Mission and Goals: Creativity & Innovation (C&I) supports, cultivates, and amplifies creative teaching and learning across campus. We do this by collaborating with faculty to integrate creative thinking and creative problem-solving activities into classes across divisions and by working directly with students in curricular and co-curricular contexts. We believe that fostering creativity supports Colorado College’s pillars of student transformation, thriving communities, and bold action and has a close relationship with the lenses of anti-racism and student mental health.   

To achieve the GPA necessary to attend an elite college like CC, our students have learned how to navigate traditional education systems effectively. However, the consequences of this proficiency can be quite debilitating: students can be anxious about their performance and often equate making mistakes with failure. But anything worth learning comes from trying things that haven’t yet been tried. And, as the world becomes increasingly complex and confusing, students will need to step beyond what is already known or has been tested to effect positive change in the world.   

C&I provides multiple opportunities, within and outside of classes, for students to reconnect with their innate creativity and develop creative confidence.1 We do this by helping students develop the building blocks of creativity, which include:   

• tolerance of ambiguity,   
• openness to experience,   
• willingness to risk failure to explore ideas  
• ability to find unexpected connections between distinctly different concepts across domains and disciplines  

Creativity is often described as the process that leads to something new, original, and valuable to others. Rather than defining creativity in terms of outcomes, C&I focuses on cultivating creative thinking processes. In this way, as Ronald Beghetto and Vlad Glăveanu propose, creativity becomes a principled engagement with the unfamiliar and a willingness to approach the familiar in unfamiliar ways¹. By foregrounding creative processes over products, students learn to bring exploration and productive risk-taking into their daily education and lives. Developing creative thinking processes also enables possibility thinking, which helps students transform uncertainty into multiple options for creative thought and action². 

Creative development rarely follows a linear path; students may be exposed to ideas and exercises that bolster creative thinking in one context and find it challenging to transfer creative thinking and problem-solving practices in different contexts. Therefore, C&I uses a campus-wide approach that reaches students indirectly through their academic courses and directly through our non-curricular programs. When students are exposed to creativity-building pedagogies in disciplinary and personal contexts, they are better equipped to apply creative thinking skills in various situations and contexts. Also, as creativity requires in-the-moment focus and promotes self-knowledge, students often experience improved well-being as they develop their creative thinking and problem-solving capacities.  

As creativity is an integral part of Colorado College, C&I endeavors to help faculty develop their creative teaching practices and share the richness of what happens in classrooms across campus. We do this by collaborating with faculty members across divisions to design and implement discipline-specific creative thinking and creative problem-solving activities in their classes. (To date, we have worked with ninety-five faculty members across all disciplines.) By assisting faculty in developing their creative confidence and supporting the integration of creativity pedagogies into their classes, we aim to embed creativity more firmly as a lens that permeates the college.

While students may engage with C&I in various ways throughout their CC careers, our program offers a pathway for students to build and operationalize their creative confidence.

By working within and outside of the curriculum, Creativity & Innovation seeks to provide a through-line that helps students find connections between different aspects of their academic coursework and their personal development. In this way, our program complements and expands upon the creativity-building elements intrinsic to a liberal arts education. In The Creative College: What Higher Education Can Learn from Kindergartens and Neuroscience, David W. Oxby argues that embracing the cross-disciplinary thinking that the liberal arts provides can increase students’ creativity by pushing them out of their comfort zones and demanding that they make connections between disparate disciplines. He writes, “...by taking courses across multiple disciplines, a linear thinker can develop the ability to make leaps of insight.” Further, the block planWe believe that C&I leverages and amplifies the benefits of CC’s liberal arts education to help students develop the creative confidence they need to take courageous actions and envision new futures.  

1. Vlad P. Glăveanu & Ronald A. Beghetto, “Creative Experience: A Non-Standard Definition of Creativity,” Creativity Research Journal, 2020.

2. Ronald A. Beghetto, “Leveraging Micro-Opportunities to Address Macroproblems: Toward an Unshakeable Sense of Possibility Thinking,” in Creative Intelligence in the 21st Century, Don Ambrose & Robert J. Sternberg, editors, 2016.