Dr Chris Mitchell is Head of Academic Strategy Development at the Royal College of Art and the creator of the MA in Creative Education — a hybrid programme that brings together educators, designers, and creative practitioners from around the world.
In this talk, Chris explores what formal education is really for in an era when AI can generate a passing essay in seconds, why creative arts institutions are well-positioned for the disruption ahead, and how the RCA is rethinking everything from assessment design to grading itself.
Let’s dive in.
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We Have Been Here Before
Every decade or so, a new technology arrives and education is declared finished. In the early 2010s, it was MOOCs — massive open online courses — that were supposed to render universities obsolete. The content was free, it was global, it was on-demand. What was the point of sitting in a lecture hall?
Dr Chris Mitchell has been watching these cycles for a while. “Probably we’ve changed less than we imagined that we were going to change,” he says of the MOOC era. The same argument is now being made about generative AI — that it makes formal education redundant because knowledge is available dynamically, generated to order, at no cost.
His view is more nuanced. AI is profoundly changing how we live and work, but it may not fundamentally change what formal education is for. If anything, it is a useful prompt — not to be complacent, but to reaffirm a purpose that has always been there. “Higher education has a purpose which is beyond the delivery of content,” he says. That purpose never went away. It just got easier to ignore when content was the thing everyone measured.
An Education Built Around Making
At the Royal College of Art, making is not a method — it is the point.
The Covid years put this to a serious test. Suddenly, students who depended on kilns, print studios, and shared physical spaces found themselves cut off from the very materials their practice required. The institution had to confront a stark question: what remains of an education centred on making when making becomes impossible?
More than expected, it turned out. What persisted — and what Covid made newly visible — was the thinking that surrounds the making: the curiosity about a particular choice, the reflection on what failed and why, the articulation of process. That, Chris found, is also precisely what generative AI does not threaten. “That fundamental ethos of creative arts education about making, reflecting on the process of making — that is something that generative AI is not necessarily threatening. It just becomes another way of making things.”
“You’re making, but through that making, you’re making connections. You’re making sense. You’re making choices. You’re making mistakes.”
The Assessment Wake-Up Call
A few years ago, Chris ran an exercise in class that shook him. He used generative AI to dynamically produce a response to the same assessment brief his students were working on, then asked groups of students to evaluate it. Nearly all of them said it was a pass. He assessed it himself on the way home. He agreed.
“My first reaction was terror,” he admits. But sitting with it longer, his terror shifted into something more useful. “What that was a sign of is not necessarily that the machines are coming to replace us. It’s a reflection of my bad assessment design.”
If an assessment can be passed by a tool that has no curiosity, no imagination, no sense of personal investment — then it was never really measuring those things. It was measuring the ability to compare, summarise, and recombine information. Generative AI is very good at that. But it is not what education at its best is actually trying to cultivate.
Chris redesigned the assessment. Instead of comparing X and Y, he asked students to take a teaching session they had observed, led, or participated in — one that meant something to them personally — and redesign it, explaining why. The difference was immediate. “You’re getting people’s deeply personal formative educational experiences. We had examples of people drawing on learning in a choir, or a workshop around ocarina making. It’s just so much fun to mark.” More importantly, it was impossible to fake. The personal investment was the point.
Creativity Is Not a Property of a Person
One of the most important things Chris pushes back against is the idea of creativity as something you either have or do not have — a fixed trait, a personal characteristic, a label. “I am a creative person. I am not a creative person. I think those labels and that identification is really unhelpful.”
When the UK government recently reviewed the national curriculum for schools, the RCA contributed to the consultation. Their position was not simply that schools should have more creative subjects. It was that there should be more creativity in education across all disciplines — that maths can be taught creatively, that English can be taught creatively, that a creative approach to learning is not an island reserved for art students.
“To be able to encourage people to be creative, in whatever form that takes — whether that’s maths or whether that’s fine art — both of those are creative disciplines and can be taught in creative ways.” The World Economic Forum’s Future Skills Report echoes this, identifying creative thinking as one of the core capabilities people will need in the coming decades. The RCA’s working definition: being open to new ideas, experiences, and perspectives in order to generate connections, insights, and responses.
Making connections — between ideas, between people, between disciplines — is at the centre of it.
Learning to Be Uncomfortable Together
The RCA runs a programme called the Cross RCA, which began as a student-led interdisciplinary festival and has since become a formal part of the curriculum. Every MA student takes part. The idea is simple: bring together students from radically different creative disciplines — graphic design, fine art, ceramics, writing, architecture — and ask them to make something together.
In practice, it is anything but simple.
Design students, accustomed to structured methodologies like the double diamond, often arrive ready with a process. Fine art students sometimes want nothing to do with that process. The collision of disciplinary cultures can be genuinely difficult. “Some students go, that was totally the best thing I’ve ever done. And some people go, that was the worst thing I’ve ever done, please don’t make me do that again.”
Chris is comfortable with this. If collaboration is a fundamental skill for creative practitioners — and he believes it is — then the discomfort of not immediately finding common ground is part of the learning. “Maybe it’s an interesting experience that you can then draw on, even possibly push away from when you emerge beyond the institution.” The goal is not consensus. It is comfort with dissensus: the ability to be around people with very different experiences and perspectives, and to navigate that without generating harmful conflict.
“It’s absolutely fine not to agree. But that idea that we can be comfortable navigating through that with other people — easy to say, difficult to do.”
No Grades, Better Feedback
The RCA does not give grades. For the vast majority of its programmes, work is assessed as pass or fail. This is a decision the institution revisits roughly every five years, and every time it reaches the same conclusion: the approach is worth keeping.
The logic is straightforward. If the goal is to focus students on process rather than product — on what they learned, not just what they made — then a number gets in the way. “I know in my own head, when I got marks during my degrees, I would often go, I got that mark, hooray. And I probably wouldn’t engage with the feedback in ways that are respectful of the fact that someone spent a lot of time reading the thing I created.” Strip the number away, and the feedback becomes the only thing left to engage with.
This places an enormous responsibility on tutors. For each unit, they write a substantive paragraph on each of the three learning outcomes — detailed, personalised, genuinely reflective of what the student has done and where they can go next. It is slow, labour-intensive work. “If I could just say it’s 70%, I would save myself a couple of hours of writing.” Not everyone does it to the same standard, and that inconsistency is a real challenge.
But the underlying conviction holds. In a world increasingly shaped by speed and mass consumption, the rare experience of having someone read your work carefully, think about it seriously, and write back to you honestly about what they saw — that is something close to a luxury. As Chris puts it: “When else is someone looking at you and asking you questions and thoroughly engaging in your answers for this amount of time? It’s a really rare privilege.”
Co-Creating the Educational Experience
Every new cohort of students arrives at the RCA carrying their own educational history — different systems, different assumptions, different relationships to authority, risk, and creative freedom. A student shaped by rote learning in one country and another who grew up in a liberal arts environment are not simply coming from different places. They are bringing entirely different ideas about what education is supposed to feel like.
Chris’s argument is that the most honest version of formal education acknowledges this, rather than simply requiring students to adapt. “It’s not just you adapt to us. It’s about we adapt to you as well.” Each cohort is a new negotiation — between what the institution believes it is doing and what the students bring with them.
In an age of generative AI, this negotiation matters more than ever. The world students are graduating into is genuinely uncertain. No one can promise that doing X will lead to Y. What education can do is help people develop the capacity to respond — to think, reflect, collaborate, and make meaning — in contexts that cannot yet be predicted. “It’s a much more subtle thing,” he acknowledges. “But I think it’s a really important part of thinking about whether formal education has a future. It is about that nature of response rather than solution.”
That, ultimately, is what creative education at its best has always been preparing people for: not a template, but a way of being in the world.
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To connect with Dr Chris Mitchell, find him on LinkedIn. To explore the programmes at the Royal College of Art, visit rca.ac.uk.
