Reflections on Teaching

Further thoughts on our Teaching Reflections:

Masking Tape Visual Piece as seen at Decodova Museum.

Masking Tape Visual Piece by Thomas.

Martha Kuhlman:

Does every assignment need a rubric?

What would make a creative assignment “successful” for both the teacher and the students? (Success could likely be different things.)

Chen Zhang:

Does competition help/hinder the creative process?

How does evaluation of both peer and professor play a role in improvement?

What is “open innovation”? (See Chen’s slides)

Kristen Park:

How can we create a space for creativity?

What would the container for creativity look like?

How might saturation projects help students hold and create a space for creativity? (Saturation projects: a project that asks students to go back again and again to an idea/object, but look at it from new and different angles or manipulate it with new or different mediums.)

Rebekah Greene:

How do we clear a space in students’ minds for analytical thought?

Can we give them permission to have a “space of freedom” for random thoughts and expressions, for aesthetic averageness, for mediocre reflections?

Does such a space become both a mechanism to clear the mind for more critical reflection, as well as serve as fodder for deeper creative thought?

Thomas Hartl:

How do we help students get “into the mind” of the question so that they do not rely on ineffective and unsustainable rote memorization?

Are tricky questions ever valuable?

How do we get students to see the solution (the product/the end) and be curious about navigating the map from their current reality to that end that is presented? (The question to answer; answer to question spiral).

Display seen at MFA Gift Shop.

Version completed by Thomas and Zoe.

Jane McKay-Nesbitt:

Can students appreciate creativity by using audience as a means to focus their creativity?

Why can’t we measure the subjective components of creative work?

Why do we shy away from this?

Vanna Donoyan:

When students get fired up by an idea and they are taking the lead, how does one “manage” their creativity?

How do we escape the student conditioned need for a grade?

And how do we, as teachers, escape our reliance on that “need for a grade” as a means to motivate students?

Can we provide them with different “bars” to measure their process against?

Vanna's photographs of her garden.

Alan Olinsky:

What do you find when you actually run the data (example of the Titanic)?

How do you teach students to think about potential evidence they want to unearth from data?

Alex Perullo:

How do you measure the quality of learning when tackling so many issues—content, race, understanding of global complexity?

How can you “tackle” the difficulty subjects—like race—in a short expanse of time?

How do we trust to a context of learning that is broad enough (beyond our teaching) that these issues are being addressed elsewhere? (OR) How do we insure that such teaching is happening elsewhere?

Stefani Boyer:

How do we teach students to be adaptive and creative right on the spot?

Are we adaptive and creative “on the spot”?

How do we model this for students?

Some further general questions that emerged:

Evaluating creative work is vital because creativity cannot just be left to its initial messy stages. Those stages are important. However, as instructors our job is to make a space for the initial messiness and then teach them discernment and challenge them to be better. So, perhaps, the issue is less whether we should evaluate, but how we do this?

How do we insure that the work we are doing is sustained and supported elsewhere because repetition is key to learning? When teaching the subjects we do (on race or other subject) and the processes we do (like design, creativity or critical thinking), how do we insure its presence elsewhere? What parts of this are related to “trust,” “frustration,” “critical mass building,” etc.?

Focusing on our Practice

As the New Year is underway and the spring semester is about to begin, let’s keep refocusing on our practice. Hopefully, you have had some time to think about what it is that inspires you, what it is that undergirds your creative practice, and ways that you can nurture and encourage your own creativity.

The beautiful garden images
(both in our background and here) come from Martha Kuhlman.
Anticipating the Spring that will come!

I know that I am beating a dead horse when I say that in order to teach students to be creative, we have to find ways to challenge ourselves creatively. 

One way we have started doing that is by playing with some items at hand—our animal habitat, our first alteration of our books, our sketchbooks, our iPad minis, and our gathering of materials for our accordion books.  This spring we will add a few more creative practices to encourage more reflection and working with our hands.

In the next week, I will be sending out individual invitations to meet with you to talk about YOU and what it is you want to be developing this spring. We will go back to your initial application to the seminar, and then discuss some ways you can design your approach to our work together this semester to help further your creative practice and your pedagogy.

Thoughts for this blog commentary:

For this blog, let’s think further about some of the issues that emerged as we began our study of the AAUP creative thinking rubric.

Our discussion on the AAUP rubric lent some interesting insight into what we think about whether creativity emerges solely from a problem-solving approach. What might be the strengths or weaknesses of discussing it in this manner? Is a “problem” always the origin of creativity? Should it be? Do we inspire such thinking by the way we design assignments in our classes? Might there be ways to design prompts that are not rooted in problem-solving? What might be the value in that? Or not?

We talked about the levels of risk involved in creating, of exposing abilities in a group of peers? The rubric discusses the willingness to take risks and fail as a primary marker for measuring growth as a creative person. How are you experiencing that personally? How do you see this happening for your students?

And we talked about competencies as an important step in the creative process. How do we manage the line between the messy, generative, make lots of mistakes part of creativity, and the important part of practice, practice, practice? Creativity without competency is wonderful and fun and playful, but it can only get one so far. Creativity that is fun and playful and is then channeled and shaped and honed can become something much more.  Do we agree with these thoughts? If we do, how do we help our students to think through these steps?

Things to think about that are coming up:

For our February meeting, I would like to follow up on the suggestion that we devote time directly to the creative works we have had our students doing. Once the February date is set, we will put together a presentation/display of that work and devote that meeting to discussing what others have been doing and the successes and failures of those experiments. We will talk about this at our next session so everyone is clear on what we want to do.

Best wishes for the start of a creative semester!