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.
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| 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!
