Promoting Creativity in the Classroom: Assessment Experiments in the Brave Space

Katrina Heijne

In this paper a vision on how to teach creativity and how to assess elements of it are proposed in a case study as part of the minor Connected Creativity which is taught at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at the Delft University of Technology. Intrinsic motivation and a ‘brave space’ are essential elements for enabling learning as well as creativity. Since the aim of the Connected Creativity course is to learn about creativity, intrinsic motivation and the brave space are further examined. Two approaches for assessing creativity in the brave space are proposed and reflected upon. One is about the ‘learning pact’ to allow students to customize the course’s learning objectives and make them more relevant for them. The other approach is reflecting upon the experiment of assessing journals on quantity only: so, how many pages are filled, instead of assessing the quality of the pages by using rubrics.

Purpose – Sharing best practices and learnings from assessing creativity in the classroom.

Design/methodology/approach – Several case studies were conducted in the context of teaching the minor Connected Creativity at the Delft University of Technology.

Originality/value – A vision on teaching creativity will be shared as well as example on how to assess creativity without killing creativity as a side effect.

Keywords – Creativity, Assessment, Brave space, productive failure, Journaling