You’re at university working hard and completing assignments and reading around your subject. You have left all the fun of creativity, painting pictures, building sculptures, writing poetry behind. Or so you think.
Creativity comes in many forms, and while you’re probably not writing poetry as part of your course, you’re being far more creative when you write an assignment than just memorising information. Academic skills that help to build creativity, and then move onto innovation, include critical thinking, problem-solving and research skills. This can all be boosted by a regular habit of reflection on what you have learnt.
When you write an assignment, you gather information from different perspectives, including ones you disagree with, and blend them together into a piece of writing where you have developed your own train of thought and argument. This is a creative act.
Critical thinking
Critical thinking is about making connections between ideas, theories, and facts that may be very disparate. Assignment titles are often not straightforward and it’s unusual to find a journal article that directly answers the question. For example, if you are writing an essay about cats, you wouldn’t write about dogs. However, you could use ideas about the benefits of having a pet from the article you’re reading about dogs and apply what it says about pets generally in your essay about cats. You’re using both creative and critical thinking.
Group work
Group work often brings creativity and innovation to the fore. They are heightened by the group process of the project you are working on together. The task for a group work project often involves creativity, such as developing marketing for a charity. As a group, you will apply your knowledge of theory to a practical, real-life situation. Problems will arise, people may disagree, and ideas won’t always work. All of these need an adaptable, flexible, and creative response if your group project is to succeed.
Reflection
At the end of a group project, students are often asked to reflect individually on the process the group as a whole has experienced. Reflection is a useful habit. You can identify what went well, and what could have gone better. If one solution to a problem didn’t work, why not? If it did work, why was it successful, and how could it be improved? What would you do next time? This process of reflection brings what you have learned together and makes it conscious, tangible and repeatable. Creativity and innovation are learned skills and reflection can help you develop them. They are easy to apply to a group project because the whole process is obvious and your own experience. It is not just a mental process within your own mind as is more the case with an individually written assignment. But, once you get used to reflecting, you will be able to reflect on more internal processes such as the way you write an assignment and gain a similar benefit. You can then apply your learning to other situations where creativity is required.
AI and creativity
AI is increasingly part of everyday life and creativity is one of the keys to its most successful use. You can ask it to find facts for you, to give you ideas, or plan. This way of using AI is essentially the AI thinking for you, and you learn very little. Of more benefit by far is using the AI to support you to think critically and creatively with prompts such as “There are connections between x and y, can you help me expand on them by asking me critical questions?” or “Ask me questions to develop my thinking about x”. In this way, you can develop your critical thinking and creativity.
Employability and creativity
Get involved in societies, blogs, and portfolios, or schemes like the Bath Award. These help you evidence your creative and transferable skills to employers. This all adds to your employability and can be logged in My Employability Profile as you build your employability and creative skills. This will mean that you don’t forget anything, and you can highlight your transferable creative and innovative skills for a potential employer. The key is to make these skills visible so that employers will be able to see that you have the skillset they are looking for. These skills can be key to success in any job.
When you go on placement or leave university and enter the world of work, you will take the ways of thinking you have developed at university with you and apply them in the workplace. The transition from university to work often involves applying creativity to practical, real-world challenges. Employers value soft skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving and adaptability. You may well be expected to generate ideas and adapt to fast-changing situations. This is creativity.
So, creativity isn’t only painting pictures and writing poetry, it has a much wider application. Reflection and self-awareness help you build a skillset you can use throughout your life.
Some actions you can take to develop creative thinking:
- Try new things outside your comfort zone e.g. join a society, give a Ted talk
- Keep a notebook or digital record for new ideas. The more you do this the easier it becomes
- Play with AI and let it be your thinking partner in creativity
- Reflect regularly on what you are learning and how you think.
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