Creating Visitor Experiences: the story of students experiencing creative professional practice inside an events management module.

This paper discusses how creativity can be placed centre stage within the student experience by engaging students in making their own visitor experience proposal. There has been recent discussion of the importance of creativity in events (Jackson, Morgan and Laws 2018). However, there may not have been as much focus on how higher education can develop, enhance and assess creativity as a particular skill or attribute. Furthermore, there is evidence that event management graduates may feel they lack the practical skills required for work in event management after graduation (Barron and Ali-Knight 2017). According to the QAA subject benchmark statement, such skills should include the ability to, ‘creatively plan…practical activities’ (QAA 2016, p15). Can creativity be stimulated and learnt by students, rather than be assumed as an innate or artistic talent?

This presentation will evaluate a new final year module entitled Creating Visitor Experiences, for undergraduate students at Ulster University. One objective of this module is to engage students in using skills and coursework that mirror real life creativity in professional work required in the successful creation and management of ‘visitor experiences’. Students must implement the creative skills and working methods of a professional event experience manager in the production of a creative pitch in response to a client brief for a visitor experience. The module seeks to actively engage students in the process of making and managing an original creative visitor experience, through ‘learning by doing’. By putting students in the role of ‘being’ a professional event manager inside ‘The Experience Economy’ (Pine and Gilmore 1999), they set about creating meaningful and memorable experiences for people, developing professional skills of creativity to enable future managers to bid for and create successful experiences in the leisure, events and tourism sector.