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

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) Phenomenography (Disembodied phenomenology)

Common research-informed foci Quality 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 Small_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….