Post on 28-Dec-2015
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?
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
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?
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
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