Academic Engagement
C&I supports faculty with integrating creativity-building pedagogies into their classes. Engaging students in these pedagogies allows them to develop creative confidence and apply their creative thinking and problem-solving skills in academics and beyond. We also endeavor to support faculty in recognizing and augmenting their own creativity practices, recognizing the impact when they model those to their students.
"I want us to learn the existing science, but I want us to learn to do it playfully as scientists truly do: have a goofy idea, see how the data support and refute that idea, revise and repeat. We live in the messy middle and we systematically converge and diverge as we work. It is odd that instead of teaching these skills to college students from the start, we instead teach them "facts" that they need to learn as a foundation before they can start to play."
Jason Weaver, Associate Professor, Asian Studies; Psychology
The alchemy and algebra of creativity
Our academic engagement supports both the alchemy and algebra of creativity.
Creative Thinking is the alchemy of creativity, it's a mindset, a way of approaching the world with an open and inquisitive mind. It is characterized by a high degree of innovation, divergent thinking, and risk-taking. Creative thinking involves cultivating the ability to bring all of who we are into any given situation: our intellects, our emotions, and our embodied selves. In the classroom, creative thinking activities within courses challenge students to develop imaginative ways of knowing, acting, and working together.
Creative Problem-Solving is the algebra of creativity. Creative problem-solving techniques provide structured ways of finding multiple creative responses to problems in various contexts. Using these techniques can help students overcome entrenched thinking patterns that may inhibit their abilities to find new, original solutions and can strengthen their abilities to identify and solve problems in unexpected ways.
Examples of Exercises
Possibility Thinking
Possibility Thinking allows faculty and students to cultivate Creativity Mindsets through the practice of various embodied pedagogies, such as Possibility Books and exercises that include sound walks, meditation, and movement exercises. These forms of Creative Critical Inquiry intentionally insert divergent and convergent thinking, as well as incubation into classes in which we often rush to seek solutions.
Creative Communication Modules
Creative Communication modules help students access their creativity and find new ways to communicate complex, discipline-specific concepts to audiences who may not share the same context. The activities teach students how to focus on cultivating their audience’s understanding rather than their performance and also help them hone visual, analogical, and data communication skills. Modules can be offered as stand-alone units or combined into a thematically linked sequence throughout a course.
Concept Mapping
A concept map is a visual learning tool representing meaningful relationships between and among concepts. It constitutes a form of systems thinking that involves examining the connections among elements of a larger whole and identifying how they interact. Systems thinking can lead to insights into a system’s structure, how it changes over time, and its underlying assumptions by focusing on a holistic, big picture rather than individual parts.
Visual Learning
Vision provides us with data about our surroundings that we cannot obtain in other ways, for example, facial expressions or colors, and helps us learn skills, copy movements, and respond to other people's emotions without conscious intention. Cultivating the ability to look at an object, image, landscape, experiment, or situation closely without drawing premature conclusions as to meaning provides a more robust ‘bank’ of information that can lead to nuanced and creative interpretations. C&I offers a variety of exercises and programs that develop students’ capacity for visual learning. We offer a variety of observation exercises that can be modified to support multiple learning goals.
Creative Problem-Solving in Action
C&I offers a variety of problem-solving exercises that can help students leverage their intellect and imagination in equal measure to solve messy, ill-defined problems, and generate ideas. Exercises include: Solving Problems through Metaphor, Ten Questions for Problem-Finding, Introduction to Design Thinking, and Create in a Flash.
Community Building and Well-Being
Across the spectrum, creative work promotes community because, in trying something novel whose outcome is uncertain, creative work entails risk. When undertaken in a supportive environment, such creative risk allows students to experience vulnerability. Exercises such as Lyrical Questions, Multiple Narratives, and Meet Your Muse connect students to their innate creativity and cultivate empathy for others, which forges bonds that last well beyond the boundaries of a block.