IVE’s Rosi Lister presents ‘A new pedagogical model’ of applied creativity at EMKAN School Conference 2022

IVE’s Rosi Lister presents ‘A new pedagogical model’ of applied creativity at EMKAN School Conference 2022 in Saudi on Saturday 26 February at 8am UK time.  With an estimated attendance of over 3000 attendees, one of this year’s conference themes is the integration of arts and everyday creativity in schools.

The UK enjoys a rich heritage of ensuring that arts and cultural opportunities have been consistently on offer for students from ages 5 – 14 as part of the national curriculum requirements. At the same time, there is an increasingly growing dialogue and activity around the importance of ‘creativity’, and how this can be integrated in teaching and learning in schools. The panel discussion presents UK best practice in both domains, and invites delegates to examine the relationship between the two. Can the teaching and learning of arts subjects in schools contribute to enabling students to develop their own creative approaches to real world situations? Are there shared approaches in the teaching of arts education and of applied creativity? Is there an overlap of student-learnt skills?

Rosi Lister is the Chief Executive Officer at IVE, a key creative education provider based in the north of England. Rosi has thirty years’ of work experience. More than fifteen of those years were spent in further and higher education designing HE curriculum and lecturing in the principles of design, the creative process and related critical studies to mainly undergraduates. Rosi has since held senior management positions in a number of arts and education organisations and within Cultural heritage and tourism. Rosi has been CEO of IVE since 2016.

As an organisation, IVE believe that 21st century creativity is a core and transferable life-skill, not the sole domain of the arts. So why is it important to be creative? The World Economic Forum reported in 2019 that they considered creativity as the single most important skill for future leaders. Referencing a 2010 IBM study of 1,500 CEOs who chose creativity as one of three top leadership traits, were up to 20% more likely to pursue innovation through business model change. WEF state that it has never been more important for business leaders to be creative. As the IBM report states: “To operate more effectively in a volatile environment, creative leaders strongly encourage and experiment with all types of business model innovation.” The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report (2018) predicts creativity, innovation and ideation being the key skills of the workforce of the future. These so-called soft skills, which sit alongside analytical thinking and problem-solving, they say will replace manual tasks that become automated.

Having researched creativity in the classroom for 25 years, the team at IVE believes that creative behaviour can be (re)learned. IVE introduce young people to how they can apply ‘everyday’ creativity to real world challenges via a new pedagogical model they call ‘Applied Creativity Labs’. The Applied Creativity Lab model uses the creative process as a structure for learning how to learn independently (developing Meta cognition) and at the same time, solve real-world challenges. It includes several key components, including divergent and convergent thinking skills, working in collaboration and developing personal resilience. The labs also allow students to learn in a live environment where problems are real, failure is acknowledged as a necessary building block of success and where expert advice is there to support the learner journey, not to provide the ‘right answer’, because there isn’t a right answer. IVE have developed a Teaching and Learning Competency Framework to support the delivery of Applied Creativity Labs. The competencies in the framework are for both the educator to develop in their own teaching practice and for the learner to develop as a form of independent learning. The learner competencies are there also for the educator to use, as a way of being able to recognize that learning is taking place in the desired way. The learner and the educator therefore learn how to become collaborators in the learning experience. As well as students learning to learn and becoming systematically creative in their thinking, the labs also result in improved oracy, confidence, listening skills, collaborative working with peers, respect for one another’s ideas and a better understanding of career opportunities in science and innovation. Applied Creativity Labs are mostly delivered in school settings, however the ACL pedagogy is transferable across all age groups and educational settings and indeed into workplace training environments. In her short presentation, Rosi will summarise these key, focussing on the Applied Creativity Model and the Teaching and Learning Competency Framework that has been developed to the support its delivery.

You can find out more about IVE’s Applied Creativity Labs here.