Higher Education Pedagogy: Learning from the creative practices literature (An antidote to teaching excellence metrics) Prof Vicky Gunn.

Higher Education Pedagogy: Learning from the creative

practices literature

(An antidote to teaching excellence metrics)

Prof Vicky Gunn

Production line:Not a good metaphor for

learning

http://www.lucentvisions.com/gallery/images/Idea%20Machine.jpg

What are your pedagogy research passions?

How do we foster deep

learning in our disciplines?

Role of technologies?

Resilience in

/through diversity?

Collaborative learning in & beyond the university

Reflective praxis?

The Question behind our teaching passions

How do we improve student learning?

Where we’ve tended to look for answers to the question

• Cognitive psychology

• Sociology

Phenomenography (Disembodied

phenomenology)

Common research-informed fociQuality of

interaction with peers and staff

Ability to adapt, translate, transform

knowledge from one context to

another

Intellectual development and

information processing

Self-efficacy and resilience

Orientation to study and learning approaches

Dominant ‘proxy’ for pedagogic effectiveness

Using teaching methods which support

sufficiency of understanding in the

disciplinary context to cultivate

simultaneously:

• immediate subject area predetermined outcomes

• career-wide approaches to learning

Dominant judgement of best ‘way of thinking’ at disciplinary level

Creativity

and originality

within the

parameters of

the given

discipline

Sociological expression of disciplinary originality

Emergence of innovation in disciplines

dependent on three elements:

• A culture that contains symbolic rules

• A person who brings novelty to the

symbolic domain

• A field of experts who recognize and

validate the innovation

Csikszentmihalyi, 1997, p.6

Disciplinary creativity and originality

• Materialization of people’s passions as

excitatory charge of disciplines

• The social commodity of what

academics do

• Anticipatory temptation for some of our

students

Three threads

• There’s more to teaching than is currently supplied by our research on it

• Disciplinary creativity and originality can be a focus of teaching

• Increasingly unbalanced weight given to particular types of thinking over doing & making in undergraduate programmes

Different conceptualisations of originality and creativity in the

disciplines

Artist

Designer

Maker

Maker / Artist

“Innovation requires thinking and doing at the same

time about things we haven’t imagined yet.”

Sharma, 2013, p. 242

Activity in the space of the unthought, the ‘not

theory’ (Borgdorff, 2012);

Ludic experimentalism & singularity

Designer

“Creativity might be better understood as a

process and a feeling.” Gauntlett, 2011, p. 7

“The design process thus can be viewed as a

creative means for designing a new reality.”

….with the outcome being both novel and

appropriately useful Chang et al, 2015, p. 372

NB Creativity in Art & Design not the same within or across

these areas

Foresight of a maker – “lies not in the

cogitation that literally comes before

sight but in the very activity of seeing

forward, not in preconception but in

anticipation”

Ingold, 2013, p. 69; Sennett, 2008, p. 175

And my point?

Each of these conceptualizations is made active through teaching

regimes in Art Schools

And students materialize meaning-making in these regimes

Dimensions & realms of learning via Studio

Realms:

Reasoning(logic)

Sensing(aesthetics &

affect)

Playing& connecting

(method)

Reasoning

http://www.creativitypost.com/images/made/images/uploads/science/iStock_000019723630Small_610_300_s_c1_center_center.jpg

Genesis of Creativity as part of a ‘method’ in Art & Design?

Pre-discursive Practices(Borgdorff, 2012)

Abductive‘speculative pragmatism’(Manning & Massum, 2014; Sharma, 2013)

Inductive

Deductive

So what?

• Pre-configured

• Configuring

• Configured expression of physical, material, ideas as well as evaluation within a cultural context

How much of our teaching supports student engagement with these?

Feeling like this yet?

Problem of Constructive Alignment and

Phenomenography• Both start at inductive part of the method

• Focus student learning on identifying appropriate salience almost exclusively (Entwistle, 2005, p. 4)

• Doesn’t tell us about what fosters creativity either in disciplinary terms or Art & Design terms

Sensing, Aesthetics & Affect

Missing in the HE literature on teaching:

• What leans us towards or away from objects of study? How does this relate to what we discern and feel and, from them, teach?

• How does this change the way we making sense of our students’ learning?

• How do the spaces, objects, and immaterial in which our teaching occurs influence how we teach?

Playing, experimenting, connecting

• Genesis point of originality in the disciplines

• Embodied as well as cerebral

• Encourages links of the

seemingly irrelevant to the

topics of the discipline

Implications for curriculum: Our brief

• Curriculum Mapping for reasoning, aesthetics, & playful experimentation

• Creating progressive, assessable opportunities for pre-discursive & abductive reasoning

• Disorienting student expectations by disrupting typical teaching approaches

• Encouraging meaning-making as revelation through making

Why bother?• Fuelling originality in the disciplines

• Revitalizing disciplinary content and methods

• Challenging students’ intellectual instrumentalism

• Supporting development of creative agency

• Fighting back against metricization of teaching excellence….