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 

Higher education teachers also see creativity as an important and necessary part of their professional identity.

A matter of self-expression: Perhaps Stephen Covey’s concept of voice, which connects an individual’s identity, self-expression, self-efficacy and ethics 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 enough 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).

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

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.

MAKING HIGHER EDUCATION A MORE CREATIVE PLACE JUNE 2007.doc

 DESIGNING FOR CREATIVITY CURRICULUM GUIDE.rtf