Creativity & Innovation Toolkit

Providing a safe environment for creativity

Creativity implies risk-taking. Risk-taking requires courage. Students must feel confident that their attempts to create something new and meaningful will not be laughed at, put down, or criticised too harshly. As lecturer or tutor, you need to provide a safe environment in which students will happily take risks and expose themselves to failure, by acknowledging that:

• taking risks is scary;
• they need to reflect on what they are creating, or solving;
• they need to document every stage of their process; and
• feedback from self and others can be invaluable.

Composers, choreographers, writers, designers and artists take risks every time they start creating a new work. To quote a visual arts student:

“You have a blank piece of paper on which you put marks, and every new blank piece of paper is potentially a new look discovery, a new disaster or a new success.”

Candy, P.C., Crebert, G., & O’Leary, J. (1994). Developing Lifelong Learners Through Undergraduate Education. Commissioned Report No. 28. NBEET. Canberra: AGPS.

“In addition, each and every mark, or combination of marks one makes on a piece of paper may suggest or prompt another thought, another concept, and so on. This is a process of receiving visual feedback, thus magnifying the potential for a truly original and creative concept to emerge. In a sense, this is building ‘visual capital'.”

Personal communication from: Barnes, P. (2005). Queensland College of Art, Griffith University.

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