What if misunderstood creativity in learning creates barriers to participation and impacts students' sense of belonging

Abstract

The pressure which may be felt by staff to apply creativity when teaching, could potentially overshadow the benefits of it, by diverting the focus from meaningful knowledge building during the learning process (Sun et al., 2020; Deverell and Moore, 2014; McGuire and Gubbins, 2010). Experiencing the emphasis to be creative in my teaching as a learning development tutor, I am interested to explore the matter of replacing traditional teaching values with divergent ways of learning, and how this could affect the sense of belonging to a HE organisation. Karwowski (2022) argues that to achieve successful engagement with creative learning, students must recognise the act of building meaningful knowledge alongside the untraditional teaching approach offered to them. The main question to raise is if students do not perceive creative activities as meaningful knowledge building, would they disregard the opportunity to learn and disengage with the wider community of practice (Goulet-Pelletier et al., 2023, p.197-198; Pachler, et al., 2019; Wenger, 1998). Opening a professional dialogue will allow the investigation of the hypothesis that misunderstood creativity in learning could have an impact on students’ perception of the HE institution and their positioning within it and will offer opportunities to tackle issues around students’ sense of belonging.