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discovering creativity in higher education

This version was saved 15 years, 9 months ago View current version     Page history
Saved by Norman Jackson
on June 26, 2008 at 2:50:37 pm
 
Creativity an essential part of being in a complex world
The cave paintings at Lascaux are as good an image of creativity as any other. They embody the idea of creativity as imagination, as seeing and knowing the world in a sense making cognitive, emotional and spiritual way and as a means of communicating the wisdom of how and why a complex world works in the way it seems to work. 
In considering the idea of supercomplexity, Ron Barnet talks about the role of higher education in the development of people so that they can deal with complexity. Jeff Cronklin talks about the challenges of Wicked problems and the creative way in which experts tackle wicked problems. We cannot work with complexity without tapping into our creative energies and capabilities.
 
Some reasons why we should take creativity seriously:

 

The moral argument: If the purpose of higher education is to help students develop their potential as fully as possible, then encouraging and enabling students to be creative should be an explicit part of their higher education experience.

 

A matter of identity: One of the most important messages to come out of research  into how students see creativity is that it lies at the heart of a student’s own identity. ‘Even where creativity was not taught, not considered teachable and not valued in assessment, it was still relevant in defining how the students saw themselves.’ Oliver et al (2006).

 

05_Higher Education570.pdf 

 

Teaching for creativity: Higher education teachers also see creativity as an important and necessary part of their professional identity and practice. Personal accounts of teaching and interview-based research suggests that teaching to promote students' creativity requires an open facilitative approach in which teachers:

  • Demonstrate their own creativity and provide a role model
  • Are prepared to take risks themselves
  • Are prepared to reveal something of themselves in the teaching process
  • Act as guides, coaches and facilitators
  • Adopt a questioning approach to learning
  • Are prepared to let students make mistakes
  • Create opportunities for problem or enquiry-based approaches to learning
  • Are sensitive to the balance between challenge and reinforcement
  • Are sensitive to the balance between freedom and control
  • Are responsive to students as a group and as individuals
  • Adapt their teaching as new possibilities emerge.

 

 

Being someone: If creativity is central to being, then higher education needs to understand what it means to be creative in the many domains it embraces e.g. historian, biologist, lawyer, engineer or any other disciplinary field of endeavour (Jackson and Shaw 2006). We need to raise awareness of what creativity means in these different contexts and encourage educators to support forms of learning that will enable students to develop the forms of creativity that are most appropriate for their field(s) of study and future careers.

 

08_Higher Education570.pdf

 

Examples of what creativity means in disciplinary learning and practice

Creativity_Working_Paper_Earth_Sciences.doc

Creativity_Working_Paper_Engineering.doc

Creativity_Working_Paper_History.doc

Creativity_Working_Paper_Medicine.doc

Creativity_Working_Paper_Modern Languages.doc

Creativity_Working_Paper_Social_Work.doc

 ART&DESIGNSURVEY.doc

 

 WORK CREATIVITY & REFLECTION IN THE PERFORMING ARTS.doc

 

 

Learning to be creative in a particular field requires people to be enculturated into the field often by legitimate peripheral participation - apprenticeship. John Seely Brown describes the dimensions of learning to be as : a way of seeing; a way of knowing; seeing what constitutes and interesting problem; knowing what consitutes an elegant (in this context perhaps novel) solution; and being able to engage in productive enquiry. These fit the idea of learning to be creative in a field very well.

 

Learning to be creative: cognitive apprecticeship

10_Higher Education570.pdf 

 

Personal Development Planning (PDP) and creativity

Creativity and PDP WORKING PAPER JAN 06.doc

 

A matter of survival and prosperity in an increasingly complex world: We live in a world where change is exponential and we are currently helping to prepare students: for jobs that don’t yet exist, using technologies that have not yet been invented, in order to solve problems that we don’t know are problems yet. In short, we have a responsibility to prepare our students for a lifetime of uncertainty, change, challenge and emergent or self-created opportunity and they will need all their creative talents to survive and prosper.

 

We need to see creativity not as a stand alone competency but in the context of other abilities and capacities that are developed through a tertiary education. Sternberg and Lubart (1995) argue that we need three different sorts of abilities to be successful: analytical abilities–to analyse, evaluate, judge, compare and contrast; practical abilities – to apply, utilise, implement and activate; and creative abilities – to imagine, explore, synthesise, connect, discover, invent and adapt. To these families of abilities I would add, abilities to reflect to learn from and make sense of experience.

 

An essential ingredient for being successful: Creativity doesn't work by itself. To be successful creativity needs to be integrated into a package of beliefs, personal agency and dispositions. This video clip - Secrets of Success in 8 Words by Richard St John, says it all!

 

So how do we tackle the problem of creativity in higher education? What is the problem and how might it be conceptualised? What can we do about it?

 

 THE WICKED PROBLEM OF CREATIVITY IN HE.pdf  June 2008

 

 DESIGNING FOR CREATIVITY CURRICULUM GUIDE.rtf

 

 

 

 

 

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