Creativity, the arts, and transformative learning

Abstract

The arts provide educators and researchers with opportunities to work with adult learners to support creative and transformative learning opportunities. This chapter examines how the arts may foster creativity and help adult learners develop the capacities to live and work in contexts characterized by fluidity, uncertainty, and change. It challenges a neoliberal perspective that reduces the notion of creativity to the more technical-rational definition of innovation for the purposes of profit. Drawing upon critical Habermasian and transformative learning theory, it explores how these frameworks help us to understand the need to broaden our perspectives on teaching adults to promote creativity. This chapter examines various examples of how the arts, including fiction writing, may be used to develop creativity in adult education and lifelong learning contexts.