Norman Jackson (2010)

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Prof. Norman Jackson

Thursday, June 10, 2010, Length: 38 Minutes 51 Seconds

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Prof. Norman Jackson
Centre for Excellence in Professional Training and Education, University of Surrey, England

TITLE
Developing Creativity through Life-Wide Education"

ABSTRACT
"The world needs people who can combine and integrate their knowledge, skills and capabilities in creative and adventurous ways to work with complexity, create wealth and prosperity and enrich enterprises, societies and cultures. The problem with higher education is that it pays far too little attention to students’ creative development. Often taken for granted and subsumed within the cognitive skills that are traditionally valued, creativity as an outcome of a higher education is usually more by accident then design. I believe that education that is dominated by the mastery of content and cognitive performance in abstract situations, while a necessary for the specialised critical thinking/problem solving capacities for a complex world – is not enough. To prepare students for the complexities of the world we need to pay much more attention to the development of students’ capability for dealing with real world situations: capability that includes their creativity. Our will to be creative usually stems from a deep intrinsic motivation inspired by the personal choices we are able to make in our life. We talk a lot about student-centred learning but if we respected the learner as the designer of their own life experience we would have more chance of embracing, supporting and recognising their capability to deal with real world situations and the creative acts embodied in such capability. My proposition is that we can move towards this situation by honouring students’ creative spirit and encouraging them to fulfil their creative potential for dealing with situations in the real world, by adopting and practising a life-wide concept of higher education."

This keynote talk was given by Prof. Norman Jackson, Centre for Excellence in Professional Training and Education, University of Surrey, England, at the 8th Annual Galway Symposium on Higher Education, 11th June 2010. The conference title was "Creative Thinking: "

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