A practice-based approach to developing creativity in higher education

There is increasing demand for professional level creativity. In order to facilitate such professionally orientated creativity development through tertiary education we suggest that students need learning experiences different from those conventionally provided in Higher Education degree programmes today. This paper reports on an ongoing project which aims to introduce professionally orientated creativity development in the undergraduate planning degree course at Cardiff University’s School of City and Regional Planning. The project represents a response to calls for education providers to equip planning graduates with creative problem solving and visioning abilities. Considering the professional profile of planners, creativity development focuses specifically on ‘Creative Leadership’ and ‘Creative Urban Planning Intelligence’. The authors’ efforts and experiences of introducing creativity development led to the creation of a forward looking curriculum model that combines old and new pedagogies and content. Progress toward implementing this model in Cardiff is traced and critically evaluated by sharing lessons from the first three years of experimentation, discussing different variations of intervention and their effects. Introducing changes in established programmes and curricula is difficult. Our experience demonstrates that the (nonconformist) collaboration between a lecturer and an expert creativity consultant employed in this project has been useful and stimulating in facilitating such changes