All 4 entries tagged Creativity

The Creativity Recipe Book for HE – project bid

I recently submitted a bid to the Higher Education Academy National Teaching Fellows project fund. The idea behind the projet has raised a lot of interest already, even without actual funding. Hence I thought it would be good for a wider range of people to see what we are up to. With a 2000 word limit, the initial bid is very much a compressed version of our ideas. Manus Conaghan of the Learning & Development Centre (Warwick's NTF coordinator) did a great job in editing it down and making sense of the ideas and intentions.

We have project partners at Warwick, as well as at Worcester and Oxford Brookes. Since submitting the bid, we have extended the "widening participation" aspect with the support of Brenda King of the Afro Carribean Diversity initiative. If the bid succeeds in the first stage, we will then add details about partnerships with the British Museum, V&A, Warburg Institute Library, regional museums and other cultural organisations.

If you are interested in this project, then please contact me at r.b.o-toole@warwick.ac.uk for more information.

1. Purpose

In 08/09, we ran highly successful student podcasting competitions with small production teams, consisting of students and an academic or alumni. The teams produced podcast interviews exploring some aspect of academic work or the experience of the alumni. In post-competition interviews, the students explained how they had found the “creative project”, when closely linked to academic work, to be an excellent, intensive, exciting, immersive learning process, equivalent too, but in many ways better than, writing an essay.

Podcasting, and other creative forms, are becoming accepted and valued channels for developing and expressing academic work. At Warwick (and other institutions) only a few lucky students have been able to take part but one undergraduate project topped the iTunes chart with 40,000 global downloads.

This project aims to bring this kind of experience to the majority of students, and to integrate and align them with academic work to make them valued, understood achievable.

2. Background

“Most NTFs [National Teaching Fellows] are highly motivated and keen to develop students’ creativity.  …  Even though most of the NTFs see themselves as having more autonomy, flexibility … many struggle with challenging working conditions… responses highlight the fact that, despite some really innovative teaching, much HE provision is still geared to the previous century (in some instances, the century before that).” (Fryer)

This bleak picture, contrasts starkly with calls of policy makers, business leaders, and social visionaries to put creativity at the heart of education.

Through many innovative initiatives, our understanding of creative practices and the attainment of a creative capability has grown. We understand the benefits to individuals and communities. We have well-founded beliefs about how creativity can help us to deal with many challenges facing HE today Furthermore, the dynamics and necessary ingredients for creative acts (“design thinking”) are well documented by practitioners from industries with innovation at their core (Brown, 2008).

And yet:

“Whilst 75% of the NTFs believe that the capacity to be creative enhances academic performance, few (13.5%) believe that the most academically successful students are also the most creative.” (Fryer)

The situation seems even more frustrating if as according to Jackson:

“…the teaching and learning process, with all its complexity, unpredictability, and endless sources of stimulation ... is an inherently creative place, and there are many potential sites for creativity embedded in … teaching.” (Jackson)

NTFs are indicating that we have not yet put creativity consistently at the heart of what it means to be a successful student, nor rewarded it highly enough. Not only is this detrimental for students, it means that we have fewer opportunities to develop and test theories about creativity and its benefits in the HE context. The project will increase these opportunities to achieve “the tipping point”, leading to greater scope to develop our collective understanding (and to better address the research questions below).

Born of the desire to contribute towards the attainment of “tipping points for cultural change” (Jackson,) and informed by the experiences of several NTFs and institutionally recognized “excellent” teachers, it has also evolved in response to a widespread concern, and a growing demand for help from both new and experienced academics.

Established and new lecturers face difficulties, practical issues are combined with questions about how to integrate creative projects with the curriculum, assessing the results, and ensuring that students understand their worth and relationship to a wider academic and cultural context, and value beyond assessment grades.

E.g., Dr. Nicoleta Cinpoes teaches English Literature at the University of Worcester. New to the profession, and keen to develop her practice to enable creative student academic responses, she would like her undergraduates to undertake creative projects as part of their assessed work. (Particularly important for “non-traditional background” students at Worcester).  Although she has done well with available tools, designing and supporting such projects on her own seems to be an insurmountable challenge despite having good links with theatre companies and archives. Dr.  Cinpoes will be a key member of the project’s advisory board.

There are many cases in which an academic has successfully designed and supported such creative student projects, with appreciable benefit to their students.  Dr. Sarah Richardson is an experienced teacher of History at Warwick and Director of the HEA History Subject Centre. She has supported many creative student projects.  Working with her has enabled us to identify key transferable success factors:

• Outputs have appreciable academic value and integrity.
• Fit naturally with the taught curriculum (ideally contributes to assessment) and. the development of the students’ academic and personal identities (giving them opportunities to grow).
• The project has to seem achievable, with a good sense of requirements and the nature of the end product.
• The project will benchmark key success factors, providing an informed approach for the wider academic community to incorporate creativity in to their practice. 

Projects such as this one and many others undertaken at Warwick can inform what is required by:

• Defining a range of project types (film making, podcasting, wikis, etc), appropriate to a wide range of disciplines that are achievable without too great an additional cost in time and energy.
• Encouraging the use of established techniques from creative and design-centric industries (“design thinking”, storyboarding, agile development, etc).
• Identifying enabling technologies enabling greater focus on creativity rather than technology – enabled by developments in hardware and software such as solid-state MPEG4 video cameras & Google Wave.
• Inspiration and guidance to create such projects out of the curriculum and beyond.
• Evaluation methodologies for creative projects and their outputs.
• Showcasing excellent projects to encourage students and teachers to undertake them.
• Assisting in finding opportunities for projects.

By providing academics with a range of contextualised model projects with transparent pedagogic underpinnings – we can help to enable creative projects becoming more feasible, common and valued in HE.

4. Methodology

We will develop an open-access, community-owned, online guidebook for students, teachers, support-specialists and collaborators (from creative, cultural, technical and scientific organisations) based upon the concept of “creative recipes”.  Including:

• Demonstrations
• Explanations to make projects achievable and promote creative improvisation and adaption beyond the recipe.
• Video, audio and Flash animations
• Recounts from those undertaking the project
• Tips from students, teachers and creative professionals (e.g. filmmakers)
• Teachers notes, concerning assessment, skills development and curriculum integration

This format is a response to the challenge of embedding creative projects across HE.  Engaging, accessible but powerful: the book will be constructed online, using a wiki containing a range of “recipes” (initially 20), designed in every way to be inspiring. Individuality and improvisation will be emphasised – creating recipes that are thought provoking but not overly prescriptive. Professional expertise will embed and encourage sound pedagogical, technical, design and creative techniques. Warwick’s successful iTunesU podcasting team will be one dissemination route.

We will fund and support exemplar student projects to drive development of the recipes, using a reflective and critical process, modelled upon the successful Warwick Undergraduate Research Scholarship Scheme.

The involvement of real students and real teachers is essential to the project to make it relevant, designing and testing recipes, and providing personal testimony concerning implementation and academic value.

We will prime this process with awareness raising events and demonstrations, by identifying opportunities for project work in collaboration with cultural, scientific and other partners (currently trialling with the British Museum), and building upon excellent work undertaken by CAPITAL, in collaboration with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

A range and depth of examples will support a broadening of our understanding of creative projects and community practitioners, allowing us to address key research questions, including:

Can creative student projects:

•    Improve the student-teacher relationship, improving engagement and feedback?
•    Help students in the transition from school to a higher education?
•    Have an impact in attracting students from “non-traditional” backgrounds, thus “widening participation”?
•    Enrich academic disciplines and connect them with wider communities and issues?

The selected projects will be given resource and advisory support from experts and assigned a “critical friend”, to support and monitor the process. Project teams will document their activities reflectively in a blog and write a final report presenting their outputs.

These exemplars will enable the creation of “recipes” for successful projects. As the recipes are developed, we will beta test them. As they move towards completion, we will test them live. Then we will launch the recipe book at a live event, giving teachers and other practitioners an opportunity to try out recipes for creative projects in a supported and well equipped environment.

We will repeat this event at locations around the country (e.g. with the support of subject centres) as part of a Creativity Recipes Live tour, recruiting further contributors with yet more recipes, and ensuring the ongoing development of the “recipe book” wiki beyond the life of the initial project.

5. Outcomes

This project will deliver the following outcomes:

• The online “recipe book”. Practical advice on how to find opportunities, integrate them with academic disciplines and curricula, build teams, design projects, and undertake creative productions (films, podcasts, web sites etc).. The initial 20 “recipes” will be created within a wiki, to provide focus for the development of a self-supporting and extending community of practice.
• Printable “recipe cards”, summarizing the recipes, and making them portable.
• A showcase of exemplar projects.
• A directory of opportunities, matching students with cultural and community organisations.
• A Creative Student Projects Live event, at which participants can try out the “recipes”. The live event will then be repeated around the country “on tour”.
• The embedding of creative project “recipes” within training and development for students and staff programmes for higher education teaching and student skills.

The success of the project will be measured by:

• The completion of a wide range of creative projects connected through a lively and extensive community of practitioners.
• The number of academics given training will be over 300.
• A greater understanding of the contribution of the creative projects approach to significant issues in higher education (research questions above), with findings published in peer-reviewed journals.
• Creative projects becoming a key element in the university experience.
• A community adoption of the wiki, leading to future maintenance and development.

6. References

Brown, Tim (2008) ‘Design Thinking’, in Harvard Business Review, June 2008.
Fryer, Marilyn (2006) ‘Facilitating creativity in higher education: a brief account of National Teaching Fellows’ views’, in Jackson N, Oliver M, Shaw M & Wisdom J (eds.), Developing Creativity in Higher Education, Routledge, 2006.
Jackson, Norman (2006) ‘Creativity in Higher Education’, in SCEPTrE Scholarly Paper 3, March 2006.

Robert O'Toole : 28 Oct 2009 14:41 |  Tags: Creative Projects Creativity Higher Education Academy Implementation National Teaching Fellows |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Facilitating creativity in higher education: a brief account of NTFs' views, Marilyn Fryer

Published in the book Developing Creativity in Higher Education¹. A report on a survey of 94 recipients of the Higher Education Academy National Teaching Fellowship (90 email questionnaires and 24 in-depth interviews)².

The chapter begins with a survey of research into attitudes towards and perceptions of creativity amongst teachers in schools and (much less commonly) in higher education. The results of such studies seem to confirm the intuitively obvious: for example, that the valuing of creativity varied with preferred teaching styles.

The NTF survey is impressive in its sample size - Fellows from across the broad spectrum seemed to be quite keen to respond. The details of the response are equally impressive. The NTFs were asked to describe aspects of creativity. Their answers were compiled into a useful table (p.78), with "imagination" at the top (90%) and several other somewhat general notions proving to be popular, including "innovation" (76.6%) and "invention" (66.7%). However, it's interesting to see that several more tangible behaviours are rated highly, for example "seeing unusual connections" (86.7%), "combining ideas" (80%) and "generative thinking" (53.3%), suggesting a more pragmatic engagement with creative actions - indeed 92.2% of respondents believe that "creativity can be developed" p.79. Also of interest is the fact that there were no strong disciplinary biases expressed. Fryer suggests that these attitudes may be the result of the widening debate concerning creative education (p.79), with active teachers readily accepting its importance for all students.

The NTFs, however, seem less optimistic concerning the ability of HE to adopt creativity more consistently:

Most NTFs [National Teaching Fellows] are highly motivated and keen to develop students’ creativity.  …  Even though most of the NTFs see themselves as having more autonomy, flexibility … many struggle with challenging working conditions… responses highlight the fact that, despite some really innovative teaching, much HE provision is still geared to the previous century (in some instances, the century before that). p.82

This could be blamed upon an entrenched legacy HE culture, defining assessment goals and practices, that is biased towards bahaviours that are not creative.

Whilst 75% of the NTFs believe that the capacity to be creative enhances academic performance, few (13.5%) believe that the most academically successful students are also the most creative. p.80

Fryer concludes that "questions need to asked about the criteria for academic success." (p.87) - a significant, if not revolutionary question to pose. Assessment was especially singled-out as a blocker to a revaluation of creativity. (p.86)

________________

¹ Developing Creativity in Higher Education: An Imaginative Curriculum, Norman Jackson, Martin Oliver, Malcolm Shaw and James Wisdom, Routledge 2006
² Facilitating creativity in higher education: a brief account of National Teaching Fellows' views, Marilyn Fryer in Jackson et al 2006.

Robert O'Toole : 27 Oct 2009 00:27 |  Tags: Creativity Inspiration National Teaching Fellows |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Students’ experiences of creativity, Martin Oliver et al

Follow-up to Creativity and curricula in higher education: academics’ perspectives, Margaret Edwards et al from Inspires Learning - Robert O'Toole

A report on research carried out by Martin Oliver, Bharat Shah, Chris McGoldrick and Margaret Edwards, based upon interviews with 25 students from a wide range of disciplines at UCL and LJMU. This investigation of student views accompanies a chapter on those of academics³.

Again the results are rich, deep and wide ranging. I have selected points most relevant to my own research (my notes in square brackets or bold).

Notes

Defining creativity

“Rather than giving one coherent, integrated account, they typically drew on a number of different discourses, often presenting contrasting or even inconsistent positions at different points in the interviews.” p.44

[People most usually define creativity by emphasising its supposed antithesis - rigidity, dogma, lack of spontaneity; or by referring to complete works that are deemed to be ‘creative’ - typically artistic acts or acts of perceived genius.]

Students lack time and energy for creativity

“Other comments were concerned with things students felt helped with creativity. These included physical exercise (as a way of reducing stress), being with creative people and reading or watching something inspiring. Some students suggested that study pressure was squeezing activities such as these out, either because it took up too much time or left students feeling tired.” p.48

“As one student summarised: ‘you need time and space in your mind to be creative and if your mind is full of studying and this and that and the other then there’s no space for it’.” p.51 [Note the opposition between creativity and studying. Also creativity time is referred to as being spatial - often people spatialise time when it is under threat and needs to be protected.]

Creative teaching

“Examples of techniques included role playing (by the teacher, not the students), debates and creating posters that were then presented to the class or displayed in a public place.” p.49

“Some conventional forms of teaching were also felt to support creativity. These were inevitably dialogic, and focussed on opportunities for discussion that addressed students’ current understanding or beliefs.” p.50 [Conversational framework]

Academia perceived to be in opposition to creativity

“In many students’ comments there was a sense of frustration at a perceived conflict between being creative and being ‘academic’. Many of the students experienced academic values as being controlling, conformist and inflexible, more concerned with producing ‘clones’ than supporting new ideas. These students framed their experience in terms of rote learning, spoon feeding and regurgitation.” p.54

“…students identified many things that limited or inhibited creativity. As before, some of these point to a perceived contrast between creativity and acceptable academic work.” p.50

“Some comments were simple suggestions for teaching techniques that could be used to provide a contrast to current teaching. (Such contrasts typically portrayed current teaching  as transmissive and dull; however, in context, it seems likely that this is a rhetorical description rather than a judgement about their courses.)” p.49

“Students on vocational courses pointed to work placements, often as an explicit contrast to their academic study. They identified the people they encountered and the problems that arose in that situation as requiring the new solutions to be created, or existing ones to be adapted; it was also suggested that personal style could be expressed in such situations in a way that was not always possible within the formal educational component of the course.” p.50

[Perhaps questioning the relevance of academic work and modes of assessment]

“There’s an infinite amount of possibilities, it’s really, really daunting. […], I’ll do whatever I want and it might be something completely different, which is incredibly satisfying but it’s terrifying as well.” p.49

[Some students might actually need creativity to be controlled and bounded by a discipline, as they might feel to challenged by risk and unpredictability]

Academia perceived as allowing bounded creativity

“It is important to point out that not all students were dissatisfied with their experience of academia. Indeed some came to appreciate the creative endeavour of academic work, even if they tempered this with the suggestion that is was somehow not for them…” p.55

Assessment styles opposed to creativity - essays, exams - but essays seen as more creative

[exams] “It’s also about spontaneity isn’t it? So you can be creative and you’ve spent a month revising and your head is full of crap.” p.54

Creative study

“…even within ‘uncreative’ disciplines, some students admitted they found ways to be creative, such as developing short-cuts or quicker approaches that helped them in their work.” p.55 [students use creative techniques to subvert academia]

“Just as students described creativity in their teachers’ practices, they also discussed their own. They deemed this to be particularly important, since they felt it was learning, not teaching, that was central to their academic success; bad teaching might not inspire, but it did not prevent learning.” p.51

Specific techniques identified

“making links across different contexts” p.51 [cross-pollinating]

“interpreting texts” p.52

“case studies”, “videos”, ‘the Internet” p.52

LEARNING SPACE

“The environment in which study took place was felt to be important. Several students stressed the importance of comfort (‘a big, comfortable chair or something’), and many identified ‘distractions’ such as music, exercise or a window to look out of as being important….However, other participants spoke of exactly the same distractions in negative ways; the key to this was in whether the student had the choice to distract themselves in such ways.” p.52 [Do students understand how different spaces are used in different ways?]

Conclusions

“…there seemed to be a desire for spaces within the course that were open to risk-taking, free from the need to justify decisions and where failure was an opportunity for learning rather than a problem.” p.57

[That students see creativity as being an important part of how they achieve (or survive), regardless of whether it is sanctioned or not, or whether it is used for legitimate or subversive purposes, it is important].

_________________

¹ Developing Creativity in Higher Education: An Imaginative Curriculum, Norman Jackson, Martin Oliver, Malcolm Shaw and James Wisdom, Routledge 2006
² Students’ experiences of creativity, Martin Oliver, Bharat Shah, Chris McGoldrick and Margaret Edwards, in Jackson et al 2006.
³ Creativity and curricula in higher education: academics’ perspectives, Margaret Edwards, Chris McGoldrick and Martin Oliver, in Jackson et al 2006, p.60-73

Robert O'Toole : 17 Oct 2009 20:34 |  Tags: Academic Book Chapter Creative Spaces Creativity Inspiration |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem