The CETL in Creativity funded 44 distinct ‘spin out’ projects, in addition to numerous research, T&L and community outreach events supported by general operations.
The Creativity Development Fund (CDF) was a pot of money made available (on a competitive bidding model) to tutors and students for the development of creative practice.
Reflections on the CDF Model
The ambition of the CETL initiative, combined with light-touch management from HEFCE enabled innovation in a way uncommon with many other programmes of this scope.
Not only did the resulting experience feel liberating and empowering, the removal of excessive monitoring has meant that less time was taken up preparing documentation, hosting monitoring visits, and thus more time could be focussed on the principal activity of the project – the support of innovative and effective teaching.
This mirrored our own experience with the Creativity Development Fund. Here tutors were given a small amount of money and support, and relative freedom to redesign their teaching along the lines outlined in their bid. Although in some cases, the outcomes and project documentation met the minimum requirements, in many instances, the eventual outcomes far exceeded the original expectations. It appeared to the project team that this demonstrated an underlying desire and commitment to innovative teaching and learning – it only needed a little support and encouragement to grow. A common report from funded tutors was that the ‘permission’ to put some time into the development of new teaching and the ‘freedom’ to try something new was more important to them than the monetary reward. In many cases this permission, and the peer recognition of the award, was important in giving value to activities that had previously been limited to the tutor’s spare time.
This notion of ‘freedom’ reflects an essential characteristic of creativity and innovation and has been a recurrent theme in discussions at the various ‘crit’-type sessions held within the creativity zones: people must feel able to take risks, even fail to do something truly creative. The structure of the CETL initiative allowed the project team to do just that, focussing our full attention on responding to the emergent findings of the project as it evolved.
Case Studies of CDF projects can be found here.
Below is the list of all funded CDF projects
| Creativity Development Fund Programme: |
| The Creative Medical School (‘Learning to Look’) [Brighton & Sussex Medical School] |
| Creative responses to the Holocaust: Interacting with artefacts and exploring new assessment methods [History & Centre for German-Jewish Studies] |
| CREATE: Creativity, e-learning and teacher education [Education] |
| Quantifying the teaching & learning value of ‘Fab Labs’ [Engineering & Design] |
| Shared Insight: Understanding Creativity [3D Design] |
| Specialist Fashion Design Development and Pattern Cutting CAD System software [Architecture & Design] |
| Bridging certain distances with mobile media [Media] |
| Overalls Evaluation (‘Access to Art’) [Art & Communication] |
| Developing Models of using social (Web 2.0) technologies for supporting personal development planning [Engineering] |
| Artemacy: The fusion of creative art and pharmacy education [Pharmacy & Bimolecular Sciences] |
| Coordinating and supporting the use of Web 2.0 and social technologies across two CETLs [Learning Technologies/Information Services] |
| Football 4 Peace: The development of multimedia modules and hypermedia research methods in a visual evaluation [Chelsea School] |
| Reading into Creativity – an investigation into the new relationship between technology and scholarship [Media] |
| Succour – biannual journal of creative work [English] |
| Creative Space: A writing retreat for academics [Education & Sport] |
| PUBGLAS: Recycled glass as a material for teaching of Product Design[Engineering] |
| PHIGETS 2006: Advanced design for Creative Interactivity [Informatics] |
| Scaffolding Automotive Engineering Learning: Link Y3 Motorsport Teaching Course into MEng Formula Student Car Racing Project [Engineering] |
| CAD [Engineering] |
| Assessment [Engineering] |
| Seminars [Art & Design] |
| Ways of Thinking [Engineering & Design] |
| Picturing World Politics [International Relations] |
| Innovative Teaching Practices for Real-world situations: A student-led initiative in Second Life [Informatics] |
| Vis-ability: An interactive visual research gallery [Computing and Information Science, & Engineering] |
| Motion in Poetry: Poetic Performance of the Navier-Stokes equations in Fluid Mechanics [Graduate Centre for Humanities] |
| Creative Bridging between academia and Industry [Engineering] |
| Interactive Everywhere: Scaffolding Creative Design for context-based services[Computing, Maths & Information Sciences] |
| Hands on? How the notion of touch is applied in teaching and learning[Architecture & Design] |
| Three Dimensional Learning: Interacting with artefacts and exploring new assessment methods [History & Centre for German-Jewish Studies] |
