Developing Creativity in Higher Education

An Imaginative Curriculum

Norman Jackson, Martin Oliver, Malcolm Shaw, James Wisdom

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134216123
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Graduates face a world of complexity which demands flexibility, adaptability, self-reliance and innovation, but while the development of creativity is embedded in the English National Curriculum and in workplace training, the higher education sector has yet to fully recognise its importance.This book highlights how pressures such as quality assurance, peer review systems, demands for greater efficiency and increased research output are effectively discouraging innovation and creativity in higher education. It makes a bold case for the integration of creativity in higher education, drawing together contributors and research from around the world and explores valuable lessons learnt from those working in schools and professional organisations. Offering a wealth of advice on how to foster creativity on an individual and an institutional level, this book encourages lecturers to engage with the ideas and practice involved in helping students to be creative in all areas of their study.

1 Imagining a different world

Norman Jackson

Imagination is the beginning of creation.

(George Bernard Shaw)

Imagine a different world of higher education

Our ability to imagine and then invent new worlds for ourselves is one of our greatest human assets and the origin of all human achievement. It is the vision of a higher education world in which students’ creativity is valued alongside more traditional forms of academic achievement that provides the driving force for this book and energises the Imaginative Curriculum network:¹ a loose association of people campaigning for greater consideration of the role of creativity in higher education. Underlying this project are the assumptions that: helping people to be creative is a good thing; that people tend to be more satisfied if they are able to be creative; and that individually and collectively we need to be creative to continually adapt and invent in an ever-changing and increasingly complex world. But, more than anything else, we are campaigning for creativity because we believe that students’ experiences of higher education and their future lives will be enriched if teachers help them recognise, experience and develop more of their potential. Pragmatically, we believe that students will become more effective learners and, ultimately, successful people if they can recognise and harness their own creative abilities and combine them with more traditional academic abilities.

This book is part of a strategy to encourage higher education to think more deeply about its responsibilities and practices for nurturing students’ creativity and to provide practical help and advice to teachers who want to develop their curricula and teach in ways that are more likely to foster students’ creativity. Our strategy reflects Michael Fullan’s (2003: 23) wise advice for accomplishing complex change:

• Start with the notion of moral purpose, key problems, desirable directions, but don’t lock in.
• Create communities of interaction around these ideas.
• Ensure that quality information infuses interaction and related deliberations.
• Look for and extract promising patterns, i.e. consolidate gains and build on them.

The book draws together the results of many of these interactions to ‘extract promising patterns’. Our objective is not to provide definitive scientific definitions of what creativity in higher education means. Rather, it is to open up the many rich and diverse conceptions of what creativity means to individuals and groups of people and how it is enacted in different teaching and learning contexts. Our hope is that readers will find things that resonate with their world and be inspired to see their own practices in a new light. In doing so we are seeking to give substance to the voices of higher education teachers in their individual practice settings. In producing this book our objectives are to:

• show why higher education should be helping to develop the creative potential of students and advance understanding about the role of creativity in higher education.
• stimulate interest/curiosity in creativity in higher education beyond the disciplinary fields that have traditionally embraced the idea.
• provide practical advice and aids to encourage more teachers to examine their own understandings of creativity in their disciplinary and curriculum contexts and develop their practice in ways that will enable students to experience and develop their own creativity.

The formulation of a problem is far more often essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science.

(Albert Einstein)

Finding the problem

Finding and working with problems is core to the academic creative enterprise and when we began to explore the question of, ‘what does creativity mean in higher education?’ Anderson’s Law came into force with a vengeance.

I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.

(Anderson’s Law)

The ‘right way of looking’ entailed exploring the issue of creativity through multiple perspectives, engaging with the lived experiences of teachers and students and using the research literature on creativity to try to make sense of the patterns that emerged. I like to think that the imaginative curriculum project has helped to create the conditions for the emergence of sense-making in this complex perceptual and practice world (see Tosey, Chapter 4, for an elaboration of the concept of emergence). Inevitably, the approach is leading to a deeper appreciation of the complexity underlying our problem, some of the dimensions of which are examined below.

Problems are things or states that someone thinks are worthy of attention or investigation. They might be visualised from two very different perspectives. The first sees a problem as an issue that needs to be resolved or rectified, the second that there is an opportunity for something different. The problem called ‘creativity in higher education’ contains both of these perspectives but is much more about the latter than the former.

Finding a problem requires someone to be looking for it – people who will own and care enough about the problem to do something about it. In our network-building activities through the Imaginative Curriculum project we have encountered many individuals – teachers, staff and educational developers, managers, educational consultants/advisers, and researchers who care enough about a problem called ‘creativity in higher education’ to commit their time, energy and minds to trying to understand and work with it. The Imaginative Curriculum network was invented to provide a social structure to enable people who cared about creativity in higher education to connect, communicate and collaborate by pooling their knowledge and resources to develop a deeper understanding of the problem and how it might be addressed and to co-create new opportunities for students’ and teachers’ creativity.

The ill-defined problem we are engaging with is associated with a question like, ‘how can we improve the higher education experiences and the future lives of students by giving greater attention to the role of creativity in their learning?’ Or, if you are a teacher you might prefer, ‘how can I be a part of the educational experience of students fostering creativity in pursuit of our shared goals?’ Such a representation locates our problem in the ultimate moral purpose of education – ‘making a difference to students’ lives’ (Fullan, 2003: 18) and provides us with our inspiration and motivation.

Our problem is not chronic, in the sense that the vast majority of teachers believe there is an issue to be addressed. It is more of a sense of dissatisfaction with a higher education world that seems, at best, to take creativity for granted, rather than a world that celebrates the contribution creativity makes to academic achievement and personal well-being.

Our intellectual curiosity is aroused by questions like, ‘what does creativity mean to a teacher of history or engineering?’ Our response has been to engage higher education teachers in conversation about creativity, in the belief that it is only through conversation that meanings can be shared and new understandings co-created. Our current perceptions of the problem are outlined below.

First, our problem is not that creativity is absent, but that it is omnipresent. That it is taken for granted and subsumed within analytic ways of thinking that dominate the academic intellectual territory. Paradoxically, the core enterprise of research – the production of new knowledge – is generally seen as an objective systematic activity rather than a creative activity that combines, in imaginative ways, objective and more intuitive forms of thinking. The most critical argument for higher education to take creativity in students’ learning more seriously is that creativity lies at the heart of learning and performing in any subject-based context and the highest levels of both are often the most creative acts of all. Our problem then becomes one of co-creating this understanding within different disciplinary academic communities.

Second, although teaching and designing courses are widely seen as sites for creativity, teachers’ creativity and creative processes are largely implicit and are rarely publicly acknowledged and celebrated. Teachers are reluctant to recognise and reveal their own creative thinking and actions in the many facets of their practice. In the UK, the introduction of National Teaching Fellows² and institutional teaching fellowships which evidence and publicly reward individual teachers’ commitments to teaching and innovation, and the establishment in England of over 70 Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning,³ which reward innovative and effective teaching teams, departments and institutions, is beginning to change this situation. We have a long way to go, though, before the unique creative contributions of every teacher are valued and recognised.

Third, although students are expected to be creative, creativity is rarely an explicit objective of the learning and assessment process (except for a small number of disciplines in the performing and graphic arts). Creativity is inhibited by predictive outcome-based course designs, which set out what students will be expected to have learned with no room for unanticipated or student-determined outcomes. Assessment tasks and assessment criteria which limit the possibilities of students’ responses are also significant inhibitors of students’ and teachers’ creativity.

Fourth, for teachers whose motivation derives primarily from their passion for the subject, creativity only has meaning when it is directly associated with the practices and forms of intellectual engagement in their discipline. Many teachers find it hard to translate the generic language and processes of creativity into their subject-specific contexts. Conversely, many higher education teachers have limited knowledge of creative approaches to teaching, even within their discipline. Most higher education teachers are unfamiliar with the body of research into creativity and how creative-thinking techniques can be used to facilitate problem working. So the problem becomes one of growing awareness and understanding of the meanings of creativity in the discipline and of persuading teachers that teaching for creativity is no more or less than good teaching to achieve particular outcomes in disciplinary learning.

Fifth, while many higher education teachers recognise the intrinsic moral value of promoting students’ creativity, they baulk at what they perceive as the additional work necessary to successfully implement more creative approaches. Furthermore, any conversation about creativity raises many organisational barriers and factors that inhibit or stifle attempts to nurture creativity. Paradoxically, for some teachers these barriers are themselves catalysts for creativity.

It is hard to imagine a more difficult set of conditions to work with, and academics recognise that they will not make much headway with changing these conditions unless they can influence the behaviours of the organisations in which they work. It is not enough for teachers to overcome such organisational barriers through their own ingenuity and persistence; ultimately, organisational systems and cultures themselves have to be changed. Such changes have to be led through sympathetic, inspiring and energetic leaders. The problem of creativity in higher education is also one of leadership at many different levels. Our message to higher education leaders and managers is to seize the opportunity for leading higher education into the sort of world we are imagining.

In exploring the nature of the problem, it has been posited as teachers doing something for students to foster their creativity. But what if we were to turn this around and see it as a problem of teachers doing it for themselves in order to satisfy unfulfilled needs? For example, to work in different ways with students, to develop different sorts of relationships and engage in different sorts of conversations to achieve different sorts of outcomes that they felt were missing or under-represented in the curriculum. There is evidence in many of the conversations we have had with teachers that these sorts of values and beliefs are an important source of inspiration and motivation for engaging in discussion about creativity in higher education. So perhaps our problem is also about satisfying value-based personal and professional needs in a higher education system that increasingly seems to ignore such things.

What sort of problem is it?

Apart from the obvious – a blooming big, complex and fuzzy one – our problem is a systems problem involving the thinking, relationships and actions of many participants and contexts. Checkland (1999) described two very different ways of viewing a system. The first perspective is an engineered system in which the entities, their relationships and the way they function can be defined, designed and predicted with accuracy. He used the term ‘hard system’ to characterise the thinking that is applied to the analysis, definition and understanding of the functioning of such systems. A hard-systems approach to problem solving attempts to define, analyse and resolve problems within a conceptual framework that relies on and seeks to create a highly ordered real world.

But, in socially constructed systems, such as that in which our problem is embedded, the very nature and complexity of human thinking, action and relationships defies such a rational and logical approach to the definition of the system and its behaviour. Checkland used the term ‘soft system’ to describe this type of situation. A ‘soft systems’ view of the world accepts confusion, diversity and complexity and uses this as a resource and a source of inspiration to orchestrate enquiry and grow new learning. Soft systems theory does not see all new perspectives as problems to be solved. Rather, it sees different perspectives as routes that can be taken to open up and examine possibilities.

Checkland (1999: 154) identified two different types of problem that systems thinking might be used to resolve. Structured problems are those that can be explicitly defined in a form that implies a theory might be developed to enable them to be resolved. These are amenable to hard systems thinking. Unstructured problems manifest themselves in a feeling of unease but they cannot be explicitly stated without appearing to oversimplify the situation. These are more amenable to soft-systems thinking.

Solving problems that can be defined in hard systems terms, through proven techniques, strategies and theories is a feature of many disciplinary learning contexts, but the problems associated with teaching and learning, including the problem of how we can improve the conditions for creativity in higher education, requires a soft systems approach. The Imaginative Curriculum project has, through its growing network of interest, created a social system for learning about what creativity means and how students’ creativity is enabled in many different higher education contexts. Through this process, we are harnessing our collective imaginations and intellect to find ways of changing higher education to make it a more creative place.

We will either find a way, or make one.

Hannibal

Why are we working on this problem now?

We believe that this is a challenging problem that needs to be explored now. UK higher education is in a process of inventing, or co-creating, a different system. The process involves all the agents (people, organisations, networks and other collaborative associations) continually interacting and ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Appendices
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Foreword
• 1 Imagining a different world
• 2 Public policy, innovation and the need for creativity
• 3 Creativity in schools
• 4 Interfering with the interference: an emergent perspective on creativity in higher education
• 5 Students’ experiences of creativity
• 6 Creativity and curricula in higher education: academics’ perspectives
• 7 Facilitating creativity in higher education: a brief account of National Teaching Fellows’ views
• 8 Developing subject perspectives on creativity in higher education
• 9 Views from the chalk face: lecturers’ and students’ perspectives on the development of creativity in art and design
• 10 Developing students’ creativity: searching for an appropriate pedagogy
• 11 Enhancing students’ creativity through creative-thinking techniques
• 12 How should I assess creativity?
• 13 Evaluating creativity through consensual assessment
• 14 Developing higher education teachers to teach creatively
• 15 Making sense of creativity in higher education
• References