With great pleasure, we share the remarkable event where Pamela Burnard, Professor of Arts, Creativities and Educations, an international authority in ‘Creative Learning’ from the University of Cambridge, presented a keynote to a prestigious gathering of 50 Chinese Higher Education leaders at the Moeller Institute, Churchill College (12 July 2023).

With great pleasure, we share the remarkable event where Pamela Burnard, Professor of Arts, Creativities and Educations, an international authority in ‘Creative Learning’ from the University of Cambridge, presented a keynote to a prestigious gathering of 50 Chinese Higher Education leaders at the Moeller Institute, Churchill College (12 July 2023).
Her talk featured the exciting ERASMUS project “Creative Learning for Boosting Bio-Economy within HEIs’ Curricula” because it exemplifies an innovative commitment to fostering creative thinking, creative learning and creative teaching in Higher Education.
Purposively branded with use of Edgar Rubin’s Vase Illusion embedded within the project’s logo, this endeavour underscores the paramount importance of creative thinking in tackling the pressing environmental challenges that confront us today.
Prof. Burnard pointed out that our existing education system, fashioned during the industrial age, now faces the urgent call to adapt to the ecological demands of unprecedented technological change in an increasingly unscripted world. To usher in this transformative change, she emphasised the future-capable critical role of transdisciplinarity (present within the bioeconomy field) and advocated for integrating new and creative pedagogies of the possible in the Higher Education sector.
As argued by Prof. Burnard, ‘Creative Learning’ encompasses more than just an event or product; it embodies a dynamic relational process, a state of mind, a disposition characterised by exploring ideas, possibilities and an unwavering acceptance of ambiguity. This generative and holistic approach to teaching and learning in Higher Education brings up a set of new relations between problem-finding and problem-solving and involves an intricate interplay of cognitive, emotional, and social factors, encompassing rational and non-rational modes of thought and action. Creative Learning is also nurtured through an ethics of possibility and deep contemplation, further enriched by co-authoring new knowledges, skills and capabilities for imagining what is possible and then catalyzing change.