Academic development is a creative act

This paper argues that academic development is a creative act. Creative acts have potential to inspire, critique, inform and in many cases to change. The creativity literature identifies a number of core features of creative acts that assist in developing independent creative practitioners. Those features are observing, attending to relationships, engaging and persisting, exploring and risk-taking, problem-solving, intuiting, reflecting and envisaging. The realm of academic development in tertiary education necessitates many of those same features to support the complex human interactions involved in bringing about change in learning and teaching. In this paper we explore how the core features of creative acts are utilised in our work as academic developers. We argue that conceptualising academic development as a creative act is of value because the intent of the work is to develop creative educators who are critically reflective and responsive to change within challenging tertiary educational environments.