Dr Adelle Hulsmeier

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Senior Lecturer for Performing Arts and Screen Performance, and Programme Leader for Screen Performance

I am a Senior Fellow of Advance HE. I manage the Faculty of Arts and Creative Industries' collaboration with Northumbria Police, and I have also developed and lead the academic partnership with Live Theatre, Newcastle. I have created extensive links and networks with clients external to the University and attempt to embed external engagement opportunities across the curriculum. Ensuring students experience authentic workplace experience, ahead of graduation, has become the heart of my passion for capturing their innate innovation and creativity, which ensures a visionary, yet achievable focus for the curriculum.

My career trajectory and teaching has been characterised by my conviction to embed the notion of social change as an integral part of teaching and learning, which in turn impacts on a capacity to drive positive change through a transformative educational experience. My teaching focuses on collaborative learning, transcending institutional and civic boundaries, and driving and underpinning curricula with participatory action research which develops the critical reflexivity of students.

My research is threefold.
1) Embedding employability in the curriculum via client-led and academic/industry collaborations. Creating an exchange platform for sharing good practice and enhancing the scope for further collaborative approaches to the curriculum and pedagogy.
2) Participatory practice, creating work that is led by the community and for the community, mostly with the purpose of creating social change and transformative educational experience.
3) Shakespeare and Applied Theatre and the ways in which Shakespeare's plays may contribute to a socially transformative encounter.

I teach modules which are rooted in social change, the theory and practice of acting and performance, applied theatre, Shakespeare, screen performance, and multi-disciplinary performance in the areas of cabaret and popular performance.

Teaching and supervision
Research
Publications
Areas of expertise
Further information

Teaching and supervision

I teach on BA (Hons) Performing Arts and BA (Hons) Screen Performance.

I am currently the module leader for:

Acting for Screen 1
From Page to Stage*
Cabaret
TV Drama Projects**
Multi-Platform Performance

I also teach:

Drama for Live TV 1
Drama for Live TV 2
Acting for Screen 2

*Since 2015 I have actively strengthened partnership collaborations, shaping and managing a partnership between the University and Live Theatre, Newcastle. This coincides with the planning and delivery of a range of modules within Performing Arts, and particularly within the Stage Two Module From Page to Stage. The aims of the partnership are to; afford relationships with theatre members and increase their capacity and capability in delivering of module content to the students, produce the student body with networking opportunities with a range of professionals working in the industry, and to give the students access to the operational workings of a contemporary, professional theatre and its programme. This offers a more vocational focus to student learning and these encounters are aimed to offer confidence and identify pathways into the creative industries.

** Since 2013 I introduced and continue to manage the collaborative relationship with Northumbria Police, affording drama and film production students, particularly taking the module TV Drama Projects, the opportunity to produce and act in films that increase awareness of complex category serious crime.

Research interests for potential research students

Shakespeare
Applied theatre
Performance
Screen performance
Drama education
Theatre for Social Change

Awards and achievements

2020: NTFS
Awarded National Teaching Fellowship), Advance HE
2019: CATE
Awarded Collaborative Award for Teaching Excellence), Advance HE
2019: SFHEA
Achieved Senior Fellowship Higher Education), Advance HE

Research

Embedding Employability on the Curriculum

In a joint research project with Hayley Jenkins, our project collates a 'live' exchange of enterprising innovations currently embedded in curricula across our faculty as a means of articulating good practice and enhancing the scope for more successful collaborative approaches to pedagogical practice and entrepreneurship education. Our project:

Shares practical guidance to support colleagues in embedding enterprise within the curriculum
Provides a platform to share good practice and navigate challenges in embedding enterprise in the curriculum
Enhances embedded industrial practices, collaborations and innovations.

Participatory Practice

1) Partnership with Northumbria Police
I manage the collaboration with Northumbria Police, and sustain and nurture the partnership which affords performance and film production students the opportunity to produce films that increase awareness of complex category serious crime. Invaluable as a training resource for the police and invested partners from counselling services, law, healthcare, secondary, tertiary and Higher Education*, these films are integrated into educational and training. All collaborate with our Level 6 undergraduates. To date, over 30 films have been produced by approximately 600 students. All films have address key issues of serious crime including: capacity to consent, sexual exploitation, domestic violence, cyber-safety, modern day slavery, male rape, county lines, policing during covid, and Peer on Peer abuse.

*Changing Lives, Sunderland Counsellors, Edge North East, SARC, Slater & Gordon, Association of Chief Police Officers, Healthcare Professionals (e.g. GPs, GUM services, University Wellbeing Departments, Accident and Emergency Departments,) and Voluntary Organisations.

2) Seascapes: Reading the Rocks
I am the project manager, producer and coordinator for Sea Ai project@ Reading the rocks. This project is funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. This is a multi-media based project based around and informed by interviews with communities who are living around and/or influenced by Blast Beach, Seaham. Over a six month period, varying individuals will be interviewed to create a documentary that highlights the influence the of the coast upon the people who live and are influenced by it. Geologists, East Durham Artist's Network (EDAN), Miners and local community members will be interviewed about the coast and its meaning and influence upon their work, practice and everyday lives. This work will be first screened at EDAN's Maglime exhibition on the 26th march 2022, and again as part of Seaham's carnival in June 2022.

3) Shakespeare and Applied Theatre
My research into Shakespeare within Applied Theatre settings explores the challenges faced when combining Shakespeare’s plays for purposes of transformation. It explores how applied theatre may embody strains between the instrumental and the transformative. It undertakes an historical reading of a range of Shakespeare’s work in order to demonstrate the importance of the cultural, political and historical contexts of Shakespeare’s plays. It explores the intentions of applied theatre within three salient community settings (prison, disability and therapy) exploring how Shakespeare’s work is used within these settings and why. All aspects are explored in order to demonstrate how the challenge of making Shakespeare’s plays work in an applied theatre setting is more complex than it may at first appear.

My research outputs are relevant to the areas of drama for social change and action-based research.

Publications

Jump to: Article | Book Section | Conference or Workshop Item | Thesis | Video

Number of items: 9.

Article

Hulsmeier, Adelle and Jenkins, Hayley (2021) Enterprise Exchange: Analysing the levels of Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Activity Embedded in Faculty of Arts and Creative Industries (FACI) Programmes at the University of Sunderland. Embedding Enterprise and Entrepreneurship in Higher Education: A Case Study Series. (In Press)

Hulsmeier, Adelle (2020) Working beyond end-point assessments to deliver employability experiences: The University of Sunderland’s Crime Awareness student film projects in collaboration with Northumbria Police and its Sexual Assault Referral Centre (SARC). Enhancing Graduate Employability: a case study compendium. pp. 11-15.

Book Section

Hulsmeier, Adelle (2021) Understanding Signature Pedagogies: How film can tackle important civic issues. In: The CATE Collection: Together in Collaborative Educational Leadership. Advance HE. ISBN 9781916359369

Hulsmeier, Adelle (2020) Shakespeare's Diabled: Disabled Shakespeare. In: The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Social Justice. Bloomsbury Press, London. ISBN 9781350140387

Hulsmeier, Adelle (2020) It’s warm up North: training and opportunities for actors living in North East England. In: Actors' and Performers' Yearbook 2021 Essential Contacts for Stage, Screen and Radio. Bloomsbury. ISBN 9781350159471