The Importance of Creativity

Juliet is a teaching-focused academic who teaches on a range of programmes. As well as working in her home department Education Studies - University of WarwickJuliet greatly enjoys her teaching collaborations with the Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning (IATL).

Juliet's research interests lie in Higher Education Pedagogy; Creativity and Cultural Policy; Children's Literature; Interdisciplinarity; Discourses of Employability, Resilience & Placement-Based Learning in HEIs. In Spring 2026 joined an IATL Pedagogic Reading Club to lead a discussion on creativity. Keen to understand more about the importance of creativity for any discipline Grace Fisher, Editor spoke to Juliet.

What inspired you to run a pedagogic reading club session with us, and what drew you specifically to creativity in higher education as your focus?

Universities, globally, are going through a period of flux (Davidson, 2017; Mulholland & Turner, 2019; Zhu & Yang, 2025). Pedagogies across disciplines are being reviewed, revamped, rebranded to meet the market pressures of the highly competitive global HE marketplace. As course cohorts become more internationalised and students become more diverse in their expectations of universities, it is inevitable that tried and tested curriculums of yesteryear demand to be updated to meet the needs of increasingly digitised, globalised and competitive labour markets.

Having a degree, evidence would suggest, does not carry the same clout when applying for a graduate job as it once did (Okahana & Hao, 2019; Jackson, 2021; Ohmann & Shor, 2024). Having an enquiring mind, being flexible, resilient, being able to have original and independent ideas, being unphased by economic uncertainty, able to problem-solve, think laterally, be imaginative, work in diverse teams and be well-networked– attributes and characteristics many see as central to being creative and employable (Vincent-Lancrin, 2019; McIntyre et al., 2018 ) - are often stressed on marketing materials for university courses as attributes, firstly, that it is desirable for university students to cultivate and secondly, as being attributes that individual university courses can help students develop. But how is this achieved pedagogically? How, from a practical and applied perspective, can a university course support students to develop these types of ‘work-ready’ attributes, that employers are reported to desire so much (Vincent-Lancrin, 2019; Hong & Ma, 2022)? Indeed, to what extend should university education focus on work-ready attributes as opposed to the development of academic knowledge and skill?

Within the literature an increasingly polarised and heated tussle can be identified between the opposing camps of ‘university is for academic endeavour’ and ‘universities need to serve economic demands’ (Haski-Leventhal, 2020; Post, 2023; Patel, 2026). Enthusiasm to debate these topics further with reference to the concepts of creativity and employability is what excited me about attending the pedagogic reading club. With my background in championing and applying creativity in education, I wanted to explore with the group what they saw as the benefits of embedding creativity within HE pedagogy and what relationship they identified, if any, between ‘increasing one’s ability to be creative’ and ‘increasing one’s employability’.

During the session, you selected the chapter ‘Setting the Scene’ from McIntyre et al. (2018). What about this text felt significant or discussion-worthy for students engaging with pedagogy and academic practice?

The chapter helpfully outlines some of the pressures graduates are under today – academically and economically. Arguably students today are more aware than ever that surrounding their study at university is an economic imperative to not just achieve high grades, but also to emerge from their course with things like an array of quality work-based experience, established connections to professional networks, and a digital footprint that reads with ease to prospective employers (McIntyre et al., 2018; McManus & Rook, 2021). I’m interested in recent academic work by those such as Rivers and Webster (2019) and Hooley (2022) who argue university educators are at best being naïve, but at worse irresponsible and negligent, where they do not acknowledge how certain types of economic and employment pressure impacts students’ wellbeing and intrinsic motivation to study. The McIntyre et al’., (2018) book provides an interesting case study that explores how a community of university educators chose to face some of these responsibilities through a major curriculum overhaul of their Media Design course. Individual chapters analyse how this team of educators overhauled their curriculum content; their assessment processes and the ways they understood student employability to develop a more robust pedagogy suited to helping students (and staff) navigate the uncertainties within this specific educational and employment context. Arguably, this case study constitutes a highly specific scenario but one that I think can be used as a productive example for considering other types of university course.

I think the chapter raises an important question about whether the concepts of creativity and employability can be aligned as two complimentary concepts within university pedagogy, rather than being perceived as somehow oppositional and/or unrelated to each other. In the chapter this idea is posited largely through detailed analysis of Csikszentmihalyi’s (2014) work on ‘the systems model’ of creativity and the idea that ‘to be creative’ is to be systematic in your approach; to be able to communicate your ideas successfully within complex socio-cultural contexts; and to be able to get your creative ideas ready to test within contrasting ‘economies’, (be that knowledge economies, digital economies, aesthetic economies, financial economies etc). To be ready for the testing stage of creativity the authors argue students need to have developed skills connected to being able to research contrasting economies as well as researching specific units of knowledge and skill valued within specific economies. At the session I was interested to debate with colleagues how these pedagogical ideas related to how they approached ‘being creative’ in their teaching and learning.

Creativity was a central theme in the reading. How do you personally define creativity within a teaching and learning context, and how does that compare with the chapter’s definition?

Of course, this question must be answered!

My favourite definition of creativity, and the one I most often apply within my pedagogy, is from the National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education (NACCCE) Report (1999, p.1) which defines creativity as:

‘Imaginative activity fashioned so as to produce outcomes that are original and of value’

For context, this advisory committee was chaired by Ken Robinson, and established at the behest of The Rt.Hon. Tony Blair, Prime Minister, upon New Labour coming to power in the UK in 1997. In the McIntyre et al., (2018) chapter Ken Robinson (Robinson, 2011; Robinson and Aronica, 2016) is referenced many times and his ideas on creativity are analysed and applied within the chapter’s arguments extensively. Similarly to the authors of the chapter, I would describe myself as someone who aligns with Robinson’s assessment of what creativity is.

However, alongside Robinson, in my work I, like the authors of the chapter, also credit the work of Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (2014), whose ideas Robinson has clearly been influenced by. Csikszentmihalyi central argument is that creativity in any given society does not operate in a vacuum. To have your creativity validated and acknowledged you must pass through a ‘system’ of gatekeepers, laws and regulatory practice, and often implicit as opposed to explicit, social values and cultural expectations. This will include being tested and evaluated against certain prejudices and biases that those being creative may not necessarily be comfortable with or which they may find clash with socio-cultural values and perspectives that underly and drive their creative work. Thus, Csikszenmihalyi’s work exposes how complex being creative is within contrasting socio-cultural contexts. Csikszentmihalyi’s work helps clarify that whilst there may be credibility to the idea that ‘being creative is an innate human characteristic’ and that to develop language and social skills the developing child naturally engages in imaginative wordplay and lateral thinking (Vygotsky, 1994; Craft, 2002 & 2005). However, ‘innate creativity’ that is not systematically approached will not suffice to produce the types of outputs that have long lasting or large-scale value and impact in society. To achieve recognition for their creativity, individuals, groups, and organisations must develop an awareness of both the socio-cultural roots of their motivation to be creative, alongside a fine-tuned awareness of the dominant cultural, political, and economic ‘systems’ in which their creative practice is situated. University-level education, I believe, should be a perfect environment for this type of higher-level analysis, critique and practical application.

Our discussion explored creativity in relation to employability and assessment. What are your thoughts on creativity as a skill within higher education — can it be meaningfully taught or assessed?

Can creativity be taught? Well, I think I hint at my answer to this in my answer above. I believe it can be taught. However, at university level I think what needs to be included within creativity-led pedagogy needs to be thought-through very carefully.

Here I need to return to the NACCCE definition of creativity:

‘Imaginative activity fashioned so as to produce outcomes that are original and of value’. (N.A.C.C.C.E, 1999, p.1)

I use this definition explicitly in my teaching. I take time in class to share it with students and encourage them to analyse it in reference to their own experience of being creative and having their creative ideas and outputs recognised. I ask them to reflect upon:

When have you experienced an original idea or product of yours being taken seriously by other people?

I stress to them that we don’t have to think about this in ‘Big Creativity’ terms, we can think of it in ‘small creativity’ terms (Crafts, 2002; 2005) and include things from our lives where we have integrated relatively small or seemingly insignificant ideas into daily practice, where others have praised what we have done as being original or of value. Everyday things, for example, like making small changes to how we make a lasagne; or changing our walking route to work to be more efficient; or making our friend a birthday card rather than buying one.

In my pedagogy, and particularly when I am designing assessment processes and criteria, I break the NACCCE definition into the following 4 steps.

Step 1: Demonstrate you can use your imagination. Demonstrate you can imagine something that did not exist previously that you would like to argue should exist.

I think each step is equally important when teaching modules designed to enhance student creativity, but I would argue step 4 is particularly important in a university context. Being able to gather and work with feedback is an essential part of being an accomplished academic as well as being a successful, employable, creative person. Thus, I will often request in assessments that students design their own original approaches to gathering feedback and request they make it explicit within their assessments how they worked with feedback and what sorts of reflective practice, redesign, and new experimentation their interpretation of feedback led to.

I am conscious that within the HE pedagogy marketplace creativity as a concept comes in and out of fashion (Kalin, 2018; Brown et al.; 2024) and is often replaced or usurped by terms like ‘Design Thinking’ (Kelestyn and Humphreys, 2025) and Problem-based Learning (Chang et al., 2022). I appreciate and embrace many aspects of these other learning approaches as their pedagogical values clearly have much in common with the NACCCE definition. I know criticisms are levelled at the NACCCE definition such as it is too vague (Banaji, 2006; Hesmondhalgh, 2015) or that it is difficult to translate into an educational context (Feng et al., 2025; Maor, et al. 2025). I can appreciate these criticisms. However, I think something vital and fundamental to learning is lost when words such as creativity and imagination are banished to the peripheries of the learning experience and, thus, I am always drawn back to the emphasis in this definition on ‘applied imagination’ and ‘fashioning’ your ideas purposefully.

Finally, I’d like to acknowledge the McIntyre et al., (2018) chapter’s analysis of W.I. Thomas (Thomas, 1967, cited by Mcintyre et al, 2018) and their argument that how learners are encultured to understand creativity as they grow up and learn has a direct influence on the types of creativity they feel they can engage in, and with. as they age. I work with so many students who tell me they are not creative or they suggest that creativity concerns a set of behaviours and attributes they associate with other subject domains other than theirs. I agree with Thomas (1967), and others such as Robinson, 2013, and Kidd, 2020, that this is an issue exacerbated through educational cultures that prioritise high-stakes testing and traditional pedagogical models which minimise student-voice, imagination, and active participation within learning. In my teaching I have witnessed the ways students’ attitudes to being creative can evolve once they start working through the four steps I outline above. Our task as university educators is often to reverse the damage done to students’ creative self-efficacy by their previous educational establishments and reintroduce students to their creative potential.

Why do you feel activities like reading clubs are important for developing critical thinking and academic community among students? And how might we encourage more staff and students to engage in pedagogic discussions like this?

Research consistently reports that many of the students coming to university today have been through high stakes testing learning cultures that have involved students studying restricted curriculums and types of pedagogy where they have tiringly been ‘taught for the test’ (Ball, 2017; Jerrim, 2023). Webster and Rivers (2019) argue that commonly in the UK, undergraduate students arrive at university intellectually frazzled and exhausted by the prospect of having to engage with new sets of learning expectations and practices. This in turn puts pressure on staff to design classroom pedagogies and student experience programmes that build trust and challenge student mindsets beset with perfectionism and fear of failure (Fuente, et al. 2020). This is where activities like reading clubs, learning circles, and what Lave and Wenger (1991) would define as communities of practice become important components of effective university pedagogy. They communicate that university is a place where community, dialogue, and learning from each other is valued.

Burnout amongst students and staff, the research suggests (Rahman, 2024; Turner and Garvis, 2023), is real and is challenging the foundations of our university cultures every day. Thus, how we build community and collegiality into our pedagogy at university is for me not a side issue to teaching and learning but an aspect of Higher Education that needs to be taken very seriously. Thus, I believe things like reading clubs and academic projects that build a sense of belonging, co-production, and shared identity into their processes need to be at the heart of pedagogy and educational strategy across the university.

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