Teaching artfully: On encountering the unknown in higher education

In this contribution I address the challenges and rewards that are brought by teaching creatively in higher education. By looking auto-ethnographically at my own practice as educator at undergraduate and graduate programs in Denmark, I describe a number of creative educational tools: metaphor-building by means of artefacts, integrated use of visuals in lectures, and dramaturgical structure in educational design. My objective in teaching creatively is to inspire my students, who are educators-to-be or facilitators of educational processes and are used to problem-based-learning approaches (PBL), to (more) critical and original thinking. The aspiration of the present contribution is to disseminate my thoughts, reflections, experiences and engage in a conversation with a scholarly field, to whom academia is much more than logical-verbal transmission of knowledge.