Lliam Freeman

Lliam Freeman's current role is Associate Director - Creative Industries, College of Vocational Education. He has worked in multiple roles across the Tertiary Education sector for over 25 years.

Since completing a Bachelor of Education at Melbourne University in 1990 Lliam has accumulated 30 years experience in the Tertiary Education sector, working predominantly in VET environments across a range of roles and responsibilities. Experience has included work as a teacher, consultant, coordinator, manager and multiple leadership roles including experience at executive level in recent years.

Lliam has held multiple executive level roles at RMIT, Melbourne Polytechnic and NMIT over the last ten years, including Deputy Dean and Associate Dean positions within the School of Media and Communication and the School of Vocational Design and Social Context at RMIT University. Prior to this, Lliam held the position of Head of Department Performing Arts and a six-month period as acting Head of Faculty - Creative Arts at Melbourne Polytechnic.

Lliam holds two masters degrees (H1 average), a Master of Education by coursework from the University of Melbourne* and a Master of Arts (Music Performance) from Monash University.

In addition to Lliams work in Education, he is a versatile Melbourne-based musician, guitarist, composer and educator. He has worked with a diversity of artists and groups both nationally and internationally. Lliam has travelled and studied overseas in the USA, Canada, and Ghana West Africa. Lliam was the recipient of an International Study Grant in 2002 from Arts Victoria and visited the Banff centre for Arts and Education in Canada to pursue studies in jazz composition, arranging and improvisation.

A theme of the Master of Education was to critique Competency Based Training (CBT) as a platform for teaching and assessing ‘creativity’ as a 21st Century skill/ Industry 4.0 capability. The argument was that generic transversal skills and capabilities present a challenge to CBT as it is underpinned by positivist, empirically informed conceptions of knowledge, skill and their workplace application, typically attuned to teaching and assessing discrete, observable, measurable skills, tightly aligned to specific workplace-situated contexts. My final masters coursework subject proposed future doctoral research in the area of ‘Creativity in VE’ towards understanding student creative experience, its influences and learning outcomes within and across creative industry fields.