All 16 entries tagged Inspiration

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].

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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

Innovation Through Design Thinking, Tim Brown of IDEO (iTunesU podcast)

Here are some notes on a talk by Tim Brown (CEO of design company IDEO), given to the MIT Sloan Business School. You can watch a video of the talk on iTunes. It's an excellent and well presented talk, packed with useful ideas relevant to all kinds of work (explicitly or implicitly creative and innovative). I have selected points that are particularly relevant to my development projects, teaching and research on creativity, space and teaching and design.

05:20 – The lecture starts, after 5 minutes of introductions.

07:15 – We believe that companies which view design as just making things cool or pretty are missing the point. [Design is an essential element in innovation, process design and service design]

08:16 - Six Sigma and Design Thinking – Recommends a Business Week interview with Jeff Immelt, CEO of GE: Bringing Innovation to the Home of Six Sigma - but implies that the two approaches sit uncomfortably together.

08:32 - For many companies design thinking is the way that they create their future.

12:05 – It is an approach to innovation.

14:16 – [Involves] People (desirability); Business (viability); Technology (feasibility).

14:59 - Three important phases (inspiration, ideation, implementation).

16:48 - Insights are the fuel for innovation

17:12 - Design thinkers use the world as a source of inspiration not just validation

18:27 - It starts with empathy

21:28 - Analogous situations

22:50 - Insights come from extreme users

23:56 – We’re not trying to get statistical data about what the world thinks, we’re simply trying to get new ideas, we’ll evaluate those ideas later, we just want a source of inspiration.

24:40 – Building to think (prototyping)
The real kind of notion here is that we’re kind of used to building things to show people what we have done, so we’re used to the notion that we might build a model a prototype, whether it’s a physical thing or not, to show people that we’ve achieved something, and to get their permission their authorisation to move forwards, the idea that you’ll build a prototype to take to a milestone meeting to show the boss so that he will give you more money to keep going. But that’s not what we are talking about here. We’re talking about building things to learn about your ideas.

25:39 Learn by prototyping, and that means prototyping quickly and inexpensively. You want to do a lot of prototyping.

27:34 – Prototypes don’t have to be physical but they must be tangible. … They must allow you to build a picture and come to a sense of what you have learned.

27:52 – There are all kinds of prototyping techniques that are very useful, based around film making, based around improv, we act our ideas out.

33:00 - There are different kinds of prototypes and different kinds of prototypes exist at different parts of the design process (inspire, ideate, implement).

35:15 – In our experience, many good ideas fail to make it out to market, not because they aren’t good ideas, but because they couldn’t make it through the corporation, they couldn’t navigate through the system … one mechanism for beginning to deal with that … is storytelling, and the more powerfully you can construct a story around the ideas you have, the better you can communicate those ideas to your colleagues, to partners, to stakeholders, the more likely that idea is to survive through the process, and so the use of storytelling, the use of movie making, the use of building experiences that are about those ideas themselves, the more you can do that the more you will succeed in getting your ideas out there. [Nike] The design team started making ads of their ideas before they showed them to anybody.
Stories help provide the framework for creating ideas.

38:05 – The story can be tangible and experiential.

39:38 – Design cultures, innovation cultures, if there’s one thing that they do, if they do nothing else, they are really good at being inspired and being inspiring, they get people to think about things in different kinds of ways.

39:52 – One of the things to look out for is how inspired are people by what’s going on out in the world? How connected are you to the outside world to the big ideas that are emerging?

43:40 – Being inspired about where you get your ideas. Space has a huge impact on one’s ability to innovate, not just how cool is it, how fun is it, but how is it laid out? What are you actually using space for? We have relatively small amounts of space at IDEO dedicated to individuals, but we have lots and lots of space dedicated to project rooms, and the reason we have lots of space dedicated to projects rooms is that when you are trying to synthesise large amounts of information in projects you need to do that visually, you need to have it up around you, you need to be able to plaster the walls with things.

52:14 – We have a team on our campus whose only job is to create project rooms for people, take them away again, and make new ones [they also record what has happened in them]. Typically a project room might be in existence for a couple of months.

Robert O'Toole : 16 Oct 2009 12:05 |  Tags: Design Methods Design Thinking Inspiration Multimediacomms Podcast Professional |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Creativity and curricula in higher education: academics’ perspectives, Margaret Edwards et al

How do practising higher education teachers define ‘creativity’? How do they see it as fitting into their curricula and their roles as teachers and academics? What strategies do they use to make teaching and learning more ‘creative’? What obstacles do they face?

Between 2002 and 2004, Margaret Edwards, Chris McGoldrick and Martin Oliver conducted deep-searching interviews with 32 members of academic staff from UCL and Liverpool John Moores University. Their results are summarized in this most useful paper¹ published as a chapter in Developing Creativity in Higher Education².

The chapter is packed with significant findings and interpretations of views from teachers actively engaged with higher education’s most challenging issues (notably assessment, feedback, key skills and employability). My research concerns examining how such ‘creative practices’ may help us to address these issues, and how new concepts of ‘space’ and ‘design’ can make creativity work in the HE context. I will also be talking upon the subject of learning space and technology at a couple of forthcoming conferences. In this article I will select from the many interesting points made in the chapter, reporting upon things that are particularly relevant to my work. However, there’s much more to it than this – so I recommend reading the full chapter (indeed the whole book).

A dissonance between ‘creativity’ (as perceived) and the demands of HE teaching

Definitions of creativity vary widely and contain conflicting and sometimes paradoxical elements, as should be expected for such a molar concept. However, there is a common belief that ‘creative’ practices introduce a degree of unpredictability, if not chaos, especially in cases where “the lived curriculum arose dynamically out of interactions with the students.” p.60

One respondent stated:

“You’ve got to improvise – it’s like a performance in a way.” p.60

This poses the potential for a conflict between analytical, objective driven learning design approaches and creative work. How can creativity ever provide SMART (specific, measurable, assessable, realizable, time-related) objectives? p.62

I argue that the conflict can be resolved through design thinking practises. For example, in their influential Harvard Business Review article of 1977, Eileen Morley and Andrew Silver described how professional film-making is a well structured, well understood formal management process that accomadates risk-taking and dynamic emergence of un-anticipated outputs (it is in that sense highly creative and controlled).³

A mismatch between feedback regimes and creative relationships

“Institutional arrangements for student feedback were not felt to be particularly effective in either university. Students could regard them as ‘an annoying routine’, and academics rarely found this type of feedback helpful (‘because … they just tick the numbers, and the numbers are arbitrary anyway – what does plus two mean?’). Student representatives on Boards of Study and informal feedback were found to be much more helpful. Generally, however, students tended to concentrate on details and ‘not to be all that insightful about the whole curriculum’.” p.63

I argue that creative practices, embedded within the curriculum, may actually improve the quality of feedback (helping to establish and maintain a mutual understanding and clarity of communication). However, success may be dependent upon establishing good creative practices and appropriate creative spaces (physical and online).

The necessity for appropriate creative spaces

“Creating spaces - several participants noted how ‘crammed’ curricula tends to be, attempting to cover an ambitious range of topics. A recurrent theme in interviews was the need to replace some content with ‘creative space’ – areas of the curriculum where teacher and student felt able to try things out and negotiate what should be done, and how to do it. Such spaces created opportunities for ‘more relaxed pedagogy and … discussion, workshop, individual feedback – you need this for deeper understandings’. Important features of such ‘creative space’ were that it should be enjoyable (‘I’d want to make it fun!’), part of the course, but not so tightly assessed that risk-taking and the exploitation of ideas were inhibited. Moreover, it was felt that the ‘space’ was not boundless. As a curriculum designer, ‘your creative act is in trying to build in these spaces … in a way … which will still allow students to feel secure that there is a curriculum and that they aren’t just in a free for all.’ “ p.64

My aim is to show how we can understand the role of different types of space in creative learning activities, and how we can build effective teaching and learning around such spaces. A ‘design patterns’ approach is an essential tool in achieving this. With such an approach, practises and curricula may be developed to harness the power of creative practices without resulting in chaos and over-complex requirements.

Some good practices

Teaching for Creativity – ‘… techniques that teachers associated with technology …’ p.64-65

•    Developing critical thinking.
•    Encouraging lateral thinking and problem-working.
•    Move between the university and ‘outside.’ Get students outside of classrooms.
•    Give space for group work.
•    Increase student confidence (in staff and student colleagues).
•    Have fun!

Assessment is an obstacle challenge

"Assessment appeared central to the whole issue of designing creative curricula. As one participant commented, ‘If the assessment process is right, you can cope: creativity is encouraged’." p.66

Creative approaches to assessment

"In Arts disciplines, exhibitions, portfolios and performances were used for assessment, and would be viewed by internal and external assessors. ‘Mini-vivas’ would give undergraduates an opportunity to comment upon their work and would be taped in final-year modules for external examiners. Outside Arts disciplines, more than one assessor would comment upon assessments that were specifically designed to incorporate creative work; these included oral presentations, poster demonstrations and role play." p.67

Creative spaces are important for…

Designing problem-based, research-based tasks for first-years, aiming to help them with the transition from school.

Designing final-year courses: “The idea of creative space … was felt to be particularly important here.” p.68

Creative practices and spaces help with student-teacher relations, help to get final-year students to be more active and challenging.

The traditional module structure hinders creative work

"A very considerable discouragement to creative curricular design and student learning was felt to be the university’s ‘insistence on [semester-long] modules … there is no space, there is assessment crowding in and reduced opportunity for formative assessment…" p.70

Do less better!

"Given the central role of creativity, one starting point might be to consider whether there is an over-teaching of content coupled with too little ‘high gain [student] and low pain [academic] assessment’ (Knight and Yorke, 2003)." p.73

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¹ Developing Creativity in Higher Education: An Imaginative Curriculum, Norman Jackson, Martin Oliver, Malcolm Shaw and James Wisdom, Routledge 2006
² Creativity and curricula in higher education: academics’ perspectives, Margaret Edwards, Chris McGoldrick and Martin Oliver, in Jackson et al 2006, p.60-73
³ A Film Director's Approach to Managing Creativity, Eileen Morley and Andrew Silver, in Harvard Business Review March 1977

Robert O'Toole : 14 Oct 2009 14:24 |  Tags: Academic Book Chapter Creative Spaces Creativity Inspiration |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem