Blackholes and Revelations: Understanding everyday creativity in higher education teacher practice

If we accept that creativity is a fundamentally human characteristic that is central to our well-being and productivity, why is it that creativity continues to be undervalued in everyday teacher practice? Today, so much of the HE educator’s role is focused on objective performance and maintaining high levels of achievement with comparatively little attention seemingly given to the role of creativity in their own professional learning strategies. This is because normative conceptualisations of creativity in higher education discourse tend to bias breakthrough thinking, cutting-edge practice, and large-scale innovation (Elkington et al., 2019; MacLaren, 2012). In truth, we know relatively little about the mechanisms underlying everyday creative behaviours in the context of professional practice strategies of educators. This chapter captures and examines productive inquiry research aimed at developing a more informed understanding of the personal meaning higher education teachers from different disciplines ascribe to creativity in their day-to-day practice. The chapter draws upon key research findings to provide insight into how creativity comes to frame the thinking and actions of HE teachers as they reflect on and learn from certain everyday experiences; how the nature of the interplay between such activities and the structure of practice cultures impacts on the direction and content of practitioners’ everyday creative behaviours; and how such ‘everyday creative praxis’ allows them to cope with change, express their individuality, and occasionally make significant contributions in their own practice domains.