In 2015, startIng in my new role as program director of the Liberal Arts BA at King's College London, I was presented with a unique opportunity. My colleague Arthur Burns, then Vice Dean for Education for the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, was introducing a series of “Opportunity modules”: these were an innovation for King’s, in line with the Faculty's interdisciplinary ambitions that had also seen the introduction of one of the UK's first Liberal Arts BA programs in 2012. Modules would be inherently interdisciplinary in nature, could be taken by students from any department in the Faculty, and would utilize innovative assessment methods. I sought to design a module that would provide a transformative learning experience for students selecting it. Coming to King's with a background in teaching medieval literature and in educational development, I also wanted the module to be a space where I could try out innovations and approaches that I’d then seek to embed in the Liberal Arts program more broadly: openness and curiosity towards new areas of knowledge; research and enquiry based approaches; reflectiveness about methods and perspectives within the disciplines; a commitment to staff– student and student– student collaboration and co creation; innovation with assessment, especially with digital assessment. The Arthurian tradition, especially in its modern manifestations, was an appealing choice for the module—ranging across so many periods and media, its study is inherently interdisciplinary, and many students who had not chosen to study literature at university would have had prior encounters with Arthurian material in their childhoods or their ongoing engagements with popular culture. Students would have opportunity to engage—following their own interests and lines of enquiry—with a wide range of medieval Arthurian texts and their recreations in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty first centuries: in poetry, novels, paintings, photography, opera, film, television, musicals, video games, comic books, material culture, advertising, wartime propaganda, children's toys, and tourist sites (and potentially in further forms beyond this list, if their own research interests took them to that material). We would work together to explore: how and why has Arthurian literature and legend proved so culturally productive and enduring?

Opportunity and Transformation

To an extent that may be hard to comprehend from the perspective of other Higher Education systems, it is an unusual and challenging task to design provision for students from more than one discipline in UK universities.