Developing Student's Creativity in Higher Education

Since its conceptualisation, creativity has had a special place in education, and some argue that education should be primarily concerned with developing creativity and individuality to ensure graduates’ self-actualisation and success in life. More broadly, there is consensus among educators that creativity is essential to adaptation in a constantly changing work environment, as it enables an individual to imagine, synthesise, connect, invent, and explore. Creativity is particularly important nowadays as the economic environment is shifting “from knowledge-based economies to creative, innovative, and entrepreneurial-based economies”. For this reason, the Higher Education sector feels pressure to produce a workforce capable of contributing to this new innovation-based economy. University of the Arts London (UAL), in their strategy (UAL, 2023), prioritised the teaching of creativity, and the emphasis on creativity is essential in the fashion discipline as it can enhance fashion sustainability.

This talk has two parts. In the first part, Dr Jekaterina Rogaten will explain what we mean when we talk about creativity and how to design and test teaching to enhance students’ creativity. In the second part of the talk, Gintare Jankuniene (PhD candidate) will present the research she is doing for her PhD. She will introduce the concept of zero waste (ZW) and minimal waste (MW) pattern cutting approaches, how the teaching materials for teaching these skills are developed, how they will be taught to enhance students’ creative thinking and how the effectiveness of these approaches will be evaluated to determine their usefulness for teaching creative thinking.