Critical thinking and creativity: can we teach both?

Abstract

UAL is a world leader in art and design education. Yet, some of the UAL courses and students have a rather different subject focus and related pedagogies, whilst constantly looking for inspiration from the creative environment. The Science programme in the Fashion Business School is the home of several such courses, undergraduate and postgraduate. Critical Thinking (CT) is a key skill that students on our courses are helped to develop and apply to their respective subject domains.

Systematic critique has been one of the pillars of good citizenship and education in the Western tradition and we could easily identify examples of implicit or explicit CT activities in our teaching. Indeed, CT is present in the higher order learning outcomes of undergraduate and is a core component of postgraduate learning, but we, the educators, sometimes struggle to explain it to our students. Finally, daily media feeds commonly place creativity above process, and disruption above tradition and reasoning, leaving science teachers and students feeling stuck in the past.

My paper presents some of my teaching practices, explicitly aimed at developing CT, and my approach to evaluating student learning beyond the assessment grades. I aim to reinstate the value of CT and its contribution to creative practice and vice versa.

My personal working definition of CT is the one developed by the American Philosophical Association: "Critical thinking is purposeful, self-regulatory judgment that results in interpretation, analysis, evaluation, and inference, as well as explanations of the considerations on which that judgment is based…" (Abrami et al, 2015).