Creativity or Conformity? Building Cultures of Creativity in Higher Education

January 8-10 2007

We all agree that students learn best when they are strongly motivated. Most of us agree, too, that motivation is best stimulated in an environment which is open and flexible, which encourages innovation, which is, in a word, creative. And yet many of us find that such an environment is increasingly difficult to maintain. In an audit-driven culture, with its emphasis on targets, room for exploration constantly contracts. The demands of assessment (Sternberg's ‘tyranny of testing'), increasing student numbers, the RAE and a growing administrative burden only exacerbate these problems.

The conference will focus on how these tensions affect higher education: its organisational cultures and its teaching and learning practices alike. Through sharing experience, it will discover practical methods of promoting creative learning in the face of increasingly stringent economic, legislative, and pedagogic constraints. And, more strategically, it will help us develop ways of influencing policy in this area.

Papers and abstracts from the conference are available to down load from the conference website.