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ARTS EDUCATION POLICY REVIEW, 111: 59–62, 2010
Copyright C○ Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1063-2913
DOI: 10.1080/10632910903455884
Teaching Creativity in Higher Education
Larry Livingston
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA
Individual creativity is ubiquitous. New technologies both enable and urge fresh approaches
to creativity in the context of education. University-level education offers a natural place to
adjust pedagogical structures in favor of a more individual approach to learning that organizes
the intellectual community into new patters of interaction and time allocation. This direction is
made possible by the vast improvements in access to information, data, knowledge, and opinion.
College students live in this world of access, in an ever-expanding sea of material. Networking
second-by-second is central to their zeitgeist. The result is far more than social. Interaction
and collaboration are now important in most workplaces, and are expected to be even more
important in the future. Higher education needs to use its natural resources in ways that develop
content knowledge and skills in a culture infused at new levels by investigation, cooperation,
connection, integration, and synthesis. Creativity is necessary to accomplish this goal. When
central and culturally pervasive, creativity becomes exemplified and enhanced for every student.
Problem solving becomes the driving pedagogy. Problem solving is a technique that can be
advanced through practice, but practice takes time. Universities must meet the challenge of
reapportioning time if suggested changes are to occur. These matters are important to P–12
arts education, because colleges prepare teachers and citizens who then provide leadership.
Possibilities abound for changing paradigms that now hold arts education back in many policy
situations. It is important to take advantage of opportunities inherent in the coincidence of
present conditions, youthful energy, technological capabilities, and interest in creativity.
Keywords: creativity, curriculum, higher education, student learning, technological culture
Human beings are inherently creative. We confront and deal
with issues large and small through our capacity to produce
and invent as a means of negotiating life. A carpenter designs
a window frame of irregular shape and brings into existence
something heretofore unseen. A chef comes up with a recipe
for peach flambé and generates a work of culinary art. A
football player runs a passing route but suddenly diverges
to catch a touchdown pass, and, in the process, performs an
unplanned act of striking originality. As a result, creativity is
neither foreign nor new to our students. They come to school
with a life history of creativity, whether it is manifested in the
use of the Internet, various extracurricular pursuits, or even,
occasionally, the classroom. Hence, we need not fret over
how to encourage creative behavior in our schools. However,
we do have an obligation to explore the means by which
we may anchor creativity in the mission of our educational
institutions.
Correspondence should be sent to Larry Livingston, University of Southern
California, 2438 North Altadena Drive, Altadena, CA 91001, USA.
E-mail: llivings@usc.edu
To establish a new experiential paradigm centered on cultivating
creativity requires nothing less than an institutional
intervention. As long as we cleave only to traditional pedagogies
and courses of study that leave little or no room for
new experiences, we will not find the time or space necessary
for nurturing the act of creativity.
How can we find or make room for creativity? One solution
may lie in turning the technological expertise of our
students into a greater asset. We start by fully accepting a
fact. Operating with almost organic technological facility,
our students traverse the ether like Evelyn Woods–trained
virtuosos of old foraging in a library. Although the label
might seem stiff to them, college freshmen are highly proficient
“researchers” at heart, chasing down books, friends,
ideas, facts, clothes, experiences, and music—and the list is
much longer—on a global scale, instantaneously connected,
rarely lingering more than a few seconds on any Web site.
Across this increasingly more powerful modality of behavior,
creative thinking, being, and doing are constants. In fact,
it is the play of creative interaction, dialogue, inquisition, and
imagination all firing concurrently, that feeds the young. It is

60 LIVINGSTON
what we might have wished for long ago if we had only been
prescient enough to see it in the offing. We must find ways of
integrating the use of the Internet not only into the mission
statement, but into the curriculum itself.
Second, we must be willing to honor and live up to the
priority of the university as an institution about learning,
not teaching. Historical assumptions that these two actions
automatically articulate are more than ever in need of review.
If indeed, learning is the goal, we need to rethink the role of
pedagogical constructs, such as the classroom lecture, that
have long stood as absolutes in the university catechism.
Although lectures can be provocative and highly personal,
the format itself presumes that requiring students to sit in a
lecture hall and parallel-process information meted out by a
“sage on the stage” is a powerful didactic strategy. In fact,
much of what is presented in the typical university lecture
can be easily acquired on the Internet.
Imagine Philosophy 101 in an alternative paradigm. The
professor gives two lectures at the beginning of the semester
covering the major points and concepts to be comprehended,
and then, fully supported by a digital syllabus, office hours for
individual help, and the Web itself, simply gives midterm and
final exams based on the course content. In this arrangement,
the student is given the responsibility to do the work, but on a
schedule of his own making. Those students who wish for or
need more personal help can find it by accessing the professor
in private tutorials. Meanwhile, the professor and students
are now released from the constraints of a lecture-oriented
class-meeting schedule to interact in small group settings and
creatively explore the applied and social viability aspects of
Philosophy 101.
We have always learned from each other. As universities
have evolved over centuries, they have become environments
in which credit is given for enrolling in classes, with
the community of students and faculty presumed to be value
added. At its nucleus, the academy has a pedagogy that entails
a highly organized means for conveying information,
ideas, and concepts. However useful traditional pedagogy
has been in the service of human enlightenment, the goal of
a school cannot simply be the dissemination, but rather, must
be the absorption, of information. In recent years, the cost
of higher education has soared, running well past the annual
consumer price index. Concurrently, the job market is fraught
with rapid change and the evanescence of stable ongoing positions.
Now, only in the credential-dependent professions,
such as medicine or law, may a college diploma be a reliable
asset. This circumstance begs the question, “Why go to
college?”
The answer may be found in the university’s greatest asset:
human capital. Because the Web acts as an Archimedes
spiral of content, information expanding outward from each
site and link in the vast realms of the digital domain, virtually
everything can be studied at home by a student who is
motivated, enterprising, and technologically facile. What is
not easily available at home is a community of individuals,
teachers and students alike, who provide opportunities for
sparking and enlarging one’s creative processes. Each human
being has a unique way of looking at the universe. As well,
each has a distinctive imagination, the seedbed from which
true originality grows. If the academy wishes to center its
mission on honing creativity, it can best do so by pedagogies
that maximize opportunities for students to practice being
inventive. Although it is a normal form of human behavior,
creativity is also a technique, a skill that can be developed
and refined over time.
The classroom lecture format is, by nature, not a natural
laboratory for interaction and collaboration. Making the curriculum
about interpersonal exchange opens the experience
for every student to express, share, and test his or her creative
instincts. Exchange turns the historical paradigm around and
makes the presence of other students and faculty the core
attribute of the curriculum and the scheduled classes value
added.
In Daniel Pink’s seminal book, A Whole New Mind, he
makes the point that in the twenty-first-century workplace,
collaborative thinking and interacting will be increasingly
core. Although jobs will change, diverge, and morph, employers
are more and more going to seek workers who
are adept at teamwork and capable of contributing original
thought to group assignments and tasks. As the university’s
purpose lies beyond mere career preparation, it is also incumbent
on the academy to validate the college diploma as
relevant to the future of its graduates. Therefore, the curricula
must be intentionally formed around courses, projects, and
seminars in which both collaboration and creativity work in
consort.
Through such normalized routines as social networking,
text messaging, playing interactive games on the Internet,
partying, or simply enjoying each other’s company, young
people coact as a matter of course. The road to collaborationbased
curricula and programs has been paved by the students
themselves. They have presented us with a gift that we need
only unwrap.
Young people show up at our doorsteps as informational
omnivores, which the digital domain both prompts and cultivates.
If we are to challenge and stretch students’ creative
capacities, we need to enthusiastically celebrate the reality
that each of them has long been a habitué in a multidiscipline
world. It is the university that has clung to discipline-specific
study and has only recently been attracted to interdisciplinary
concepts as meriting inclusion in the academy. The reason
our students are technological omnivores is because they
can be. The Internet does not parse information by “siloed”
characteristics, but is instead an open-ended system that the
navigator organizes based on his or her predilections. Our students
investigate all manner of diverse topics without being
trapped by discipline-based limitations. They do so because
no one has told them otherwise.
The university has been invited by every entering class
to build experiences that flow gracefully into the stream of

learning behaviors by which students have grown up. The
multidiscipline river is ours to use as we wish, to swim and
wade in rather than dam up or portage around. By what
means could this task be best accomplished? By carving
out time in the curriculum to work in collaborative, smallgroup
formats, addressing issues both relevant and timely.
By seeking creative solutions to problems that cut across a
battery of subjects or disciplines. By using human capital as
a credit-bearing framework for shared quests. By providing
time and space for students to mentor each other. By letting go
of the need to replicate old pedagogical models as educational
anchors and instead crafting new formats that tether students
to each other and to joint enterprises that can only be realized
through cooperation. By importing into the daily business of
the university the all-night informal dialogues, sometimes
known as “bull sessions,” which have been for decades the
sine qua non of dormitory life.
Our graduates face a world of ever more perplexing
change. The stable days are gone, perhaps forever. The crux
of creative behavior is all about change, or at least changing
something. If we can transform our educational institutions
to make change part of every topic we study rather than the
daunting future we face, creativity becomes our most powerful
tool. Inventive people relish challenges, surprises, and
even impediments. I remember the parting comments of Norman
Hackerman when he retired from his role as President of
Rice University. Citing the many things he would rue losing,
Hackerman said, “I will miss most the problems, for it is the
problems which inspire our best selves, our most rewarding
days, our most creative acts.”
Practicing problem solving as a team game should be part
of every student’s experience. The problems can be specific
or general, big or small. The question is how to develop
facility in responding to problems. This, like any technique,
can be practiced. Tackling a problem by oneself is useful
and can help build skill. Practicing problem solving as a
group initiative, however, opens doors to new approaches
and devices for coping. The university is a perfect beta-site
for working at acquiring a bigger repertoire of strategies.
Creativity is often referred to as a panacea, as part of
the new “must be good” jargon in education. It is important
to remember that creativity absent a meritorious goal is not
automatically a good thing. Hitler was very creative. So were
Osama Bin Laden and Bernie Madoff. Creativity becomes a
force of great value when it is applied to causes that benefit
humankind and the world at large. The study and application
of creative behavior, then, should also be designed around
social justice and objectives that promote the general welfare.
The motto, “It is not enough to do well. One must also do
good,” should pertain to every curricular experience, in every
forum in which creativity is being nurtured.
Universities are among the oldest institutions on the
planet. They have survived for many centuries by contributing
not only to the education of their students, but also by
enriching the commonweal. As part of their vaunted history,
TEACHING CREATIVITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION 61
universities have also been highly adaptive, able to re-valence
themselves in the face of large cultural changes. We now confront
a challenge of perhaps greater import than ever before
as a result of rising costs and the availability of increasingly
competitive and easily accessed alternative forms of learning
centering on the Internet. It is precisely at such a tipping
point that curricular transformation, or, more to the point, experiential
transformation, is ours for the taking. We have the
critical mass of equipment, buildings, staff, and, most significantly,
the human capital to once again adapt. It is simply a
matter of will.
Although universities are optimally positioned to address
the place of creativity in the collegiate experience, their
preparation of K–12 arts teachers is a natural subset of that
initiative. Taking action is important for P–12 arts education
in a number of ways. Colleges prepare P–12 teachers in the
arts and other disciplines, and, as well, educate a significant
proportion of the citizenry. What colleges teach and the ways
they teach impact the future of arts education and public understanding,
not only about specific knowledge and skills
required for graduation, but also about the content and nature
of knowledge and skill development. P–12 arts education
suffers in the policy arena, partly because there is no common
understanding among a critical mass of people, including the
college educated, about connections across arts study and
the development of individual capacities and capabilities to
work creatively with content. There seems to be a disinclination
to find solutions that work when more than one solution
is possible. The arts are thus seen either as a nonintellectual
realm, or as an intellectual realm that is unconnected to
more serious pursuits like science, technology, engineering,
and math, a realm that encompasses and nurtures a glamorous
playground for the talented and their patrons. In this
benighted paradigm, serious arts study is viewed as perfectly
fine for the interested and talented, but not necessary or particularly
useful for anyone else; artistic creativity is placed in
a jeweler’s box and admired as something beautiful but unrelated
to other kinds of work. Over time, the kind of curricular
transformation recommended here can counter the thrust of
this paradigm, particularly if university professors who teach
the arts and prepare arts teachers seize the opportunities of
the present time. Such transformation can address perennial
problematic conditions and current needs by establishing a
new, experiential strategy that centers on cultivating creativity.
If we work purposefully within higher education, P–12
arts education can be brought into a new relationship with
P–12 education in general without losing the essences of the
arts disciplines or the rigor and goals for excellence that they
exemplify.
The ultimate question, then, is not how to teach creativity,
but rather how to understand, harvest, and build up the very
creativity that every student already possesses and uses. The
answers may be multiple and diverse, but, inevitably, we must
summon the courage to reexamine the typical university curriculum.
By “reexamine,” I do not mean simply yet another

62 LIVINGSTON
exercise in curricular revision culminating in a “new” design
that is little more than an ornamental version of the old one.
I mean a fundamental commitment to transform the university
experience based on the unprecedented opportunity that
the modern information age makes possible. I mean looking
afresh at how four years can be structured to place the quest
for enlightenment at the center of the institutional mission,
and to focus on the development of the whole human as an
emerging societal adept. I mean making the sacred asset of
human capital core to the educational purpose and curriculum
of the academy. I mean placing collaborative fora in the
heart of the curriculum. I mean helping to forge decision
makers who see creativity as an art form, as the instrument
by which one becomes not only an able responder to, but
also an agent for change. I mean helping young people take
Articles in this symposium are derived from several presentations
held at the Teaching Creativity conference at University
of Wyoming, February 24–26, 2009. This conference was part
of a four-conference series titled Creativity, Curiosity, Collaboration,
led by Richard E. Miller, Chair and Professor of
English at Rutgers University, and Mark Sheridan-Rabideau,
Professor of Music at University of Wyoming.
advantage of their instinctual imaginings, which may begin
with the fantasy palaces of youth, but which can be shepherded
into the magical corridors of adult purpose. I mean
centering school on helping students become agile brokers
of their own destinies, determined to spread goodness in the
culture at large. I mean focusing our efforts on how we want
the graduates of our universities to be, and not just on what
we want them to know. I mean growing the Ninja citizens of
the future.
REFERENCE
Pink, D. H. 2005. A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to
the Conceptual Age. New York: Penguin.

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