Dr Romain Chenet presents talk on "De-schooling uncreativity" in Higher Education

Our Associate Professor Dr Romain Chenet recently co-created creative approaches to teaching within Higher Education at ‘The Tangled Roots of Creative Research and Social Justice’ conference in Bristol.

The conference earlier this year invited speakers to collectively examine the theme “Exploring the Social, Critical and Theoretical Roots of Creative Research, and Disjuncture within Everyday Practice” and Romain’s talk on "De-schooling ‘uncreativity’ in Higher Education” explored what it meant to teach creatively inside academic systems that can often feel rigid, formal, and limiting of ‘creative-academic’ capacities.

Drawing from experiences as an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) faculty lead and GSD’s transdisciplinary environment, Romain advocated for more student empowerment, agency, and expressive freedom, and why we should encourage learners to choose and shape their own creative research methods rather than defaulting to constraining traditional assessment routes.

Romain, now a veteran teaching colleague in GSD, continues to champion alternative, liberatory approaches to assessment to reconsider the ways Higher Education can unintentionally isolate or disempower agency. In outlining a pedagogic stance which explored Freirean pedagogy, Ivan Illich’s deschooling for ‘conviviality’, and feminist approaches to lived experience as situated intersectional knowledge opportunities, Romain was encouraged by these ideas’ warm reception in the conference’s ‘artivist’ environment and remains committed to enabling spaces for more authentic, student‑driven forms of learning and achievement.

Dr Chenet’s attendance at the conference was funded by the School’s Professional Development Fund, which is awarded to academics to support personal career development and foster excellence in research.