Creativity
in Higher Education
Network (CHEN)
Higher Education students who intend to enter future creative industries are attempting to become creative professionals in a world that is rapidly reconstructing itself. As a group the Creativity in Higher Education Network (CHEN) is intent on helping those students move past common beliefs and myths about creativity and help them draw, instead, on the authoritative, well-reasoned, empirically tested, peer-reviewed research into creativity. Why would we want to do this? We think that how one thinks about things has a direct impact on the actions one takes. Specifically, a person’s understanding of creativity and how it works, informs the way they implement their own creative actions and vice versa. However, many educators still draw on well-worn cultural assumptions about creativity, using these as the foundations of their teaching. Based on the evidence, we, as globally focused teachers, researchers and mentors, find it imperative therefore to draw on the authoritative and tested research on creativity in order to establish viable real world conditions to help our students engage in realistic creative actions within and beyond the creative and cultural industries.
CHEN was established to consolidate these ideas within a community of educators and set the groundwork for further research into this area and apply this to the educational settings we operate within. Given the policy concerns and educational imperatives to implement creativity within the curriculum in order to produce highly functioning, adaptable and creative professionals, CHEN will maintain itself as a formal international network of researchers who confer on a range of challenges and opportunities central to our shared creativity agenda.
This national network is comprised of like-minded scholars who research and teach creativity in a higher education setting. Our inaugural CHEN community which gathered first in 2019 at the University of Newcastle, NSW, is comprised of the following:
Phillip McIntyre - University of Newcastle (phillip.mcintyre@newcastle.edu.au)
Susan Kerrigan – University of Newcastle (susan.kerrigan@newcastle.edu.au)
Janet Fulton - University of Newcastle (janet.fulton@newcastle.edu.au)
Michael Meany – University of Newcastle (michael.meany@newcastle.edu.au)
Ari Chand - University of Newcastle (ari.chand@newcastle.edu.au)
Madonna Stinson – Griffith University (m.stinson@griffith.edu.au)
Margaret McVeigh – Griffith University (m.mcveigh@griffith.edu.au)
Iouri Belski – RMIT University (iouri.belski@rmit.edu.au)
Dan Harris – RMIT University (daniel.harris@rmit.edu.au)
Tully Barnett – Flinders University (tully.barnett@flinders.edu.au)
Eduardo Delafuente – University of Wollongong (eduardo.delafuente1966@gmail.com)
Deanne Gannaway – University of Queensland (d.gannaway@uq.edu.au)
Bem LeHunte – University of Technology Sydney (Bem.LeHunte@uts.edu.au)
Craig Batty – University of Technology Sydney (Craig.Batty@uts.edu.au)
Liz Ellison – Central Queensland University (l.ellison@cqu.edu.au)
Donna Brien - Central Queensland University (d.brien@cqu.edu.au)
Pieter.Aquilia – Australian Film Television and Radio School / University of Newcastle (Pieter.Aquilia@aftrs.edu.au)
Pam Burnard – Cambridge University (pab61@cam.ac.uk)
Jen Webb – University of Canberra (jen.webb@canberra.edu.au)
For more information about the CHEN network or its work, please contact Phillip McIntyre or Dan Harris.
Our next gathering will be in 2020 in Melbourne.