Fostering Imagination in Higher Education

Disciplinary and Professional Practices

Joy Whitton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780367591045
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351612470
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Imagination and creative teaching approaches are increasingly important across all higher education disciplines, not just the arts. Investigating the role of imagination in teaching and learning in non-arts disciplines, this book argues that a lack of clarity about what imagination looks like in higher education impedes teachers in fostering their students' creativity.

Fostering Imagination in Higher Education tells four ethnographic stories from physics, history, finance and pharmaceutical science courses, analytically observing the strategies educators use to encourage their students' imagination, and detailing how students experience learning when it is focussed on engaging their imagination. The highly original study is framed by Ricoeur's work on different forms of imagination (reproductive and productive or generative). It links imaginative thinking to cognitive science and philosophy, in particular the work of Clark, Dennett and Polanyi, and to the mediating role of disciplinary concepts and social-cultural practices.

The author's discussion of models, graphs, strategies and artefacts as tools for taking learners' thinking forward has much to offer understandings of pedagogy in higher education. Students in these case studies learned to create themselves as knowledge producers and professionals. It positioned them to experience actively the constructed nature of the knowledge and processes they were learning to use – and the continuing potential of knowledge to be remade in the future. This is what makes imaginative thinking elemental to the goals of higher education.

1
Introduction

Here is a list of some pressing contemporary world issues: poverty, global warming, sustainable energy use, democratic participatory processes, antibiotic misuse, sustainable farming, armed conflict, city design and waste water engineering, learning and teaching in the age of the digital economy. Modern societies seek to educate their citizens to contribute to the solutions. This book focuses on what is meant by imagination and its role in university education that is outward looking, problem solving, and engaged with the world. I argue that imagination (and its close cousin, ‘creativity’) is an essential capacity for cultivating novel solutions. It therefore demands greater attention in higher education, but should not be the sole province of the creative arts. Democratisation of the fields for fostering creativity appears to be a fundamental condition for a sustainable future. Underpinning this book is the view that imagination is not only an aesthetic matter, but a way of thinking, and can be directed towards adapting to the local environment or adapting that environment. Its view of learning reflects a concern with in-person changes, which modify how we interpret our surroundings and, in turn, change them by our actions. It encompasses how we learn practices and ways of thinking that are new, not only how we acquire existing knowledge. This is important in university education, for imaginative learning allows students to learn the practices that lead to new knowledge.

There is an interesting paradox in today’s world. Industry commentators say that for a successful future, we need people who think creatively and implement new ideas for innovation in products, situations and contexts. In an innovation-driven world, creativity ‘might have been a luxury for the few, but by now a necessity for all’ (Csikszentmihalyi, 2006, p. xviii). It implies that today’s university graduates need more than technical skills and knowledge. Among other things they will require personal attributes that enable them to ‘persevere in the face of complexity and unresolvability’ (McWilliam & Haukka, 2008, p. 660). And yet there is evidence that our education systems are working against these shifts and systematically suppress creative thinking (Robinson, 1999, 2011; Harris, 2014; Noddings, 2013; Amabile, 2010; Stevens, 2003). According to the landmark Robinson Report (1999) in the UK, All our future: creativity, culture and education, the prevailing model of university education is knowledge acquisition and retention, which is inadequate if, as a modern society, we are to successfully meet future challenges by applying knowledge in innovative ways and constructing new ideas. In addition, societies are currently facing disruption in employment patterns, skill sets and recruitment patterns in a range of different industries. All of this means the future of employment is uncertain. We do not know in advance how artificial intelligence will affect certain current job domains, what skills will be retained and where lie the boundaries where human elements will be augmented by artificial intelligence. Also unknown are how national and international developments will affect future markets including employment markets (Mowbray & Halse, 2010). But many commentators argue that skills associated with creativity – the generation and evaluation of new ideas – will be among them (Cropley, 1992, 2009; Cropley & Cropley, 1998; Hajkowicz et al., 2016, p. 13).

The ubiquity of creativity and critical thinking in university graduate attributes in all disciplines and professional areas suggests their importance is recognised by institutions of higher education. And yet there is no evidence that higher education providers develop creativity through a set of coherent, systematic, course-wide strategies (McWilliam & Dawson, 2007, p. 4; Biggs & Tang, 2007). In the absence of undergraduate course-wide development, it falls to interested teachers to develop it in individual subjects/units they are responsible for. In a post-graduate context, the picture is not dissimilar. In an Australian 2007 Group of Eight¹ survey of PhD graduates 5 to 7 years out, covering employment outcomes, job attributes and quality of research training, completed by the University of Queensland Social Research Centre (Western et al., 2007), graduates rated their doctoral training in creativity and innovation as 3.74 but placed the importance of these capacities in their employment higher, as 4.06 (on a five-point scale where 1 was ‘Not at all’ and 5 was ‘To a great extent’)(Western, et al., 2007, p. 18).

The reasons for the lack of educational focus on creativity in non-arts-based disciplines and professions are unclear. Some have argued that many higher education researchers are highly trained in ways that have neglected to develop their own imagination and creative faculties (Trowler, 2013, p. 6). Imagination, the aspect of creativity central to the original research on which this book is based, can be regarded with suspicion by higher education educators because of its connotations of fantasy or ‘fancy’, subjectivity and daydreaming. Saul, for example, attributes the marginalisation of imagination to the influence of the Romantic period, which ennobled pure artists as rather unstable people (2001, pp. 128–129), but the view has been traced back much further, at least as far as Plato (Bleazby, 2013, p. 79; Egan, 1997, Chapter 1). In the history of Western thought, meaning has been identified with logical thinking, whereas human imaginative thought has been identified with fantasy, the irrational and the instinctual (Policastro & Gardner, 1999) – complete with its associations of danger – a point which has been documented by historians and philosophers (for example Dening, 2000, p. 45; Kearney, 1988; Warnock, 1976). A preference for the first goes without saying. For whatever reason, imagination is often construed as having a binary oppositional relationship to facts, evidence and rigour; there is a reality principle at stake. Asking higher educators to foster imaginative capacity may be interpreted by some as trivial or demonstrating a lack of comprehension of the verifiable or evidentiary base to knowledge, to hard-won acquisition of disciplinary skills and disciplined methods of inquiry (see Chapter 4 on this commonly made distinction) or the sheer hard work and persistence involved in discovery. Most academics focus on the knowledge base but neglect teaching how it might be put to work creatively. Creativity’s frequent absence in assessment is a case in point, reflecting its ambiguous position in relation to knowledge. Yet students clearly see the institution placing value on those things it assigns marks to; the assessment is the curriculum as far as the students are concerned (Ramsden, 1992; Boud, 2010). And if it is not assessed, the question arises: Why should students value it as something they need to develop? And how are they to understand the role of imagination in advancing knowledge?

Yet the advancement of knowledge through creative synthesis between ideas is the pinnacle of academic achievement. In doctoral research in all disciplines it is reflected in standards for evaluating ‘original contributions’ (Lovitts, 2007). In addition, higher educators are currently grappling with steep rises in student numbers and a more diverse student body at a time when the sector rewards research more than teaching and has diminished resources to spend on teaching quality and the changes required to provide optimal, personalised learning in large cohorts. For whatever reason, a lack of a deliberate, systematic course-wide strategy to develop students’ imagination and creativity in disciplines not usually considered creative persists (Cropley, Cropley, Kaufman, & Runco, 2010, p. 301; McWilliam, 2007, p. 4).

Creativity? Imagination? Same difference? – terminology

My research, which forms the core of this book, investigated how university teachers in non arts-based disciplines and professions foster the creativity of their students, with a particular focus on imagination as a fundamental aspect of creativity in higher education. So what is meant by ‘creativity’ and imagination in higher education? What distinguishes them? This book uses the term ‘creativity’ as the overarching term. An Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) working paper adopted a Five Dispositions Model of Creativity (Lucas, Claxton & Spencer, 2013, pp. 16–17), which included five dispositions or aspects:

1. Curiosity or inquisitiveness, challenging assumptions.
2. Persistence; grit.
3. Discipline (by which is meant devoting time to developing expertise or mastery in domain relevant skills).
4. Collaboration including the giving and receiving of feedback.
5. Imagination, which refers to making connections, playing with possibilities and using intuition.

Each of these dispositions or aspects reflect key themes in the psychological and educational literature on creativity (for example, Sternberg & Lubart, 1999; Csikszentmihalyi, 1999; Craft, Jeffrey & Liebling, 2001).

Taking these five dispositions further, a fruitful metaphor to understand what imagination is, and its role in creativity, is the thumb’s function in the hand. If the creativity of the ‘hand’ can be composed of five main aspects, or ‘fingers’, imagination can be considered the thumb, the opposable digit with the power to unlock the potential of the others. In fact, this analogy works from a number of viewpoints. It carries with it the importance of wholes – of the importance of the thumb for the facile functioning of a hand. In an analogous way, imagination is crucial to ‘grasping’ an insightful new connection, some newly perceived relationship or similarity, some new idea or purpose. The connections referred to are not random or pastiches. These new connections made possible by the imagination offer the foresight to see beyond ‘what is’ to ‘what could be’. But imagination needs to work in tandem with a seeking curious impulse, with persistence, confidence to take risks, and to be informed by a deep familiarity with, and skill in, one or more fields – the other four elements that make up the full hand of creativity. The hand metaphor also nicely carries connotations of my contention that imagination is opportunistic in its use of available tools in the environment – whether language, things, technologies or social networks, the body itself – to structure this grasping. In this way it plays a fundamental role in cognition and learning. The post-Cartesian framework of the embodied and ‘extended mind’ thesis (Clark, 1997, 2011; Jeffares, 2010) contends that the body, language and the opportunistic use of things in the environment all play a role in cognition itself. As well, a creative disposition implies a proclivity to use these tools, a shift in priorities, not just competence or possession of the skill (Claxton, Edwards & Scale-Constantinou, 2006).

Even though I focus on imagination, too often higher educators and others use the terms ‘creativity’, ‘imagination’ and ‘innovation’ interchangeably. The effect of this is that imagination’s specific teachable aspects remain inadequately described, something my research presented in this book seeks to address. But the way the terms are used interchangeably mean...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of exemplars
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Theoretical framework on imagination
• 3 Theoretical linking of imagination with cognition and learning theory
• 4 Defining and practising creativity
• 5 Honours quantum physics ethnography
• 6 First year medieval history ethnography
• 7 Finance ethnography
• 8 Pharmaceutical science ethnography
• 9 Conclusion
• Index