Global Creative Competency: Multi-disciplinary and cross-cultural workshops as a means to strengthen work-ready skills for Honours students in creative arts & design

Honours is an intensive year that requires students to develop advanced disciplinary knowledge, high-level research skills and demonstrate these competencies through completion of an independent research project (Manathunga et al., 2012). It is often seen as a very discipline specific pathway to further academic studies. Through providing multi-disciplinary and cross-cultural learning experiences however, the skills gained in an Honours program can be applied to direct work-ready skills, thus offering alternative career opportunities beyond the traditional academic pathway. In our Creative Honours program at the University of Canberra, we have a focus on enhancing Cultural Intelligence (CQ). Cultural Intelligence can be defined as an individual’s ability to function in various cultural contexts, and comprises a set of capabilities that include metacognition, cognition, motivation and behaviour (Wood and St. Peters 2013, 561). Strong CQ skills are seen as an asset in many fields but particularly in the arts where career paths do not always have a strictly defined skill set and often rely on graduates to be flexible and adaptable to many varied work situations (Haukka 2011).  To foster and enhance employability skill sets such as CQ, we have set up a multi-disciplinary study tour to China in which Australian students from varied disciplines such as Creative Writing, Graphic Design, Industrial Design, Media Arts, and Cultural Heritage collaborate in a series of workshops with Chinese students from a similar range of disciplines. Through an analysis of one of the workshops presented during this tour, the paper aims to show how multi-disciplinary and cross-cultural experiences can foster work-ready graduates and can therefore be a key part of an Honours program in creative arts and design disciplines.