Shape your own curriculum
The Individual Study Track (IST) is where you can shape your own curriculum. In the main phase of the bachelor — the third and fourth years — you step outside your department for a semester and follow something that broadens or deepens your practice on terms you set yourself.
By the third year you have a working sense of what your discipline can do. The Individual Study Track exists for the question that logically follows: what does your discipline not do, and where might you have to go to find out?
You work with techniques, materials, frameworks and positions that your department's curriculum does not cover, alongside students who arrived at them from somewhere else entirely. Interdisciplinary collaboration is increasingly the condition of professional practice rather than an exception to it, and this is where you can rehearse it.
Three IST routes
There are three routes, and they lead to the same place by different means: you take an IST course, you propose a project of your own, or you follow an elective at Leiden University.
IST courses are interdisciplinary courses built around material and theoretical research, collaboration and experiment.
Each course runs for a semester, with groups drawn from across the academy, and each is taught by staff who work in that field themselves. Eleven courses are offered in the first semester and six in the second.
How to choose and register for an IST course
IST courses are introduced at Common Place, where the teachers set up in the KABK galleries with work their courses have produced. You move between them, ask questions, and decide which option fits you best.
Registration follows in Osiris. You list six courses in order of preference and a placement round allocates the places. Places are limited, so taking part in the first round matters: it is the only round in which everyone is considered.
If you have an interest that would broaden or deepen your studies and no course can support it, your department may allow you to design the project yourself.
How to apply for a self-initiated project
You write an IST plan setting out what you intend to do, why, and what you expect to learn from it, and you discuss that plan with the IST coach in your department. Once the coach has approved it, the project is yours to run.
Through the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, KABK students can follow electives at Leiden University. The range is wide — the full catalogue sits in Leiden's e-Prospectus — and it is the one route that takes you outside art and design altogether.
How to apply for an elective at Leiden University
Leiden electives are arranged directly with the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts. You enrol as a guest student at Leiden. Registration closes in June for the first semester and in November for the second, well before teaching begins, so this is a decision to make early.
Questions?
Contact
For questions about IST courses, write to coordinatoracademywide@kabk.nl.
For questions about your own study track, speak to the IST coach in your department.