, which then enables micro-credentialing.”
Master of Arts Screen
This two-year, full-time degree is designed to empower and enable future creative leaders of the screen industry and fast-track their careers.
Offered in 9 disciplines (Directing, Producing, Screenwriting, Cinematography, Editing, Production Design, Sound Design, Music, Documentary), the program includes shared subjects in screen studies, research and development, coupled with deep discipline learning and cross-disciplinary projects to allow students to develop a dynamic and multi-faceted skill set.
An ongoing cycle of practical collaborations enables students to hone their skills, apply creative thinking to real-world scenarios and develop life-long partnerships.
The course culminates in the creation of major creative works, with students as heads of department, and thematically-aligned creative research outputs. During the course, each student will have the opportunity to undertake a short professional placement, which aims to support your transition into the industry upon graduation.
Jane Newton
“Master of Arts Screen course, it is entry by discipline stream and then there's a selection of shared subjects that they work on. So they will come into cinematography or editing or production design or directing.
They come in that way and then a big focus of that program is on those discipline craft skills where they are doing a lot of making and it's a lot of highly technical knowledge. But then we have the shared subjects that they participate in too that are mandatory subjects. So the collaborative practice one I was talking about where we don't even mark the artefact, we're literally trying to give them those skills to make them collegiate and collaborative and problem solving and all that sort of stuff. And then we do a screen studies and a research and development subject. So they're the three mandatory, the core shared subjects they do and then they split off into their discipline streams. So I guess we'd be addressing, I guess the division of skills and the where we see various indicators it would vary by subject for their masters course. Whereas like I say for the BA, it's integrated throughout everything they do.”
The 21st century skills and capabilities that young people develop
Hitting all of the competencies / character qualities across all three columns
As a higher education provider tend to skew more towards competencies and character qualities (softer skills approach)
For students coming in at AQF 7 - they would expect the foundational literacies to be a given
Collaborative practice
Problem solving
Conflict resolution
Analysis
Business acumen
Cultural competency
Frameworks and perspectives (looking at craft skill and the origins and history of their craft)
Jane Newton: “often if we're looking at an assessment strategy for any given subject, the artefact, or the made thing tends to carry the lowest assessment weighting because, in a way, it doesn't matter what they're making, it's about how they're making it and being able to reflect on that process… what we're trying to get at is, yes, you are making stuff, but it's the process of making stuff that is important. So we really drill down on the things like soft skills like problem solving and conflict res and things like that.”
Young people’s pathways beyond AFTRS
AFTRS is currently looking at pathways for more diverse students: at the moment many AFTRS students are Sydney-based:
Jane Newton
“We do have some from interstate, but because our campus is based in one of the more expensive parts of Sydney and the course is, we ask for three full contact days a week plus a dedicated SDL day. Sometimes that means they're required to come on campus and do some self-directed learning by using our gear or whatever, it means that there's not a lot of time for work. And so it really does appeal to the students that can afford it or can be supported through their families or whatever to undertake the study. So there's a minority that are from interstate or from regional areas, but overwhelmingly they're Sydney based.”
“Or at least a taster to attract a different kind of student who we probably wouldn't normally get through the standard application process, which is an annual big recruitment drive that we do where students know that they're signing up for three years and they've got to put a portfolio together and all this sort of stuff. This is literally sign-up for this short thing. It's one week and then it might actually for some students, and speaking of remote or marginalised students who wouldn't necessarily consider signing up for a three year bachelor that just feels out of reach, coming and doing a tester might actually then pique their interest in then looking at ways to pursue further studies. So it's sort of like a bit of a taster or a bit of a market test.
And just to speak slightly off topic, but it's something that I've only heard some murmurs about so far. But within the school we have a First Nations and Outreach division and they were talking just very broadly just recently about looking at some pathways for First Nations students and particularly those that are rural or remote, to access our learning and find them pathways into higher ed. And so we would… I guess they weren’t really speaking about it from a microcred point of view, but it was thinking ‘should we be offering some more introductory lower-level quals that we could then use as a bit of a pathway into higher Ed?’”
Making AFTRS graduates employable:
Jane Newton
“Well, I guess because the BA is in its current guise, it is intentionally a generalist course. So the idea is that we're trying to make them a Jack of all trades because we want them to be really employable, which means that then these notions of analysis and business acumen and cultural competency and some of those indicators are embedded right through the program. So there's touch points in every subject to speak to those indicators and then they're contextualised for those subjects.”