“What are employers looking for?” I asked from the front of the lecture hall. A few students tentatively raised their hands.

“Good grades,” one suggests.

“Punctuality,” another offers.

Given that these are art and design students, I’m surprised how long it takes for someone to hit upon the answer I’d been hoping for: “Creativity”.

Art and design often suffers unfairly from a poor reputation, with brighter students regularly being pushed towards what are perceived to be more rigorous subjects at school. The arts are still widely seen as the “softer” option.

But this is far from true. Art and design nurtures critical thinking skills and helps students to develop creative mindsets - both of which can be tangible assets in the world of employment.

In fact, recent research suggests that creativity is a quality that is currently in high demand in the workplace. According to a 2019 report by the Durham Commission on Creativity and Education, and based on data from LinkedIn, creativity is “the second most desirable competency in an employee (after cloud computing)”.

Similarly, the 2018 Future of Jobs report published by the World Economic Forum named “creativity, originality and initiative” as an “emerging” skill set, predicting that these qualities would become significantly more important to employers by the year 2022.

Meanwhile, research around the fourth industrial revolution shows that creativity will become increasingly valuable, as industry becomes permeated by automation, artificial intelligence and big data.

Yet, my students seemed largely unaware of the importance being placed on creativity in the workplace. So, rather than seeing the Level 3 art and design foundation course they were studying as an opportunity to grow their creative skills, they were entirely focused on building only the subject knowledge they needed to pass the course.

But these two things are not mutually exclusive; it is possible to simultaneously promote subject knowledge while nurturing skills such as creativity.

I just needed to prove that to my students.

So, I decided to embark on a research project with the aim of nurturing students’ creativity while also developing the necessary core subject knowledge that would prepare them for more specialist study at higher education.

Where did I begin? Although there were a number of ways I might have approached this research, I felt that an open process in which the students were informed and engaged participants was the most authentic option. I wanted the students to feel part of the research process rather than that they were being experimented upon.

To engage students, I felt it was important to first share current thinking around creativity at the very start of the year - in the form of the workplace research cited previously. As I predicted, students were not aware of the employability benefits of creativity, nor had they recognised they could develop such skills during the study of art and design.

Throughout our discussions about creativity, it was important that I used consistent language. I decided, therefore, to refer to the “creative habits of mind” model developed by Bill Lucas, professor of learning and director of the Centre for Real-World Learning at the University of Winchester.

Lucas’ model is underpinned by the idea that creativity is not a fixed capacity, but rather a set of dispositions that can be nurtured and developed. There are five core habits - imagination, persistence, inquisitiveness, collaboration and discipline - each of which are associated with three sub-habits.

At the start of the year, my students benchmarked themselves against these creative habits, which served as a framework for the project and provided a foundation against which students could measure their progress.

Having established this framework, I next considered what mechanisms I might use to nurture creativity and develop subject knowledge simultaneously.

The approach I decided on was integrating creative activities into my lecture sessions, alongside more traditional methods of delivery. These activities allowed the lecture theatre to become an experimental and fluid space, more akin to a workshop.

The activities generally fell into two categories: short and extended. Short activities were used to generate discussion, introduce content for rapid idea generation, as an emotion check, to promote social cohesion, or as a means of formative assessment. They also had additional benefits, such as changing energy levels in the room, building rapport and encouraging participation.

The extended activities, on the other hand, aimed to deepen students’ core understanding of a topic, while nurturing their creativity. I sought to make them content-led and engaging, while also allowing students a high degree of autonomy. Here, I was informed not only by Lucas’ creative habits of mind, but also the concepts of the “high-functioning classroom” (developed by international foundation Creativity, Culture and Education) and Roger Hart’s “ladder of participation”.

What did these activities look like? One example was asking students to form small groups and create a scene from an imaginary future to present to the class, as a way of exploring time as a concept in art and design. They were allowed to use a projected image or film as a backdrop to their scene. Once a group had finished presenting, other students could step into that scene and ask questions based in that future, or stand outside the scene and ask questions related to the overall concept of the piece.

Another example was asking students to create a short film using what they had learned from a session on narrative theory. They had to go away and put into practice the narrative elements we had discussed. Then, during the last hour of the day, the students watched each other’s films and offered feedback to their peers.

The question is: did these activities have the intended effect? Did I succeed in developing students’ creativity alongside their subject knowledge?

I asked students to rate themselves against the creative habits of mind at the start of their course in September. I then asked them to do the same at the end of the course in May. For every sub-habit, students rated their abilities more highly than they had done in September, as much as 30 per cent higher in some sub-habits.

As for subject knowledge, in terms of formal grades, there was a 100 per cent pass rate, with the following breakdown: 53 per cent distinction, 40 per cent merit and 7 per cent pass. Taken alongside the students’ personal ratings of their creative abilities, these results were very promising.

However, I did not feel that the quantitative data gave the whole picture. So, I decided to hold a final feedback session with students at the end of the year, to try to make sense of just how the project had helped them.

During the feedback session, I noticed that a lot of students said how much their confidence had grown throughout the year. And there was one student comment in particular that jumped out at me.

“By showing a level of vulnerability and risk taking, the lecturer encouraged us to do the same. This helped to build our confidence in expressing thoughts and ideas,” the student said.

Often, the main challenge in conducting research of this kind is not knowing how things will turn out. But this seems to have been part of the success of the project.

In order to help students develop their creativity, we lecturers must therefore be willing to model this, by taking creative risks ourselves.

Daniel Trivedy is an art and design lecturer at Coleg Sir Gâr and Coleg Ceredigion in Wales

This article originally appeared in the 19 June 2020 issue under the headline “Why boosting creativity means taking risks”