The domain: Members of the #creativeHE community share an interest in creativity and innovation in learning, teaching, scholarship and research. The community is open to all educators and students and the wider public.  For the first few years of its operations there was a #creativeHE team with colleagues from different institutions who led activities linked to the community. In more recent years, #creativeHE has become a community led by the community and its active members. Since 2025 the #creativeHE community is part of the Imaginative Curriculum Research and Scholarship Centre based in the School of Education, at the University of Leeds.

The community is open to anybody who is interested in exploring creativity in learning and teaching within and beyond the UK. If you would like to join us, you can participate in the community activities which you will find here on this website.

The community: The #creativeHE community was founded in 2015 by Chrissi Nerantzi as an extension to the Greenhouse, a community of practitioners across Manchester Met that sprang out of the Creativity for Learning in Higher Education module, part of the MA in Higher Education and a related open course  she designed and led. After December 2016 the Greenhouse evolved into an open cross-institutional community under the leadership of Chrissi Nerantzi with 6 institutional team members who shared a common interest in creativity and knew each other professionally at the time.  Educators came together to learn and experiment, support each other as well as identify opportunities for collaboration and wider sharing of their work and research around creativity more widely. To find out more about our journey, click here.

The practice: The activities of the #creativeHE community and their interactions create a wide range of resources, opportunities for discussions and debates through a series of activities, including open courses and online discussions, local meetups when and where possible. Since the pandemic started in 2020,  activities were move online. We organise regular  meet-ups and  introduced the annual #creativeHE jam event (thank you Anna for the name!), usually in the summer to celebrate the work of community members and showcase their work highly interactive  ways. The format of the #creativeHE jam was used to develop the Global Culture Jam at Manchester Met and an openly licensed model programme template (Jam Jar) supported by a OE4BW mentor has also been developed.  We  collaborate with organisations on a regular basis and have conducted a range of scholarly activities and disseminate these through conferences and often open-access publications.

Our values are respect, collegiality and caring for each other, democratic dialogue and collaboration.

Creativity manifesto

The #creativeHE team and community, led by Creative Academic and in collaboration with the Centre for Imagination in Research, Culture and Education, synthesised by Prof. Paul Kleiman illustrates the collective guiding principles of this community. Our collective Creativity Manifesto is available here.

Important note: If you notice or are aware of any disrespectful, unprofessional behaviour, harrassment or bullying demonstrated by any member of #creativeHE, please get in touch with c.nerantzi @ leeds.ac.uk (without the spaces) and bring this to her attention. Such behaviour is not tolerated and we will remove members who act and interact in this way from the #creativeHE community immediately. 

last updated December 2025