A Lockdown Curriculum for Arts and Humanities Foundation Year

Abstract

Learning in lockdown, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, refocused Arts and Humanities Foundation Year encounters with histories, theories and cultural works. This paper outlines the concept of a lockdown curriculum as a strategy for innovating curriculum design and pedagogy within an interdisciplinary foundation year. It sets out a case study of how this thematic framework was developed to facilitate the redesign of the ‘Modernity and Post-Modernity’ module on the Arts and Humanities Foundation Year in the Lifelong Learning Centre at an English university from 2020 onwards. It explores how new and refreshed perspectives on the past and present supported learners from widening participation backgrounds to undertake a journey through module contexts and the development of working definitions of complex cultural concepts like Modernity and Post-Modernity whilst living through lockdown. The paper reflects on how our changed lived experience reshaped encounters with cultural works as historical documents and offered new scope for supporting the development of interdisciplinary criticality at Level 0. In turn, it considers what we have learnt about our strategies to engage with real-world events in our teaching in the Arts and Humanities.