The OSL project's final dissemination conference was held on 27 June 2011.

This one-day conference, open to academic staff, administrators and postgraduate students, addressed the challenges of embedding creativity into teaching and learning in the HE sector across the disciplines. In a changing economic landscape universities must provide students with the space and means to act on and in the world in new and significant ways, to think beyond the known and predictable, to initiate new ideas and ways of knowing and making, to draw together knowledge and practices form across disciplines, in short the skills for self-fashioning needed in the real world.

The conference brought together some of the UK’s key thinkers about creativity in education:

• Ron Barnett, Institute of Education, University of London, author of Being a University (2011)
• Jonathan Bate, University of Warwick, Founder-Director of the CAPITAL Centre and, most recently, editor of The Public Value of the Humanities (2011)
• Jonothan Neelands, University of Warwick, Professor of Creative Education at Warwick Business School and Chair of Drama and Theatre Education.
• Rob Pope, Oxford Brookes University, author of Creativity: Theory, History, Practice

The  programme included workshops, case studies and panel discussions to showcase the contribution to the debate of Warwick’s Open-space Learning in Real World Contexts project. An article on the conference is featured on Warwick's Knowledge Centre.

 

The Ecology of a Whole Campus Approach to Creativiity: plenary panel (l to r) Professor Rob Pope (Oxford Brookes University), Profesor Jonothan Neelands (University of Warwick), Professor Jonathan Bate (University of Warwick), Professor Ron Barnett (Institute of Education, London).

 

Dr Nicholas Monk, The 'Trans' Space

 

Jonathan Heron, The Evolving Ensemble: Transforming Student Learning

 

Dr Barry Sheils, Evidence of Growth: The Impact of Open-space Learning in Real World Contexts

 

Robert O'Toole, Designing OSL Technology for a Creative Ecology