Creativity as a matter of context. On the assessment of creativity and originality in artistic higher education.

In education programs with an artistic ground, i.e. where the student is supposed to develop an artistic skill, the overall objective is to provide the fundament for a practitioner to become a well functioning individual in a specific artistic community. This artistic community of practice plays – directly through professionally active teachers, and indirectly through teachers with a good understanding of the field – a significant role in the formation of the education programme. Professional demands are thus imposed on the student, of a sort that do not show up as significantly in more thematic or general subject-oriented types of academic education. Apart from the specific types of technical skill that is requested by different arts or genres, there are also more abstract and common demands, like those of originality and creativity. Originality and creativity are often conceptualised as coming together in one creative act, and this paper will therefore have its focus on the notion of creativity. Creativity is for the most part measured against a paradigm of already existing art works, serving as recurring “filters” in the evaluation of students’ works. This type of evaluation recurs during the years that an education program lasts, and it develops between teachers and students, as well as amongst students themselves. The degree of creativity – or originality in performance – of a student’s work may be silently or explicitly evaluated already in admission works and entry tests, and then continues in examination of tasks designed and assessed by the teachers, but perhaps most often in the successive tutorial discussions about ongoing individual work. The climax of such evaluation, and the most emotional and disciplined moment in the years of studies, is the critique of the diploma work. In this paper I will attempt to render a few ways in which originality and creativity is evaluated, and my main suggestion here is that the contexts in which creativity is measured, are fundamental for how we define creativity itself. It is shown that works can be evaluated differently in different evaluation situations, as regards participating persons, spatial circumstances and media at hand. In other words, despite a common attributing of originality and creativity to persons or works, it is here claimed that we must acknowledge also the fact that it is the presentational situation itself that makes a creative act viewable in the first place.
Content of paper presentation:
1. Introduction
2. The critical review as form for assessment and examination in art education
3. Creativity as matter of rule, content – or context.
4. Creativity as shift-of-context.
5. End notes: examples of re-contextualisation as a teaching method.