On Critical Creativity
The EPRG will develop UAL’s Research Strategy Objective 4: Enhancing the quality of our teaching through research.
The State of Play: Research at UAL informs the way we teach our students and enhances our pedagogy. We can do more to support this and to support more staff to become researchers. Our strategy will ensure more of our research feeds into both our teaching and pedagogy, changing the way our students learn for the better. We have already committed to doing more with our Climate Action Plan, for instance, including a pledge to teach students to develop sustainable practices and business models.
The Vision: There is an opportunity to make research a much bigger part of our educational remit. This requires us to discover innovative ways to enhance our teaching practice and find new ways to embed our research into our teaching curriculum. We want to do more to strengthen the alignment between teaching and research, as exposure to new knowledge at the edge of our disciplines is foundational to UAL’s world-class creative education.
To achieve this, we will:
Support practice-based and creative pedagogy
Provide staff development on how to develop a research-informed, and research-led teaching practice
Evidence the impact of our research across the curriculum
Ensure research alignment with current UAL programmes, informing ongoing curriculum design
The EPRG will help develop Objective 2: Demonstrating the value of creativity to society.
The State of Play: As a university, we have identified many causes that matter to us and where we believe we can make a difference, including the climate crisis and racial injustice. For these two areas, we released specific strategies in 2022. We also work within the wider creative industries and contribute to their powerful collective voice.
The Vision: We believe that through our research, we can do even more. We want to become greater advocates for the power of creativity to change people’s lives. We will leverage our research, public and community engagement, and other forms of research-linked knowledge exchange to champion the transformative potential of creativity. We also want to collaborate with more people in society, beyond art and design, from policymakers to scientists, communicating more about the research we do, so it is shared more widely and its insights can be applied.
To achieve this, we will:
Ensure our stories and insights reach a wider global audience to inform the future of the creative sector and policy development
Promote and champion Art and Design research in all its forms including creative practice as research.
Further engage with local communities, industry partners, and other universities to deliver research-driven knowledge exchange
Undertake research that supports and advocates for the role of the creative economy.
Critiquing Creativity
Towards transformation: conceptions of creativity in higher education
by Paul Kleiman
PALATINE, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
[This paper appeared in Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 45: 3, 209- 217. This is a ‘Special Edition’ of the journal, focused on a number of papers presented at the Creativity or Conformity? Build a Culture of Creativity in Higher Education conference, Cardiff, 2007]
ABSTRACT
Creativity, which has now entered the discourse in higher education alongside other agenda items such as enterprise, entrepreneurship and innovation, is an elusive and complex notion. It may evade the sort of definition, categorisation and compartmentalisation required to integrate it fully into the curriculum frameworks and assessment regimes that are currently in place in higher education. After a contextualisation of the subject, this paper describes the outcomes of a phenomenographic research project that set out to identify the qualitatively different ways university lecturers, across a range of arts, humanities and science disciplines, conceptualise creativity in relation to their pedagogic practice.
Keywords: creativity; conceptions; phenomenography; pedagogy; practice
Creativity and Education by Anne Harris
‘I didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand it. I didn’t get it. Finally I took the mask on a bike ride one day and it all fell apart and then I wrote about it and I think that was the beginning of me to open up the area of process is so important. Maybe I was too goals driven, so I think through this course it allowed me to slow down and I think that’s what creativity is to me now, is more understanding the process and engaging the kids in the process, not just the beginning and the end. It can be ugly in the middle and that’s okay. So I think that’s where my definition of creativity changed and it gave me permission to do those things and understand that if the mask falls apart and it’s in a million pieces that’s okay because you’ve still got something out of it. It’s not about the mask. It’s the process. I think that’s the thing. (Vancouver teacher)
Craft et al. (2008), in one of the last great books addressing creativity in a holistic manner from inside education, explored a clear trend toward a closing down of productive risk in secondary schools, despite a growing attention to creativity. The new data informing this text does the same, and picks up where theirs left off, drawing on the voices of secondary school teachers, students, and school leaders who suggest directions for the next generation of creative teachers and learners in a rapidly evolving global education landscape. It also extends the urgent need for critical commentary regarding creativity and culture championed by Leong and Leung (2013) in China/Hong Kong/Taiwan, and Neelands in the UK.
Creativity is ubiquitous today, in both scholarly discussions and more popular contexts such as industrial workplaces, community arts, and, more recently, education.
As Anna Craft noted, ‘Creativity is experiencing a global revolution. Since the 1990s, in many countries, it has assumed increasing importance in the school curriculum, contrasting strongly with previous approaches to creativity in education’ (2005, p i). In this short book I want to summarise some of the main debates in creativity and education that are raging today, but also look toward a future in which we might be less concerned with defining creativity and more committed to integrating it into our multi-sited lives, in all its diverse meanings and definitions.’
Chapter
From Individual Creativity to Team-Based Creativity
Margarida Romero
Abstract
Supporting the development of creative competency is important for the actualchallenges of the society. However, creativity has been mainly approached in anindividual way, without considering the specificities of team-based creativityprocesses. In this chapter, we establish the differences between creativity as anindividual approach and creativity as a collaborative process. Then we discusscreativity from the perspective of the leaners’ and teachers’ attitudes. Subsequently,we discuss the concept of the
margin of creativity
in different learning activities. Wefinalize this chapter by discussing digital uses that can support creativity in team-based contexts.
Keywords:
creativity, co-creativity, team-based creativity, social creativity,problem-solving