TEACHING in the field of the creative arts in higher education in Malaysia is a rewarding but also uphill task.

Tough, not because of what teaching entails in this field requires nor the type of students that come our way.

It is tough because of factors that enable yet also hinder (for the time being) a holistic understanding of what teaching “creativity” entails in good ol’ square and consumerist Malaysia.

I can only speak on behalf of private higher education in Malaysia, for that is where my bread and butter has been for almost 20 years, an interesting path considering that I had initially approached teaching as a passing phase that I thought I would only pursue for at least six months before moving on.

How wrong I was. I was hooked, realising the unquantifiable satisfaction that teaching brings, while also keeping one literally young at heart since your “clients” are essentially the same age range (18-22) if you stick to your guns in this vocation. 

Sometimes you can’t help but feel like one of those X-Men films where older freaks mentor younger ones on The Way, so that they won’t stray off the path, and provide the guidance that the elders so longed for but never received in their time.

There is plenty of truth this: as a Gen X who coincidentally transitioned into college life in the mid-90s, we arrived at the height of Malaysia’s so-called nascent as an Asian Tiger – oblivious to the political upheavals just around the corner that would have a long-term repercussion for the following 20-odd years into the present.

Simply put the ennui of American consumerist culture hit its nadir in mid-90s Malaysia and this was, to me at least, an important juncture of the country’s creative arts (a term still unheard of then) and its eventual appropriation into mainstream life.

For middle class teens growing up in the early to mid-90s, the typical cultural diet of many would have consisted of film, music and comics pretty much consistent with each other.

We shared the same references, TV shows and favourite music since mainstream media at the time was pretty much uniform prior to the arrival of the Astro and the Internet.

We consumed similar limited popular culture products.

Making music or film to earn a living was pipe dream since everybody still depended on public telephones to call friends when out of the house (and everyone still arrived to your date or appointment on time) and you had to save up money to actually get a piece of the most current music or film or comic (legally or illegally – they both still cost something).

Fast-forward to the present, digitalisation has rendered most art forms depleted of the similar value it held previously, while at the same time democratising artistic practices and creative endeavours.

The only problem is that it’s so accessible and convenient to create anything seemingly creative on the surface, that the history of how we arrived at this is easily forgotten.

This is where creative arts education is important, it creates an awareness of some continuity or tradition.

Back to teaching, the creative arts in higher education, the challenge for instructors and lecturers is finding a steady footing on the platform in which this vocation finds its home: universities.

While universities aren’t the sole proprietor of creative arts education, they are the most visible model.

Overseas, the institute or academy model is seen on equal ground, where vocational training is just as meaningful as a university degree.

However, we live in “developing” Malaysia where, like it or not, status and mobility still dictates most middle-class parents’ decisions for their children.

These are tied to the hip with the ability of the prized education to promise employment and all the trappings (and I emphasise the word “trap” here) of middle-class employment.

At the same time, lecturers in universities are also expected to fulfil their KPIs to “keep up with the Joneses”, ie chase university rankings.

As someone who innocently entered the higher education party with no real career ambition, I feel lucky to have been a spectator of the latter bloom of the higher education industry from its “golden years” in the 2000s – where full-time part-timers were common and you could earn a decent living just teaching two to three days a week at different institutions – to the present where the fetish for PhDs is the order of the day.

With the middle class is really caught between a rock and hard place in the present, I think there is a great need for us to re-evaluate our middle-class values, which seemingly tend to gravitate around crass consumerism and unfettered indulgence.

Personally, I still stand by my belief that the middle class has a duty to be interesting, not compliant. Yet compliance is such a totem of our shallow corporate ideology it’s hard to escape.

I tell my students that “creativity” is not about the fancy, perplexing nor “arty” but about problem solving.

This is why half-jokingly tell my colleagues that the first year of any university degree in the creative arts is rehabilitation –from the oft-cliched notions of what creativity entails from what it’s been compartmentalised in school and middle-class art classes.

Teaching creativity is really teaching resilience and self-reliance – qualities overlooked in the mainstream conversation about being creative. The root word of creative is create after all.

Malaysians are a creative lot by circumstance, but unfortunately mainstream compliant Malaysia has a lot of catching up to do since those in charge of running this enterprise are more scheming than creative in their quest to hold on to power. – April 22, 2022.

* Azmyl Yunor is a touring underground recording artiste, and an academic in media and cultural studies. He has published articles on pop culture, subcultures and Malaysian cultural politics. He adheres to the three-chords-and-the-truth school of songwriting, and Woody Guthrie’s maxim “All you can write is what you see”. He is @azmyl on Twitter.