A return to Wonderland: Exploring the links between academic identity development and creativity during doctoral education

ABSTRACT

Creativity is essential to knowledge production within universities and beyond. Yet, conditions for creativity receive scant scholarly attention as a feature of doctoral development, or as an element of institutional evolution within higher education. Even fewer authors have considered how creativity may be linked to doctoral students’ academic identity formation. In this paper, we analyse literature on creativity related to doctoral education for exploring the links to doctoral students’ academic identity formation. Building on the theoretical notions of social identity, role identity, and personal identity our results reveal three key links between creativity and academic identity formation in doctoral education: ‘Becoming a responsible scholar’ (connected to social identity), ‘Acting with informed agency’ (connected to role identity), and ‘Expressing the individual voice’ (connected to personal identity). Each of these paths to a creative and academic identity formation is coupled with social interaction that paves the way for certain doctoral pedagogies.

KEYWORDS:

• Creativity
• doctoral education
• academic identity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

B. Liezel Frick

B. Liezel Frick is an associate professor in the Department of Curriculum Studies and the director of the Centre for Higher and Adult Education at the Faculty of Education at Stellenbosch University (South Africa). Her research interests are within the broader field of doctoral education, with a particular focus on aspects of doctoral creativity and originality, learning during the doctorate, and doctoral supervision.

Eva M. Brodin

Eva M. Brodin is an associate professor at the Division for Higher Education Development at the Department of Educational Sciences, Lund University in Sweden. She is also a research associate at the Centre for Higher and Adult education at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. Her research is focused on doctoral students’ learning, especially in relation to their critical and creative thinking, and academic identity development. She is also teaching in doctoral supervision courses, and she has recently published literature on doctoral supervision.