One of the aims of the Creative Interventions project is to consider whether the pedagogies used in creative arts education can be incorporated into the teaching and learning strategies of other disciplines.

Creative Academy is a creative intervention intended to transfer the pedagogies used in design education and the commercial world of design to the design world of higher education teachers and ultimately to the experiences of their students. These pedagogies are used to promote a way of thinking (design thinking) usually deployed with groups and teams in order to encourage and facilitate new and novel ways of thinking about a problem or opportunity. Higher education teachers are designers of educational experiences and there is value in transferring these practices to the design of teaching and learning.

For teachers and others who facilitate students' learning 'design thinking' can be used to aid problem solving in many disciplinary, multi-disciplinary or trans-disciplinary contexts. By introducing students to these techniques we are enhancing their ability to work with complex problems and helping them to prepare for a world that requires people to utilise their creative as well as their analytical abilities.

The case study is in the form of a text-based Guide with video clips of the techniques described. These can be found on a dedicated Creative Academy wiki

Please download the facilitator guide to the Creative Academy to learn more: Creative Academy Facilitator Guide.pdf

Although case study focuses on staff and curriculum development it echoes the idea of creative transfer that we are exploring with the students, where what we are looking at is how the creative attributes and knowledge that students are developing on their creative arts courses transfers over to work situations outside the university walls. We will return to this notion of creative transfer across discipline and into other domains of knowledge in other case studies.   

The Creative Academy case study was provided by Norman Jackson and Fred Buining from SCEPTrE at Surrey University.

The above text is taken from page 1 of the Creative Academy Facilitator Guide.