Course summary

Cultural Heritage is all around us. It is at the centre of current political debates around identity, how we feel about our past, and who we as a country want to be on the international stage. To be part of shaping the UK’s cultural heritage landscape is a rewarding and challenging career, requiring a wide and varied range of skills and knowledge. The MSc in Cultural Heritage Management is designed to give learners a broad and thorough grounding in the varied and fast-moving cultural heritage sector. It will equip learners with the wider contextual and practical skills to allow them to engage analytically with a variety of real-life heritage issues. As the course progresses, learners will be able to follow their developing interests and tailor the direction of their assessed learning to pursue a variety of professional heritage careers. This MSc provides a more flexible pathway into cultural heritage, ideal for learners who have a particular specialism or area of interest they would like to build upon, or those who wish to gain a broad range of experiences across the sector. The RAU has been at the forefront of land-based education for more than 180 years, and to study cultural heritage here is a natural choice. The programme is taught in the historic Cultural Heritage Institute, the RAU’s Swindon campus set in the ‘heritage capital of England’, home to the National Trust, English Heritage and Historic England. It provides unparalleled opportunities to work with key heritage agencies and to gain management insights. All sessions are offered in a blended format and learners can choose whether to attend any session in-person or to participate remotely, as best suits their needs. All sessions, including practical workshops and (where possible) field trips, are recorded live and made immediately available for viewing to support learners who prefer to access the sessions asynchronously. Our sessions are built around exercises to support and scaffold the learning process, and to provide valuable opportunities for peer-to-peer learning. Material is taught in workshop format combining formal elements, such as lectures, with more hands-on exploratory or consolidatory exercises, for example discussions, ‘live’ group research to explore or apply a particular concept, group-critique sessions, supported writing exercises, and problem-based learning. This programme has specifically been designed to meet the needs of postgraduate learners many of whom may be combining study with work and/or caring or other responsibilities. Teaching is designed to be fully flexible, to allow full participation for both part-time and full-time students.

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