My Creativity Book Tour - First Stop: Tarragona, Catalonia, Spain

So off I went with my newly published book on Managing Creativity to show it to dear colleagues and students. First stop in 2019 has been at Universitat Rovira I Virgili (URV), in Tarragona, Catalonia, Spain.

Near Tarragona with Teresa

My colleague Teresa Torres kindly hosted me, and the presentation of the book was intertwined with a fantastic experiential learning situation where we got to practice some ideas on creativity with curios and engaged students.

At the seminar, I got a warm feeling that I was among people who want to be creative and like myself, find several institutional challenges and constraints to make it happen. Paradoxically, creativity is being institutionalised as a way of bringing more students to our universities, something that we did not see it coming but that we now need to manage and do so creatively!

Our students in Tarragona value experiential learning. They like to see how to use ideas in practice, they would like to have hands on experience, perhaps by working in projects. This idea of project or problem-based learning seems to be a common trend in other countries including the UK and France. URV has great connections with local industry, which gives students unique possibilities to learn in a job whilst studying.

We as academics still think that alongside, we need to infuse a critical spirit in our educational activities, so that people have a chance to become aware and act to save our planet. This call inevitably links to our own local contexts, where we also need to sensitise our management students to what goes on, what is in front of us and we cannot just dismiss.  If we think of creativity as inquiring system as I propose in my book, reflecting on our values could help us connect them with the activities we do, both as educators and as human beings in general.

Students and staff at URV

In Tarragona, creativity as a combination of experiential learning and critique is developed by enabling students with learning difficulties have the opportunity of attending university and gaining skills if not a community of friends to help them gain or regain employment. To me this is a worthy goal towards which creativity could be directed.

 The hope is that my book’s ideas inspire students and educators to think of their values and linking those with their activities, be them in education or elsewhere. We also need to rescue our curiosity, that which we held dearly as children, and which could also help us deal with the complex challenges that we face.