Abstract:

Creativity and innovativeness play a key role in the future work life. It has been predicted that majority of the professions we know now will not exist in 20 years and many of the future professions we can’t even imagine today. Innovative approach to work and resilience in continuously changing situations is required from all future professionals. 21st century skills, such as complex problem solving, critical thinking, curiosity and imagination are needed in order to adapt to the new demands of working life.

In Higher Education Institutions for Societal Engagement (HEISE) project it is seen, that challenges that used to be local are now global. During HEISE a new pedagogical model was developed, where students and stakeholders from the surrounding society identified and solved different societal challenges in joint challenge solving projects. Creativity and arts-based methods were used to tackle these challenges in joint teams in order to find new perspectives and fresh ideas. HEISE project was funded by Erasmus+ Strategic Partnerships for Higher Education.

This paper describes and analyses the social services bachelor students’ reflections on how they experienced creativity during the challenge solving project. Our data consists of students’ (N=37) learning diaries and insights on creativity and arts collected during the spring term 2019. Our results agree with earlier research, that creativity can be an enormous resource and asset in the demands of constantly changing working life. Creativity hand in hand with innovativeness could just be the most important working life skills in the 21st century, when we are facing global risks like climate change, aging population and increasing polarization of societies.

Keywords:

Creativity, innovativeness, 21st century skills.