Contemporary art in higher education: creative pedagogies in political economy

We propose that contemporary art, which reflects the problems and attitudes of our times, can be used as a way of promoting creativity in disciplines that are not traditionally associated with the arts. Whilst contemporary art is being used as a learning and teaching aid in higher education in a small number of disciplines, it is not normally used in disciplines dominated by rational discourse; an example is economics, on which we focus. We begin by reviewing the literature on art, education and creativity. We then perform an activity with students taking political economy. Students are given the task of selecting a work of contemporary art which “speaks” to them about political economy, followed by an assessed, in-class presentation on the connection between the piece of art and the subject of political economy. We run a focus group to assess the effectiveness of the activity in terms of encouraging the students to exercise and develop their creativity. We find that it is particularly effective at enabling them to establish innovative connections and associations, increasing their interest in learning and developing a personally relevant body of knowledge. Furthermore, taking into consideration contemporary art’s ability to highlight the problems of our times and to react to them, we consider whether the works presented by the students display these problems and are capable of offering solutions, or elements of solutions, to them, and find that they are indeed capable of doing so.