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1、SCEPTrE Scholarly Paper 3: March 2006Creativity in Higher EducationCreating tipping points for cultural changeNorman Jackson, Surrey, Centre for Excellence in Professional Training and Education, University of Surrey, EnglandPreambleSCEPTrE is a Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL).
2、 It is being set up with a grant from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) in recognition of the existing excellence in professional training (preparation of undergraduates for employment) and the Universitys commitment to transforming the learning experiences of its students thr
3、ough collaborative forms of enquiry. SCEPTrE aims to fulfil its educational mission by helping students to develop as creative and critical enquirers.This paper provides background information to support a keynote presentation at the International Education, a Matter of Heart Kuala Lumpur 13-16th Fe
4、b 2006 on the theme of Creativity in Higher Education and how we might encourage change towards a culture that is more valuing of students creative development. There are three parts to the article. The first provides reasons for why we should be concerned to support students creative development an
5、d explores the problem of creativity in higher education. The second part considers the issue of cultural change, while the third part examines the idea of cultural change aimed at improving opportunity for students creative development drawing on recent and current activities in English higher educ
6、ation.Part 1: Creativity in higher education: a matter of heart!If the moral purpose of education is to make a positive difference to students lives (Fullan, 2003: 18), and the purpose of higher education is to help students develop their potential as fully as possible at this level, then enabling s
7、tudents to be creative should be an explicit part of their higher education experience. This is the deep moral purpose that sustains our beliefs and energises our creativity project it is most definitely a matter of heart.Underlying our interest in creativity is a concern for the development of stud
8、ents potential in a more holistic sense than most higher education experiences currently provide. One of the most important messages to come out of the research studies we have undertaken so far is that creativity lies at the heart of a students own identity.even where creativity was not taught, not
9、 considered teachable and not valued in assessment, it was still relevant in defining how the students saw themselves. Oliver et al (2006).This provides a wonderful insight into the potential role that higher education could play in helping students develop their understandings and awareness of thei
10、r own creativities as they develop their self-identity. The capacity of higher education to support identity building has been heavily criticised by Barnett and Coat (2004) and a concern for students creative development would help address this weakness.If creativity is central to being, then higher
11、 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
12、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.We need to see creativity not as a stand alone competency but in the context of other abilities and capacities that are develop
13、ed 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 imagin
14、e, 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.Successful people (people who generally achieve their ambitions) do not necessarily have strengths in all areas, but they find ways
15、 to exploit whatever pattern of abilities they may have in any given situation or context and align them in a way that value and meaning is created in their lives and in the communities they inhabit in any given situation or context. Perhaps Stephen Coveys concept of voice, which connects these idea
16、s with an individuals identity and self-expression, gets close to the heart of the matter. voice lies at the nexus of talent (your natural gifts and strengths including creative talents); passion (those things that naturally energize, excite, motivate you); need (including what the world needs enoug
17、h to pay you for and the needs you identify and feel a need to fulfil); and conscience (that still, small voice within that assures you of what is right and that prompts you to actually do it) (Covey 2004: 5, with my additions in italics).Higher education needs to see creativity within the important
18、 role it plays in preparing people for an uncertain and ever more complex world of work; a world that requires people to utilise their creative as well as their analytical capacities. research over a quarter of a decade finds a broad consensus about the attributes that employers expect to find in gr
19、aduate recruits. They should exhibit the following: imagination/creativity; adaptability/flexibility; willingness to learn; independent working/autonomy; working in a team; ability to manage others; ability to work under pressure; good oral communication; communication in writing for varied purposes
20、/audiences; numeracy; attention to detail; time management; assumption of responsibility and for making decisions; planning, coordinating and organizing ability (Pedagogy for Employability Group 2004: 5). Some assumptions about creativity in higher educationThere is an assumption underlying what fol
21、lows, that creativity is important to our well being. The world needs people who can combine their knowledge, skills and capabilities in creative and adventurous ways to find and solve complex problems. Creativity is important to our inventiveness, adaptability and productivity as an individual, and
22、 to the prosperity and functioning of our organizations and more generally to the health and prosperity of our society and economy.A second assumption is that we barely acknowledge its existence in most fields of higher education. The problem with higher education, it is argued, is that it pays far
23、too little attention to students creative development. Creativity as an outcome of higher education, at least in the UK, is more by accident then design. But the problem is not chronic, in the sense that most faculty would recognise that something is wrong and needs fixing. Indeed the problem is not
24、 that creativity is absent but that it is omnipresent and subsumed within the analytical and critical ways of thinking that dominate the academic intellectual territory. A third assumption being made is that the teaching and learning process, with all its complexity, unpredictability and endless sou
25、rces of stimulation from the subjects that are taught or practiced in the field, is an inherently creative place, and there are many potential sites for creativity embedded in the professional act of teaching. Creativity emerges spontaneously through the relationships and interactions of teachers wi
26、th their students in highly specific and challenging situations. Lesley Saunders provides a helpful synthesis of how creativity features in the role of the scholarly educator (Saunders 2004 p163).teaching is a highly complex activity it needs both the appliance of science and the exercise of humanis
27、tic imagination; it demands scholarship, rigorous critical enquiry, the collective creation of secure educational knowledge, on the one hand, and it requires insight, inspiration, improvisation, moral sensibility and a feel for beauty, on the other . Similarly, we are often encouraged to think about
28、 research mainly in terms of systematic and reliable ways of gathering and analyzing empirical data. However, research is also much more than empirical data gathering: it includes theory-building, hypothesis-testing, critical analysis and appraisal, evaluation, and the synthesis of concepts and evid
29、ence from a range of different disciplines all of which are crucial for informing practice at deeper levels research in this sense also happens to be rooted in imagination, intuition and aesthetic awareness as well as cognition and disquisition.If these assumptions are right then we have a problem,
30、in the sense of an opportunity to engage more systematically with the idea of creativity in tertiary level learning and teaching. We also have many people who have, within their own day-to-day practice, many possibilities for being creative, who can make a real difference to students own creative ex
31、periences by what they do.A fourth assumption is that we have constructed many barriers and inhibitors to creativity. Higher education is large and complex. It satisfies many purposes and goals and some of these conflict. Barriers include: staff and student attitudes/resistances/capabilities; organi
32、zational structural, cultural, procedural; time and other resources; government policyBut it is not enough for educators to overcome such barriers through their own ingenuity and persistence, ultimately, organizational systems and cultures themselves have to be changed. Such changes have to be led t
33、hrough sympathetic, inspiring and energetic leaders. A fifth assumption is that we will not change the conditions for creativity in higher education unless we can persuade the leaders and decision makers that it is worth doing.Paradoxically, our sixth assumption is that we can all do something about
34、 this state of affairs. Between stimulus and response there is a space.In the space lies our freedom and power to choose our response.In those choices lie our growth and our happiness. Covey (2004: 4)Every educator can change the way he/she thinks and acts, every group of teachers responsible for cr
35、eating students educational experiences can choose or not choose to provide experiences that will help students develop their creative potential, and every institutional decision maker can shape policy, strategy or management practices so that creativity will flourish or be inhibited. So I am making
36、 an assumption that by drawing attention to this matter and facilitating conversation and debate about the role of creativity in higher education and the fields of endeavour it embraces, we have the potential to change the way people think and behave and encourage a culture that is more valuing of c
37、reativity and more knowledgeable of its effects in and beyond higher education learning.The problem of creativity in higher educationThere is a saying that if you can define the problem you are well on the way to solving it. Problems are things or states that someone thinks are worthy of attention o
38、r investigation. They might be visualized 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/better. The problem called creativity in higher education contains both of thes
39、e perspectives but the most useful way of visualising the problem is to see it as a challenge and an opportunity to change the world of higher education in a way that will make a positive difference to students lives.Finding a problem requires someone to be looking for it people who will own and car
40、e enough about the problem to do something about it. One of the aims of building a community or network of interest is to draw together people who are willing to own and care about the problem. In our network building activities through the Imaginative Curriculum project we have encountered many ind
41、ividuals 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. Our problem is not chronic, in th
42、e 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 that creativity makes to academic ach
43、ievement 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 th
44、at meanings can be shared and new understandings co-created. Our current perceptions of the problem are outlined below.Firstly, 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 academ
45、ic 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 important argum
46、ent 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 under
47、standing within different disciplinary academic communities.Secondly, 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 recogn
48、ize and reveal their own creative thinking and actions in the many facets of their practice. In the UK, the introduction of National Teaching Fellows Information about the National Teaching Fellowship scheme can be found at http:/www.ntfs.ac.uk/ and institutional teaching fellowships which evidence
49、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 Information about the Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) can be found at http:/www.hefce.ac.uk/learning/TInits/cetl/The Higher Education Academy and Leadership F
