Teaching Creativity: Developing Creativity as a Core Metacogntitive Skill for Undergraduate Students – The Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools

The concept of Creativity is complicated by competing theories and definitions. This complexity can cause problems when trying to develop creative outcomes for undergraduate students. The extent to which Creativity is a skill or a personal attribute, its context dependence and relationship to other disciplines must be understood and reconciled to create effective learning environments to support it. This paper proposes a model for teaching Creativity that embraces this complexity by exploring it through the lens of Metacognition. It is proposed that skills and knowledge can be developed through a reflective process of planning, monitoring and evaluation. Evidence for this approach is provided through example of an undergraduate core unit in Creativity taught at an Australian university.

About the author

Mark McMahon is an Associate Professor at Edith Cowan University and Director of Teaching and Learning in ECU’s School of Communications and Arts. His qualifications include PhD, Master, Diploma and Honours degrees in literature, education and learning technology. Mark’s Doctor of Philosophy studies were in the area of promoting metacognitive processing through on-line learning tools and he has been actively researching and publishing in the areas of e-learning since 1997, most recently exploring design-based research in Serious Games. Mark also coordinates ECU’s Game Design and Culture course and Master of Innovative Technology. Before taking up his position with Edith Cowan University, Mark was the senior instructional designer for West-One, Western Australia’s institution for the development of technology based learning resources for vocational educational and training and he still consults to industry, being a mentor, and more recently lead mentor in the Flexible Learning Toolbox project – a national multimillion dollar initiative developing best practice e-Learning for Australia’s Vocational Education and Training Sector.