Jane Hartley

Jane works across the School of Arts and Media and the Centre for Collaborative Learning. Jane has expertise in designing and delivering curricula in ‘co-creation’ as developing some ‘thing’; a process, product, perspective etc. that offers a novelty of use to a context.

As a Senior Lecturer in Music Theatre (in the School of Arts and Media) Jane’s role is focused on designing, delivering and leading modules in ‘devising new music theatre’. As a Senior Lecturer in Learning and Teaching Enhancement (in the Centre for Collaborative Learning), Jane supports the development of colleagues as a member of the ‘teaching observation team’. Additionally, Jane mentors those developing and submitting claims for fellowship of Advance HE and contributes to designing and delivering staff development workshops and resources.

Jane brings to her current roles long professional experience within the performing arts industry. This includes work as a choreographer whose pieces have toured internationally, and the director of a mid-scale international dance touring company and North West regional dance development agency. Jane has also worked as an adviser to the Welsh Arts Council and Welsh Joint Education Committee on ‘dance and the national curriculum’; helping develop training for teachers and professional dancers in the mainstream education sector, as well as supplementary guidance for the Department for Education and the Welsh Office.

Jane has worked as a lecturer in Higher Education since 1994, during which time she has designed and delivered several academic programmes and led many modules and several courses, as well as working as a curriculum design consultant and External Examiner for several institutions.

Jane has presented research papers internationally on reframing aspects of postmodern dance discourse as colonialist and approaches to enacting dance-in-education. Jane has also presented nationally on designing curricula for co-creativity and embedding student-centred approaches to ‘employability’ within subject teaching.

The BA (Hons) Music Theatre course, on which Jane is a staff member, has been ranked ‘first’ in the country for the subject area by the Guardian in 2021. The Music Theatre course team also won ‘team of the year’ as voted for by the students at the University of Central Lancashire.

Additionally, Jane has contributed to the institution-wide ‘curriculum framework design group’ at the University of Central Lancashire, helping to formulate the ‘design principles’ under-pinning all programmes at the University.

Jane’s Masters dissertation was a critical postmodern autoethnography focused to help her understand tensions that she was experiencing between enactments of quality assurance systems and her work in teaching co-creativity. Developing this understanding was important to founding a theoretically robust basis for her future work.

Her challenge was exacerbated by ‘hermeneutical injustice’ as a ‘lacuna’ in the educational discourse on the nature of learning and teaching in co-creativity as novelty producing. Jane synthesised the literature into a theoretical framework in ways helpful to articulating, evaluating, and developing her pedagogic practice.

In the context of transnational policy calls for the academy to promote learning in creativity as novelty producing, and questions around how this might be achieved, Jane has presented her work at the ‘Employability Symposium’ convened by Advance HE in 2021.

Qualifications

Areas of interest and expertise