On the other side of the divide: Making sense of student stories of creativities in music

Tertiary music schools include creativity as an essential artistic and professional graduate disposition, often related to high-quality student outcomes. However, little is known about how students define creativity and how they view creativity in the context of their assessment. We explore the notion of creativity as a ‘bundle’ of elements that incorporates personal ability, process and product. We recognise that creation, creativity and creativities focus on individual, group, disciplinary and inter/intra-disciplinary environments. To explore these ideas we highlight important themes raised by music students asked to discuss what creativity meant to them. Many students situated creativity as ‘breaking the rules’ or taking unnecessary risks; as a result, they limited its application in high-stake situations such as formal assessments. Hence, we argue, institutions have an obligation to encourage and support creative risk-taking and, more practically, to explicitly discuss and develop the notion of multiple creativities with both faculty and students.