Critical-creative pedagogy 4 years on
- Anke Schwittay
- 4 days ago
- 6 min read
My book Creative Universities: Reimagining Education for Global Challenges and Alternative Futures was published 4 years ago by Bristol University/Polity Press as an invitation to make university learning more creative, imaginative and ultimately hopeful. I have since also written an open-access article summarizing the book's critical-creative pedagogy framework to make it more accessible for educators and students. In this post I explore how and where my ideas have been taken up since their publication. I was especially curious to see if they have made their way outside of the development studies and social sciences Anglo-European HE context in which my own work has been grounded.
Becoming part of the pedagogical vocabulary
From the citations of my work to date, the many presentations and workshops I have given and the emails I have received from like-minded colleagues, it has become clear that critical-creative pedagogy (CCP) is providing a conceptual scaffolding for university educators who want to inspire students to combine critically analyzing the world’s problems to designing alternative responses to them in interdisciplinary ways. Its four strands — whole-person learning, design and arts methods, praxis, and critical hope — therefore offers a map for integrating analysis, reflection, creativity and action.
These ideas have been taken up in diverse fields, including development/communication studies; climate change education, peace, democracy and social work education, data/AI literacy, history and journalism teaching, community-engaged courses, and even primary teaching and technical communication. This expansion beyond its original location in development studies has confirmed my hopes that CCP can provide a pedagogical framework for teaching in various disciplines, mainly but not exclusively in the social sciences.
The main ways in which academics have taken up my work are as a conceptual anchor referencing CCP's four-part framing, as a practical resource that educators use in and adapt for classroom activities, and as a rhetorical call to reimagine HE curricula to be more imaginative, praxis-oriented and to instil critical hope.
Examples of relevant articles
Here is a short list of some of the articles that reference CCP and/or teaching critical hope:
Tufte, T. (2024). Unlearning Communication for Social Change—A Pedagogical Proposition. Social Sciences 13/7, 335: includes my work among pedagogies of hope and creative-critical approaches to 'unlearn' and relearn communication for social change, as a contemporary call for alternative pedagogies that must be paired with political/epistemic commitments.
Atenas, J., Havemann, L., & Nerantzi, C. (2024). Critical and creative pedagogies for artificial intelligence and data literacy: an epistemic data justice approach for academic practice. Research in Learning Technology, 32: include my framework, specifically arts/design and co-creation methods, in the literature on open and creative methods for co-designing critical data and AI literacy spaces and learning activities, rooted in the principles of Data Justice.
Griffith, C.O. (2025). Creative-Critical Pedagogies in Technical Communication: A Course Design in Proceedings of the 43rd ACM International Conference on Design of Communication (pp. 166-169). adapts my framework, and especially its arts-based aspects, as a central source for rethinking practical technical-writing courses at Michigan State University, with a particular interest in inter-disciplinary knowledge making that crosses boundaries between disciplines, genres and writing styles. The article also shows how design and creative play can coexist with rigorous professional training.
Liebhaber, N. (2024). Utopia and climate change education: modes of utopian hope and their pedagogical consequences. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 33(4), 1299-1316: cites the CCP framework as part of utopian knowledge in climate change education, arguing that creative, future-oriented pedagogies help students imagine alternative socio-ecological futures. Chapter 5 of the book on Repairing Ecologies is especially relevant for these discussions. This is only one of several examples of articles on climate-related teaching that reference my work.
Lewis, D. (2025). Towards a Development Humanities: widening the multi-disciplinary field of development studies. Oxford Development Studies, 53(2), 105-118: references teaching critical hope as informing proposals for a new field of ‘development humanities’ that brings insights from the arts and humanities to development studies. The aim is to pay attention to the moral and ethical dimensions of uncertainty and change and to the need to engage critically with the dehumanizing effects of reductivism, commercialization and resurgent techno-optimism in development work and education.
Matthews‐Jones, L. (2025). Making and Defining the Creative History Classroom: An Introduction. History: The Journal of the Historical Association: draws on the creative elements of CCP for the development of a creative history classroom, to consider how the past is made and remade through creative practice in HE teaching environments.
Kruger, Katherine and Brown, Beth (2025) "Beyond Instrumentalization: Adventures in Crafting a Community-Engaged Education," International Journal of Lifelong Learning in Art Education: Vol. 8, Article 11: highlight CCP's 4 elements as an aspect of community-engaged teaching that challenges dominant narratives around the purpose of education and builds a new model for ‘good’ academic education across the life course. Katherine is a Sussex colleague who convenes an exciting community project-based module and has written this WONKHE piece to argue for experiential learning in the humanities.
Macleroy, V. & Chung, Y. (2023). How Can Digital Storytelling Open Up Spaces for Activist Citizenship…? International Journal of Early Childhood, 55, 441–46: uses critical hope to argue for arts-based, storytelling activities that combine emotion/pleasure with critical reflection. Research was conducted with 8 year old UK students to see how they can develop new understandings of hardship and survival through the process of digital storytelling. This was part of a larger global literacy project called ‘Critical Connections Multilingual Digital Storytelling Project’ taking place since 2012 across 15 countries in over 36 languages.
Taken together, these works signal that CCP is becoming part of a broader movement toward creative, hopeful, practice-based learning. It is exciting to see how educators in so many fields are using my language and ideas to legitimise teaching methods that once might have felt marginal but are now becoming more recognized and validated as activities to inform and inspire our students.
Expanding HE Geographies
In addition to crossing disciplinary boundaries, I also wanted to see to what extent CCP has found its way outside the Anglo-European HE context in which it was developed. I have found a number of articles that have done exactly that:
Shams, A., Ahmad, F. ., Khalid, S., & Banu, S. (2025). Critical Thinking and Pedagogy in the Indian Education System: Highlighting Socio-cultural Dissent. Journal of Education Culture and Society, 16(1), 951-962.: show the relevance of CCP for HE in India.
Van Houweling, E., Côte, M., Dutta, S., Gregoratti, C., Zikry, D., Jeide-Detweiler, N., ... & Wilsey, D. (2025). Decolonizing education in development practice: Experiences and challenges from India, Nigeria, Sweden, and the US. In Transforming Education for Sustainable Development (pp. 51-70). Routledge: include elements of CCP in an overview of decolonizing development education in India, Nigeria, Sweden and the US
Raphael, J., Araki, N., & Domenach, F. (2025). Critical and creative approaches to teaching and learning about complex issues in the digital world. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 1-19. : draw on whole-person learning as part of a drama-based pedagogy to teach controversial digital issues at an international university in Japan
Limani, A., Ziberi, L., & Lengel, L. M. (2025). Critical Transdisciplinary Pedagogy in Response to Neoliberalism: Reimagining Higher Education for Democracy in North Macedonia. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies (JCEPS), 23(2): includes CCP element in democracy education and critical transdisciplinarity in North Macedonia, to contribute to greater civic participation and democratization
Govender, E. (2025). Interdisciplinary Perspectives: Rethinking Communication for Development and Social Change in Health Communication. Social Sciences 14/2: 56: this South African educator uses critical-creative pedagogy and critical hope among a set of social change pedagogies as a model for curriculum change in development/health communication.
I will also get a personal experience of this geographical boundary crossing when I deliver a workshop at Mahidol University International College (MUIC) in Bangkok later this month, as part of a series of innovation workshops to celebrate its 60th anniversary.
Where to from here?
It's clear that CCP has become part of a pedagogical movement of collective experimentation with innovative creative teaching methods. They work to open up university education to encourage students to use their learning to address contemporary challenges in critically aware, creatively engaged and collectively hopeful ways.This is exciting and in itself hopeful.
Most of the applications to date remain conceptual or small-scale, which raises the question of how critical-creative pedagogy could work in a larger setting. In the concluding chapter of my book I developed a number of experimental capstone projects as prototypes of broader CCP applications across departments, faculties or even university campuses. These were thought experiments only, but maybe the time has come to use CCP to reshape university structures at a larger scale? My work on curriculum redesign with a number of UK universities has shown me that this is starting to happen.
At the beginning of 2026, I look forward to growing this interdisciplinary and international network of educators who are like me interested in teaching to“build futures otherwise.”
