This workshop, Belonging in the Creative Industries, invited second-year BA Photography students to reflect on their first-year unit, Introduction to Photography, which I redesigned as an early industry collaboration. The wider research question asks how early industry exposure prepares students from diverse backgrounds for later collaborative units and professional expectations, and how its impact on confidence, belonging and readiness can be observed over time.
What emerged was not a simple endorsement of early exposure, but a recalibration of its purpose. Students described the first-year collaboration as “gentle,” “protected,” and only partially representative of industry conditions. While they acknowledged its accessibility, they retrospectively desired greater intensity: clearer requirements, more direct client engagement, and stronger accountability. Importantly, this was not a rejection of scaffolding. Rather, it suggests that belonging to the creative industries is not produced through symbolic association alone, but through structured encounters with constraint.
Confidence surfaced as complex. Some students described the first-year project as destabilising rather than affirming. However, this destabilisation was framed as productive. It introduced limitation, negotiation and audience awareness — experiences later recognised as necessary preparation for second-year collaborations. Readiness, therefore, may not manifest immediately as increased confidence, but as a delayed recognition of friction as formative.
The workshop also revealed a distinction between belonging to the course and belonging to the industry. Students felt embedded within their peer cohort in first year, yet structurally distant from professional recognition. This suggests that early industry exposure supports social belonging more readily than professional identification, particularly for students navigating diverse educational and cultural backgrounds.
In terms of improving the workshop, I could have built in more structured comparison between first and second-year collaborations, asking students to explicitly map shifts in expectation and agency. Additionally, some written responses expressed ambivalence not voiced aloud; incorporating more anonymous or small-group stages may have surfaced these tensions earlier.
Overall, the data indicates that early industry exposure is necessary but insufficient on its own. Its long-term impact appears observable not in immediate confidence gains, but in students’ evolving understanding of constraint, negotiation and professional positioning over time.