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ARTS-BASED LEARNING IN MANAGEMENT AND BUSINESS STUDIES


BIRGIT WILDT
EUROPEAN BUSINESS SCHOOL LONDON, UK

Issue:

CP, Number 13

Section:

No. 13 (2008)  Editorial

Abstract:

The Arts are powerful forms of personal, social, and cultural expressions. They are unique ‘ways of knowing’ that enable individuals and groups to create ideas and images that reflect, communicate, and change their views of the world (O’Connor, Holland, Brodie, Dunmill, Hong 2003). The creative alliance between Arts and Business is an emerging field of practice and part of a new trend of thinking and learning (Stenstroem 2000). However, citing Jackson (2006) creativity as an outcome of higher education, at least in the UK, is more by accident than by design and although academia recognises qualitative shortfalls, analytical and critical ways of thinking might still dominate the academic curriculum. Government control has increased significantly through competence standards and benchmark systems, which, might, according to White (2006), still suppress the level of creativity, and limit the degree of risk-taking and the willingness for experimentation, which counter-effects the lecturers’ engagement to bring ‘arts-based learning’ into the classroom. Lecturers, according to Oreck, feel inhibited towards creative, open-ended, or artistic approaches, allowing students to explore and to discover, to find and to pursue problems and to arrive at unique solutions, whilst stimulating questions and communicating in multiple modalities (Oreck 2006). Therefore, and citing Jackson, the key challenge facing Higher Education is to change the prevailing culture so that greater value is placed on the students’ creative development alongside more traditional forms of academic development. Hence, management and business students at the European Business School London work increasingly in partnership or in competition with publishers, film-makers and broadcasters as the growth of information technology opens up new ways of learning and teaching (National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education 2001). The Arts, offer EBS-L students new methods of experiencing; they trigger perceptions, stimulate connections and unfold, what Jackson (2006) calls the quality of newness whilst inventing, discovering, exploring and moving from the known to the unknown. Through images, structures, motions and symbols, arts-based learning implies experimenting, trying-things-out, making a mess, establishing contexts with high levels of disorder, uncertainty and indeterminacy (Danvers, Buss 2007). The Arts provide a refuge for reflection, sympathy, quietude, inspiration where students acquire the skills of architects, developers, shapers and catalysts for ideas and agents for change and therefore, according to Jackson: “Every educator can change the way he/she thinks and acts, every group of teachers responsible for creating students’ educational experiences can choose or not choose to provide experiences that will help students’ develop their creative potential, and every institutional decision maker can shape policy, strategy or management practices so that creativity will flourish or be inhibited” (Jackson 2006).

Keywords:

arts and business, innovation, creativity, new culture, curriculum.

Code [ID]:

CP200813V00S01A0005 [0002599]


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