Local academics conceive new way to teach creativity

The University of Malta is spearheading a groundbreaking degree course in creativity that will involve the study of five disciplines from both the sciences and arts.

The European Masters in Performer Studies (E-MAPS) will combine performer studies with neuroscience, psychology, philosophy and sport sciences.

It will be offered jointly by five universities and will open to students in 2007. The next three years will be used to design the programme, aided by substantial EU funding.

The experience of merging the different disciplines, it is felt, will turn out students uniquely equipped to do important new research into creativity. They would have the capacity to look at performance, work and life itself from a holistic perspective which no other course would be able to offer. And they would be able to approach any career they might choose to pursue with enhanced creative abilities.

"Nowhere else is this type of combination of disciplines available. Science and the arts are almost always kept apart," said neuroscientist Richard Muscat, who conceived the programme with John Schranz, senior lecturer at the Mediterranean Institute's Theatre Studies Programme.

Dr Schranz and Prof. Muscat, who is from the university's Department of Physiology and Biochemistry, will also be the coordinators of the programme, which will have its base at Tal-Qroqq.

Perhaps the most innovative aspect of the course is that the disciplines will not be kept separate, but will be merged in both lectures and student dissertations.

Each lecture will be delivered by two lecturers from different disciplines (and possibly different universities). This will in itself be a creative process that will have the two disciplines feeding into each other, the lecturers bouncing ideas off each other - and the students looking at things in totally new ways.

The students' research project will have to be based on a minimum of two of the disciplines, again forcing them to take a creative approach.

"People coming from different disciplines look at the world through different-coloured glasses. Even though we're looking at the same thing, we interpret it in a different way. What we want to do is give our masters students the ability to look at things with several pairs of glasses on at the same time," said Prof. Muscat.

"They will not look at a particular aspect of life from just, say, the point of view of cells working, as I would as a neuroscientist, or just from the point of view of a psychologist or philosopher. They will learn to associate and synthesise disparate pieces of information. They will be able to look at things holistically in a real sense.

"If you want to be a creative citizen, you are better served by understanding all the different bits of the jigsaw puzzle, than one bit alone. That thinking can then be applied to any career.

"They'll be one up on us, no doubt about it," he added, laughing.

Dr Schranz said the researchers created by the course would be well prepared to study the basis of creativity and what stimulates it. Such work could have far-reaching implications for a whole range of areas, from the school curriculum to mathematics or economics.

The EU has embraced the project enthusiastically, providing just over €100,000 for the design stage. This is the third highest amount of funding among the 50 projects it has approved this year for assistance under its Erasmus programme in curriculum development.

Students will be able to take study units in any of the five universities involved. These are Italy's Roma La Sapienza, Paris XIII in France, De Montfort University in Leicester, UK, and Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland.

"This is in itself a highly exciting proposition, enabling students to start envisaging a broader, more international framework for their studies and research," said Dr Schranz.

Locally, Prof. Muscat and Dr Schranz teach the xHCA (Questioning Human Creativity as Acting) interdisciplinary research programme which has provided input to international brain research related to performance.

xHCA was launched in 1995 between the Mediterranean Institute's Theatre Studies Programme and the Laboratory of Behavioural Neuroscience in the Department of Physiology and Biochemistry. The unique programme set out to study the work of the performer - be he or she a musician, dancer or actor - with the tools of the cognitive sciences.

It was discovered that the field of performance provided a unique way to study how training the brain's motor programme could boost memory, learning and creativity.

It was also realised that a more formal European network was needed to structure and implement these studies and make the results more widely available. The E-MAPS programme will facilitate the creation of such a network and structure.

"In a world where immediate communication has become the norm, disparate fields are evermore seeking potentially new encounters to share their own research, ideas and visions. This masters programme, once launched in 2007, will provide one such ground for encounter, enabling the dynamic individual to find ample opportunity to manifest his own creative and individual vision," said Dr Schranz.