From Competitors to Colleagues: The Experience of Devising a Peer-learning Environment in a Vocal Department

The Foundation Degree (FdA) in Creative Musicianship provides an innovative, dynamic forum for nurturing such skills in students. This chapter describes three modules on the programme and explains how they operate: the Live Performance Workshop (LPW), the Collaborative Project and the Final Performance Project. The compulsory 'Applying Creative Skills' pathway in the second year of the FdA programme includes a Collaborative Project module on which students must collaborate with one or more students from outside of the Institute. Skills developed by students during the Creative Ensemble module mirror and prepare them well for the similarly collaborative, quasi-autonomous learning environments of FdA modules and for life as musicians beyond the Institute. While students' music-making has long been documented and discussed, collaborative approaches such as those described briefly here are relatively new in the context of higher music education.