Creativity, participation and digital education: reflections from a visiting scholar at Leeds

From September to December 2025, the School of Education hosted visiting scholar Ms Yaqi Wou from the Open University China.

Under the supervision of Professor Chrissi Nerantzi, the visit focused on a comparative study of how various social media platforms are today used to help boost learners participation in both open and distance education contexts in the United Kingdom and China.

“Beyond advancing a specific research project, the visiting period offered an opportunity to engage deeply with the academic culture at Leeds, particularly its strong commitment to creativity, critical inquiry and socially just approaches to digital education. Through participation in lectures, workshops, seminars and interdisciplinary discussions, I was able to rethink both my research assumptions and my understanding of what participatory learning can mean in large-scale digital contexts.”

 

Yaqi Wou’s research explored the role played by social media as part of a broader participatory learning ecology, rather than simply as a communication or promotional tool. Drawing on data from UK universities alongside data from the Open University of China allowed for an in-depth examination into how learner voice, identity, and engagement are shaped within digitally mediated learning environments.

Social presence and relationality were noted as important factors in sustaining participation.

“Engagement, particularly in open and distance education, cannot be reduced to activity metrics or platform affordances alone. Instead, it is deeply connected to learners’ sense of belonging, visibility and recognition within a learning community.”

Under the supervision of Professor Chrissi Nerantzi and through working with the #creativeHE community and the new Imaginative Curriculum Research and Scholarship Centre (ICRSC), Yaqi Wou explored and engaged with various creative pedagogies through lectures and workshops which challenged conventional assumptions about curriculum design. One such workshop uses pizza-making as a metaphor and invites participants to explore curriculum construction by reframing portions of learner’s lives, their experiences, interests, and contexts, as different “ingredients”.

“This deceptively simple metaphor opened up deeper reflection on issues of power, agency and participation in education: who decides what belongs in the curriculum, whose knowledge is valued, and how meaning is co-created through interaction.”

 

The visit provided an opportunity for meaningful cross-cultural academic dialogue, prompting extensive discussion around how issues of participation, scalability and social justice are addressed in systems operating at very large scale, highlighting the importance of comparative perspectives and reinforcing the value of dialogue between different educational systems.

“Such exchanges highlighted the importance of comparative perspectives in current debates on digital inclusion and reinforced the value of dialogue between different educational systems.”

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