“When I work in flow, I become the music”: what is the student experience of a process-based curriculum guided by real-world projects and flow psychology?

This research aims to address the problem of student engagement on vocational subjects and high incidences of mental health difficulties that present a barrier to learning and progression and ask questions about how the TAPOUT curriculum model may impact on this. This small-scale research study explores how students experience ‘flow’ in the classroom using the TAPOUT curriculum model. Focusing on process as well as product, the TAPOUT curriculum model provides a framework with which to facilitate collaborative work where students take ownership of longitudinal projects with real world outcomes. Specifically, TAPOUT was developed to provide a new curriculum framework that facilitates ‘healthy learning’; teaching and learning models whose primary function is to encourage effective learning using strategies and elements of curriculum design which promote wellbeing. Rather than separating the classroom from initiatives to promote mental health that go on outside (counselling, medication, CBT, mindfulness and so on) the classroom can support this work by providing opportunities for work that engenders ‘positive psychology’ (collaboration, mastery and personal control, supportive feedback, high expectations and meaningful achievement not predicated on external, grade-focused success). Drawing on pilot studies and data drawn from interviews, surveys and focus groups across three years of study and approximately 100 students, the research presents intermediary findings about learner experience of the TAPOUT framework and their encounters with ‘flow’. Theoretically situated in the curriculum studies field this research engages with concepts of flow psychology, wellbeing, improving the status of vocational learning, trusteeship and craftsmanship.