Everyone's business

Creativity is no longer on the margins, writes ERICA McWILLIAM UNIVERSITIES are wrapping themselves in the mantle of creativity. About 75 per cent of Australian universities have an expressed commitment to creative learning, according to a 2007 analysis of higher education teaching and learning plans and graduate attributes. Yet creativity continues to suffer from a long-term stigma: that it is too vaporous and exotic to be taken seriously as core business. Many in higher education dismiss creativity as defying definition, and thus also defying any attempt to foster it systematically through learning and teaching practices. Assessing it is even more unimaginable. It is still widely held that creativity is only relevant to a small percentage of graduates as future professional workers. Recent work has challenged these propositions. Creativity is a capacity that is being acknowledged as an observable and valuable component of social and economic enterprise. It is not merely garnish to the productivity roast, but fundamental to an increasingly complex, challenge-ridden and rapidly changing economic and social order. In the words of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who coined the term flow to describe the mental state of energised focus in which people perform tasks with satisfaction to a high standard, creativity is ?no longer a luxury for the few, but a necessity for all.? Claims that creative capability is the key to economic growth and human capital development have become more vociferous since the publication of Richard Florida?s The Rise of the Creative Class half a decade ago. Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind, is among many social commentators arguing that a profound shift has occurred in the story of affluence, technological progress and globalisation. He describes this as a shift from an information age in which knowledge workers are the most valued workers, to a conceptual age in which creators and empathisers ? that is, workers with high concept aptitudes ? will be highly valued as creative human capital. Economists and policymakers are embracing creativity, innovation and human talent as essential capacities for economic growth and social dynamism. The burgeoning field of scholarship on creativity is demonstrating the economic importance of digital content industries such as computer games, digital video and film, post-production, animation and websites. Yet the scope of creativity is wider than this. The creative workforce includes those employed in a broad sweep of industries: computing, engineering, architecture, business, science and education, as well as arts and multimedia. Learning theorists have made their contribution to creativity?s demystification. While highly individual motivation for creativity defies neuro-scientific explanation, at least in the short to medium term, there is some consensus around the view that creativity works as both a way of thinking associated with intuition, inspiration, imagination, ingenuity and insight, and a novel and appropriate response to an open-ended task. All this builds on understandings first made public over 50 years ago in Arthur Koestler?s The Act of Creation, in which Koestler identified the decisive phase of creativity as the capacity to ?perceive a situation or event in two habitually incompatible associative contexts?: the capacity to select, reshuffle, combine or synthesise already existing facts, ideas, images and skills in original ways. Similarly, David Perkins argues in The Mind?s Best Work that skills such as pattern recognition, creation of analogies and mental models, the ability to cross domains, exploration of alternatives, knowledge of schema for problem-solving, fluency of thought and so on, are all creative dispositions or cognitive habits that can and should be both taught and learned. A further important perspective has been added through Csikszentmihalyi?s insistence on the community, not the individual, as the unit that matters when seeking to foster creativity. This proposition challenges conceptions of creativity limited to individualistic psychological traits. So scholarly interest is shifting from the creative individual to the creative, dynamic team. All these recent scholastic moves to unhook creativity from artiness, individual genius and idiosyncrasy, and to render it economically valuable, team-based, observable and learnable, make it difficult for those who teach in higher education to step around creativity?s challenge to traditional learning and teaching practice. The shifts in thinking move us away from the romance of the remote artist-in-a-garret genius who has no need of pedagogical engagement. We can now focus on ways of thinking and doing that are observable and replicable within daily economic and social life. Creativity has become less mystical. Once less mystical, it can be engaged with intentionally as the outcome of precise pedagogical work. All our graduates, as potential future creatives, will be performing work that is less focused on routine problem-solving and more focused on forging new social relationships, undertaking novel challenges and synthesising big-picture scenarios. They will be working at unprecedented speed in very different workplace cultures: less vertical, more flexible and more team-based. For these reasons, creativity cannot be left to languish on the margins of university learning and teaching, relegated to a disciplinary corner. It has become everyone?s business. ? Erica McWilliam of the Queensland University of Technology is leader of the Creative Workforce Program of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation. This article first appeared in the Australian. Photo: Irina Tischenko/iStockphoto.co