I invite your engagement in a process for developing scholarship around the creativity/pedagogy nexus in higher education.
I am seeking informal feedback on a draft paper I have recently written on this topic in a way that allows a number of key scholars in the area to share feedback and to benefit from the conversations that flow from this process. I also offer my preparedness to review a relevant paper of any contributing scholar and/or to post it similarly if such feedback is useful.
Please access the following link to review the draft paper (pdf 120kb)
(Please note a new browser window will open)
Review comments can be made by selecting the comments link. (Note this will open a comments box below this post, and any future comments, where you may enter text on this page).
Please feel free to return to this page to participate in any ensuing discussions. Alternatively, review comments can be sent via email to:
Erica McWilliam e.mcwilliam@qut.edu.au
Many thanks for your support and participation
Erica
Keywords: Creativity
Comments
creativity is often about cultural space.
some kinds of physical and social space and practice encourage people to subscribe or consume or shop, broadcast oriented spaces.
different resources, space, social expectiations (law and licenses) happen/are chosen by people who want to make, create, share, distributed creative space.
I thought I'd take devil's advocate position because I'm sure you didn't want wishy-washy feedback (however brilliant your writing always is). I'd also like to try to speak on behalf of colleagues in CHASS (RQF madness & CPA indicators /panel 13 etc) & peak bodies NACTMUS (music) and ASPERA (film), together with close work I'm doing in digital arts these days with practitioner 'ranters' in film, fine art, design, animation, cyber-studies and of course, music.
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Broadly: I read the paper as swinging around two parts, the first dedicated to a literature review comprising almost exclusively material by non-artists, and the second part on (therefore?) 'how to teach creativity' at p.7. A key centre pivot seems to be the assertions that arts no longer define 'real' (world?) creativity, about the new role in enterprise and the idea that creativity should not be the exclusive domain of artists. Perhaps true, but some general comments that I have heard often include i) that creative industries is 'on the nose' because it is driven by cultural theorists and produces poor content on the ground. There are also some significant ethical matters for artists including the fact that this line of thinking is driven purely by economics. To the paper detail:
Part 1: Don't like the two metaphors of 'pin the frog' and 'the Pope's robes' on the opening page, Not needed, perhaps jars the overall argument and this line of metaphor/humour doesn't seem to continue elsewhere. Appears to be a remnant of other more appropriate work of yours and likely not a good idea here?
p1. Para 2: Although there's a-b-c-d reasons for the creativity thing here, there really is only ONE stated: b) economic productivity. And given the title of the CCII program, 'Creative Workforce' perhaps this is somewhat logical, but one would like to imagine there was more to it than this. Last line infers this but we never seem to return to 'the key drivers of commercial success AND *social betterment*' (?)
All of the literature seems to be taken from cultural theorists (a lot of the same QUT-speak from Cunningham, Hartley and their godfather Leadbeater), shrinks and teachers. I see nothing whatsoever from artists of any kind (except Lebler?). Further, the material appears to be decidedly 'Western arc' focussed, ie, UK/US/AU who so well invented globalisation, false economics while destroying the world through climate change and wars, and so well implemented legal exception, pre-emptive strike, risk aversion, 'transparency; and of course, 'lies, damn lies and statistics. See 'The Corporation' - 'Do you work for a psychopath?". Therein is the lie so hated by authentic, socially aware artists I know. Yes, I do call artists true creatives whose strange methods of jumping from A to F are in trendy demand for instant gratification, fast knowledge work and ultimately, to make more money, faster.
What comes to mind here is: examine EU and world cultures about this creativity matter. Yes, the literature may be more scant because academic creatives spend more time doing it, rather than writing about it - creative practice as research. However, I know there's good stuff coming out of Denmark, Edinburgh and elsewhere in the EU and in their relationship with the third world; the explosion of media works generated as 'world music' into China and India by telco and business models far different to the US film /record company /Disney model which runs rampant through the Florida-esque literature.
If the literature is scant, then perhaps a research project might begin to gather authentic material from artists. Heaven knows they're fairly vocal when they want to be.
Having said all of this, para 2 at p. 4 nails it, very well, I thought. 'All these recent scholastic moves . . . teaching for creative outcomes'. Nice.
Yes, so agree with many comments in your paper re. risk-averse culture etc. Also suggest the curriculum model is underdeveloped here and a problem of great concern to those creative arts that have been force-amalgamated in recent years. See eg, this 2004 report on architecture, probably the only useful text in this area since 1996-98 Strand Report. Simple substitute 'any creative field' for any occurrence of 'architecture'.
Balancing three dimensions in architectural research: depth, breadth and length. An institutional analysis of research in architecture in the UK higher education sector (with Jenkins, P & Forsyth, L), Edinburgh College of Art, 2004. Available at: http://www.eca.ac.uk/pdf/institutional_analysis/report.pdf
Re. some kind of 'teaching creativity' or curriculum for creativity. This has the feeling that creativity can be purpose-taught for all in some USA-styled neo-con program. In a time where schooling is significantly being interfered with by government, music and arts classes removed, decreased or dumbed down, one wonders why the attack on say, 'making digital chemists creative' and, of course, more profitable. What ran for at least hundreds, if not thousands of years, was a broad curriculum. Arts,
music, philosophy, perhaps a language (see French lit on globalisation, music, DRM, etc). In any case, the left brain and the right brain generally work very well if two sides are given the chance, and without too much 'meddling'. What I'm saying is: why re-invent the wheel to make mainstream coursework 'creative' when at the same time, artistic courses are being removed or screwed with, whole sale? The mind boggles.
Of course, the answer may be the bean-counters /lawyers/statisticians and the western madness . . . why we must prove intrinsic benefits are worthwhile and justified at every corner. Suggest RAND's 'Gift of the Muse' pretty much nails it.
Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the debate about the benefits of the arts.
http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG218/
P. 7, Para 4 'few blueprints for project design and management'!! Creative arts does not fit into a school/uni model. Unis process students in weekly, 2 hours classes, segregated according to year level. This is nothing like the intensive, collaborative, project-oriented shop-floor practice of any creative discipline I know. Highly visibly, flat ecology similar to apprenticeships would closer to the authentic model (or, see shakuhachi and sitar studies). In fact, I find it incredible that art colleagues can rise above the complete misfit of uni science-oriented curriculum structures to produce any worthwhile work at all: amazed, very proud. Students are 'prod-duced' (sounds awfully like PBL) via pigeonholes, come well equipped with gen-y-x (yuk/wow?) short term, greed (western arc media / Ads works well), have very short event horizon and have great difficulty in speaking about a 2 week plan, let alone 10 year career
aspirations.
Perhaps see Quest Uni, Canada, York and others who think about curricula in useful, authentic or innovative ways. I also believe Kelvin Grove High are doing some really interesting things, but I suspect that a national school curriculum will kill everything. Such authentic projects may be cross-year,
auditioned entry (christ, ethics and risk!), feature short work cycles with intensive activity and where all subjects may focus on a theme; some schools are of course 'excellence' schools and so forth. Fine musicians make fine brain surgeons and vice versa, etc . . In one of the excellence (science-based) schools in Qld, when asked what courses they thought should be added, some 235 out of 250 students requested 'music'.
p.10 Burgess and Lebler citations do not appear in Reference list. re. Lebler, unless I'm mistaken, this is the only creative and performing arts practitioner citation here (?)
The link between Lessig's work and CI? Don't see this. Commons is about freedom, non-profit, communication, play in the first instance. It may be that something this results in profitable outcomes, but the thrust of the commons literature is elsewhere, perhaps reflecting not only the rhizomatic nature of the net, but also the quest for creative outlets that are not concerned with economic rationalism, managerialism and a sense of somehow having to 'pin the frog'. I think these texts are the very useful & more useful sons and daughters of Lessig (rather than Cunningham & Hartley):
Yochai Benkler (2006) The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production
Transforms Markets and Freedom
http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.php/Main_Page
and
Richard Lanham's The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age
of Information. http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/468828.html
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As you can probably tell, my artist friends do not at all agree with the economic themes, the very term 'creative industries' is pretty much hated, nor Griffith exclusive. Try COFA, WAPPA, etc.
However, we've probably got a ways to go yet, a few nukes or a melting polar cap to swing back to some useful values?. The real answer I try to ague in herding my cats, is the truth may be one way, but we still can be strategic, indeed have to. If colleagues don't fight and provide examples then they will likely have to 'Face the Music'. After all, how can we expect the cultural theorist to visit an art gallery . . .
I guess this is some of what you're trying to do in your paper?
A little 'stream of consciousness', but hope this is of use to your thinking: In sum, I'd really like to see a lot more from traditional (dare I say, 'true') artists here in speaking about the nature of creativity. Bring back the violin and some bloody fun.
PS
Also a nice paper here about NZ's Peter Jackson:
Inkson, K. & Parker, P. (2005). 'Boundaryless' careers and the transfer of knowedge: A 'Middle earth' perspective. Higher Education Policy, 18 (313–325).
As somebody involved in the day-to-day workings of a program that depends very largely on the creativity of students for its function, I should be shouting loudly that yes indeed, creativity can be taught and, of course, that is what I do. Trouble is, my belief reflects the typical academic response to which you refer in the paper. Aspects of creative behaviour can be modelled by staff or fellow students or practitioners from industry and in that sense, it is taught; but other aspects of creativity are still elusive and would seem to be learned and developed in much less obvious ways, through creative and reflective practice rather than the pedagogy of instruction. Perhaps I should engage with Greene’s meta-model and make an attempt at figuring our which aspects fall into which category.
Creativity is no longer the exclusive domain of artistic types, for whom it has always been central; it is now a necessary attribute for almost all people if they are to deal effectively with rapidly changing environments of all kinds. The argument that the community rather than the individual is the important unit when considering the creative contexts most likely to be encountered as we move into our uncertain futures also seems very sound to me. One way to accommodate this in pedagogical practice is to encourage individual submission of collaborative work where possible, enabling both the qualities of the work as a whole and the qualities of the submitting student to be appropriately recognized. At a program, subject or course level, it is certainly possible to encourage the development of creativity within a performative university setting through developing and maintaining learning systems that allow the flexibility and interactions necessary for creative practice to flourish while still complying with the increasing demands for accountability and measurement in academic life. Not necessarily an easy task, but possible nevertheless.
If we are trying to encourage the exercising of intuition, inspiration, imagination, ingenuity and insight in our students, it would seem more likely to occur in complex, flexible and rich tasks that students feel they own in meaningful ways including the aspects of design and assessment, in which students really do act as both producers and consumers of the learning experience. This may well require some “de-learning” of old habits for both students and teachers involved in innovative practices. I would agree that we are now able to develop precise, resilient and enduring pedagogical applications based on the move from knowledge transmission to active interdependent learning, and even defend them successfully against those perennial accusations of abandoning proper teacher-ly control and power, but the development of coherent theory? Over to you Erica!
Thank you for sending me a copy of your paper which I enjoyed reading. It is well written with some inspiring words and concepts. There are few things I take issue with and my main critical comment is that you don’t go far enough in exploring what we mean by teaching (and learning) in the context of creativity – but that is perhaps your strategy. I also feel that a paper of this type.. if it is to be really engaging around the title theme should be filled with questions rather than answers.
Here are a few comments which I hope are useful and encouraging.
Your paper provides a nice synthesis of relevant published literature pertinent to your theme. Whilst making a reasons and sensible case that HE needs to pay more attention to the idea of creative pedagogies, and giving some hints as to what these pedagogies might comprise, I don't think you really engage with the practitioner perspective on 'teaching for creativity’. I wonder to what extent you have looked at the working papers I developed at the HE Academy through a series of workshops involving HE teachers in different disciplines. The patterns which emerge from conversation about the conditions in which students' creativity can be nurtured (not taught) are remarkably similar regardless of discipline context.
In your reasons as to why creativity has come to the fore para 2... you omit the most important reason.. to see and respect students as people with complex identities of which creativity is a part. Rather than the seemingly blank emotionless and compliant canvass that HE seems to prefer.
Paying attention to a learner’s creativity is a consequence of developing more realistic and holistic conceptions of learner development and learners' engagement in an infinitely complex world.
Richard Green's terrifying account scares the pants off me - why would anyone begin struggling to comprehend and work with such complexity. A simpler and more practical and grounded view drives my interest.
Pg 7 and throughout much hinges on what you mean by words like 'teaching' and 'teachable' although perhaps better constructs are 'learning, learnable, knowable’. I don't think anyone has 'taught' me to be creative. I have come to be aware of and appreciate my own creativity by learning from watching or doing things with others and through the necessity of having to invent things in the process of doing things.
Pg7 your observations about universities suffering too much performance and too little learning is true of students’ experiences of higher education as well.. arguably students are only released from this situation when they enter the workforce.. and there is something about seeing work placements as potential sites for creative experience and development and therefore a place where creative pedagogy might look.. this is something that we are beginning to look at in my own centre.
pg8,9 Agree with many of the ideas…
e.g. complex experimental pedagogic setting.. these have to be unpredictable, and challenging and they have to involve new forms of collaborative relationship where everyone is a learner..and everyone needs to be involved in sparking/facilitating everyone else We need to create more messy collaborative learning enterprises in which teachers and students are all working and learning and co-creating together in which conceptions of creativity are grown within the group.
Pg10 Agree totally with para 4
The end comes too soon. Perhaps deliberately. It was just getting interesting
I am interested in finding out more about your work.
best wishes
norman jackson
Surrey Centre for Professional Training and Education
University of Surrey
Thanks for the paper - very timely and pertinent...
Here's my main thought. We educate people in groups, knowing that these will probably not persist beyond college - so our concern has to be to use groups in such a way that valuable, generalisable residues will accrue in each individual. This poses a problem for the recognition that work in creative industries and on creative projects is very often highly communal. So how do we frame collective creative projects so that group members leave with a greater facility in, and disposition towards, the social side of creative endeavour? Maybe you could address this more?
Best
Guy
I very much enjoyed reading your wide-ranging and stimulating paper, and am delighted to see that Richard Greene's meta-analysis is starting to inform the ways that we try to make sense of this slippery notion and what it might mean in higher education let alone elsewhere in learning.
A few thoughts.
Social / cultural context: I wonder how far our attempts to understand and foster creativity are situated within particular (first world and ?western capitalist) cultural value sets and to what extent this is appropriate at a number of levels. To a degree there is a big question in my mind as to what responsibility we might have in higher education institutions to foster a breadth of understandings according to such culturally situated values.
Purpose/end: the tying of creativity to the market is a fact but again what is our responsibility in higher education of bringing critical scrutiny to the pre-eminence of this end in the ways we work with our students? Are we simply preparing our graduates to be productive in the marketplace as makers/generators and as consumers, and to what degree do we look for imagination detached from the market itself as an end worth pursuing particularly in the context of global and environmental insecurity?
What these two points lead to is the consideration of how we might foster creativity with greater wisdom, perhaps, and how we might explore the aspect of the university's role which might be seen as 'trusteeship' of larger and critical values in respect of productive creativity. The three notions of creativity, wisdom and trusteeship are ones that Guy Claxton, Howard Gardner and I have been chewing over with a number of colleagues of late, and we have a forthcoming book on the topic - so these issues are very much to the front of my mind. I guess they may therefore perhaps have taken on greater significance than they is justified in my response, however bringing these lenses to our understanding of how we act as educators at ANY level but particularly that of the University, could perhaps be productive.
I very much look forward to continuing this debate, and once again Erica thank you for such a stimulating and broad paper.
Anna
Kinds of relevant evidence:
1) the world of jobs requires creative-capable persons = a demand on colleges
2) you cannot be human without essential kinds of creativity
3) morally a world where most families/jobs hinder creativity is suboptimal
4) kids are naturally creative, schooled to not be, unfortunately
and many others.
Current approaches installed in colleges:
1) teach students what creativity is = boring
2) teach students how people think, include creation related thought forms = very popular on most campuses
3) teach students how to depart from norms and normalities = delusion, not a big part of creativity, mistaken for creativity by professors not familiar with research on creativity
4) teach cases of creation and bios of creators = interesting but what exactly is communicated and does it do anything to foster actual creation later
and many others
Creating where? Creating what? Creating how?
1) we use words like "creativity" as if they referred to ONE thing--is there any evidence at all that support this assumption
2) the relativity of creativity--levels of innovation that would be laughed at with contempt in universities go for biggo innovations in most industries--who is right the university or the industry? Being creative is relative to expectation and in industry omnipresent slop and bureaucracy and careerist distortions make tiny innovations gratefully received as near miracles of accomplishment--who is right?
3) is creating, the process of doing it, one thing or a dozen things of 6 billion things (one for every person) or 60 billion things (ten for each person)?
what does the evidence say? if it is many but not thousands of things, who is building maps of it so we can learn which processes do what, have what, are what?
There is substantial evidence that more years of college = less lifetime creativity for most people:
1) why?
2) what values, equally positive with creativity, may be in a trade-off relationship with attaining it in colleges?
3) some evidence points to a naive over confidence effect--people too dumb and ignorant to know how hard something is sometimes achieve it
4) some evidence points to an ability to enjoy life, all quotidians of it, more due to college affects on minds and hearts making the extremes of doing creativity less necessary for maintaining personal life satisfaction of college grads
Many university departments have been teaching huge amounts of creativity for over a century or two--why does everyone ignore their history of doing so and their results?:
1) mechanical engineering departments have had design sections of decades if not centuries
2) fine arts departments have been doing reflective practitioner instruction in creating for centuries
3) the basic sciences, in grad labs, have been teaching creativity for centuries
4) what university departments have consistently NOT been teaching creativity for decades? why them? why not?
What are the requisites, the hard ones, for each phase of creating process type A, creating process type B (for however many such process types there are, 1 to 60 billion):
1) do universities foster such processes, when, where, for how long
2) do professors or students notices such processes, when, where, for how long
3) is there enough isolation in key phases of those processes for surprise, discovery, invention that astounds the world to develop
4) is there enough connection in key phases of those processes that strange, isolated, unexpected things get into mainstream attention spans and minds rather than bouncing off as irrelevancies?
5) another hundred dozen such questions for shared aspects of many creation processes beyond isolation and connection....
I liked your paper very much and your framing of the literature. I especially noted the role of demystication--if adulthood starts, as a journey you begin, at around age 20, and if people first become adult, psychologically, around age 45 to 50, then major forms of demystification have been largely completed by that age, recovering most of the powers unwittingly and unwillingly given up during whatever one's socialization and being raised processes were. Are colleges launching people on that journey to adulthood or are they declaring that 20 year old minds and bodies are legally adult therefore psychologically adult? Are colleges launching people on that demystification journey so the students at adulthood, reached around age 45 to 50, have nearly fully recovered powers given away duing socialization. Is it possible to be uneducated, that is, to never start one's journey toward adulthood in one's early 20s, and still be creative in any serious history remembering sense? Is is possible to never demystify one's own chosen field that one creates in and still be creative?
To my mind, all of these are researchable questions and worthy of effort. If I were 100 people I would pursue them all. I do not know much about creativity so I prefer to write questions--I know some questions, but I know very very few answers.
I forget a main point--
There is substantial evidence that the unit of mind that is safe and effective is the male brain in tandem with one or more female brains. That is the unit of instruction, the unit that works to do instruction effectively and the unit that works to be intructed effectively is, UNFORTUNATELY FOR US ALL, not in any one person's head. The effective unit of doingand receiving instruction is the pair--male with female brain. Any separation of them greatly reduces overall quality of thought, writing, creation, etc.
COlleges, as I experience them personally, never used this unit of intructing and being instructed. Instead they defaulted to single brains, inevitably usually male alone or female alone. Hence, much instruction is wasted because directed at an intellectually faulty and deeply flawed unit--the male brain used alone or the female brain used alone. It could not be more obvious, in recent gender research, intuition research, adaptive unconscious research, cognition as mini-scientist research (Kerry, Harvard) that designing colleges or creativity instruction and directing it at single human brains insures bad quality outcomes, vis a vis the world we currently inhabit (for how long is an increasingly serious practical question). Were instruction to be directed instead at the feasible unit of doing and receiving instruction--the pair of male with female brain--then the creativity effects of a college education might escape two of the forces known to cause contemporary colleges to reduce overall lifetime creation accomplishment.
I know this will be received as totally off the wall by most people but I will obstinately insist that no one dismiss it who has not gathered specific actual evidence for dismissing it--the gender, intuition, etc. research literatures are building up a huge pile of published results demonstrating powerfully that we should stop having single males as professors and single females as professors and only hire married couples or collegial couples to teach. Similarly, the evidence points to only pairs of gender mixed brains as effective students. Why perfect a system undermined throughout by a gender brain split that make college outputs deeply flawed and cognitively dangerous, that is single males thinking male-ly only or single females thinking female-ly only? Besides, provocation is sometimes fun!
I find brief mention of Csikszentmihalyi's work in your paper, but not a lot of mention of the system's model (or confluence model) he and others like Gardner have discussed. I find this model useful because it says not what creativity is, but where it occurs... and that's within the interplay of three main components, the individual, the domain which they practice and the field that recognises the work. This seems to bridge various other models which focus more on individual psychological aspects or social determinants etc. It also recognises that creativity is expressed through a domain and that requires the development of certain skills and knowledges. So creativity then is not just about the free-flowing expression of some inner essence, but something that you can work at and develop.
Another body of work I have found helpful in thinking about how we might structure learning so that students are able to transfer their creative skills into differnet context, domains or experiences is the Bransford and Schwartz work on transfer. Some of their work around building prior knowledge through using contrasting cases (see "A Time for Telling"), looking at the importance of two dimensions of transfer (innovation and efficiency) and the idea of providing experiences for students to transfer knowledge in and transfer out (e.g. apply knowledge in problem based learning). This is just a brief mention of some relevant concepts, but I think some of these ideas would be particularly useful in considering the teaching and assessing of creativity in higher education.
Sue
I'm presently reading a terrific book, Developing Creativity in Higher Education: An Imaginative Curriculum. An edited collection of works from all sorts of backgrounds, with insightful opening and closing chapters by one of the editors, Prof Norman Jackson, the Director of the UK's SCEPTrE (Surrey Centre for Excellence in Professional Training and Education) at the University of Surrey.
I was drawn especially to this chapter by Paul Tosey, cutely entitled Interfering with the interference. Although Tovey is from the Management discipline, he provides thought-provoking analogies from the creative arts and music areas to make excellent points: He suggests that "creativity is triggered by constraining events of circumstances", and that this view of creativity "does not entail a romantic notion of total artistic freedom in which constraints are negative". He says, "Necessity is the mother of emergence as well of invention".
Hmmm . . provides me with a whole new perspective on all those undergraduates cramming for exams or leaving projects right 'till the last minute. He also puts forward the metaphor -- "change as drama" . . . as we say here in Oz, 'I reckon!' Tosey leaves us with this wonderful musical anecdote:
"A well-known Congolese drummer, TaTitos, was asked how new compositions are created in that culture. TaTitos replied that there are three methods. In the first, a new piece of music is presented to someone in their dreams; in the second, musicians notice and build on mistakes they make while they are playing and generate new variations from those errors; in the third, someone consciously constructs a new composition. However, TaTitos added, there are no known examples of successful composition using the third method" (pp 29-30).