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Creativity

Educating for a Chaotic World

By | Social Enterprise, The Thagomizer | 3 Comments

With unemployment remaining a serious issue in the United States, many students are returning to school in hope that it will give them a leg up in the workforce. Formalized education is supposed to confer upon students a higher status that allows for greater opportunities, yet sadly this is not always the case.

Growing up in Michigan, you would always hear people lament of the days when you could graduate high school and go over and get a decent job at the auto plant with a wage large enough to support your family and a decent pension. In fact my high school was strategically located just across the street from a GM plant so young students could graduate and get their union card on the same day. Unfortunately as G. Asenath Andrews, the principal of Catherine Fergueson Academy points out now, “If you don’t finish high school, you can get a job at McDonalds, and if you finish high school, you can get a job at McDonalds.” What’s the incentive for education then, if after twelve years you still find yourself with the same options?

So the question, then, is how do you create an education system that expands a student’s economic options? Perhaps the most direct solution to this problem is job training. For example Youth Build employs low-income youth to build affordable housing in their communities while getting their GED or high school diploma. The youth in the program get on-the-job training and leadership development in the program that prepares them to enter the workforce. At my own high school, General Motors offered full scholarships for students in engineering as long as they promised to work for the company for two years after they finished their schooling. Colleges around the country are also working with industries to create professional programs that help train students for available jobs.

But what happens when the economy shifts again, and the skills you have are no longer applicable? How do you train students not only for the jobs available now but the jobs in the future? That’s where 21st Century Learning comes in, a framework for teaching students the skills they need to succeed in our new economy. Instead of focusing solely on knowledge (i.e. reading and math test scores), they focus on giving students the tools they need to find out and apply information to real world problems.The 21st Century Framework focuses on the 4Cs – Critical thinking and problem solving, Communication, Collaboration, and Creativity and innovation. It shifts the role of a teacher from being a sage on the stage, imparting knowledge to students, to being a guide on the side who helps students find the information for themselves. In this way they are preparing students for the lifetime of learning necessary to succeed in this economy.

One example of 21st Century Learning in action is the Dewitt Creativity Group, which re-imagines a school as a center of creativity for the community. As founders Jason LaFay and Jeff Croley state, “This is an economy that requires people to develop and exercise skills and forms of knowledge such as: critical thinking, technological proficiency, willingness to accept the differences of others, networking, constant reinvention of the self, and the ability to design and implement innovative concepts/practices. Without these skills and forms of knowledge individuals, communities, and countries will fail to prosper.”

To train students for the new economy they’ve turned their classroom into a center of creativity where students work on initiatives such as the Adopt-A-Business program, where students gain real work world experiences by providing creative services to businesses. In this program, students are presented with real-life problems. They have to research, propose, and implement solutions, teaching them how to apply their education to business needs.

While I was working in Detroit, I got to work with Catherine Fergueson Academy, a school for young pregnant women and mothers committed to providing a relevant education that prepares them to succeed. Their school puts their students in real-world work places and engages in discourse and dialogue on setting and reaching their educational goals. One of the first things you’ll notice about the school is they have a working farm in the back where students are trained in how to grow their own food and agribusinesses, how to make a profit selling the products of their harvest. Students take care of bees, an orchard of fruit trees, vegetables, and even goats and rabbits.  The farm teaches them a new way of thinking about the planet and consumption, how to take care of themselves and their family, and how to make money.

In order to become successful in this chaotic economy we need to train our students to become part of what Fast Company calls Generation Flux. “What defines GenFlux is a mind-set that embraces instability, that tolerates–and even enjoys–recalibrating careers, business models, and assumptions.” From the earliest age, young people are asked to identify what “they want to be when they grow up” but what happens if the world no longer needs automobile workers or firefighters? Members of Generation Flux need to be able to pick up new skills quickly, solve problems, and make connections to constantly create new opportunities. In order to train this new generation we need schools to become hacker spaces, labs, and incubators where students can experiment, collaborate, research, and apply what they’ve learned.

Today much of my career has been built on working with social media. But when I graduated high school, Facebook was still exclusive to college students and Twitter hadn’t been invented yet. There were no classes on social media in college but I was able to build the knowledge of the new technology on my own and apply what I had learned about best practices in communications to this new medium. To succeed in today’s economy a student needs to be a detective to figure out how to learn whatever skill is relevant to the day’s realites and connect the dots between what is already known. We need new systems of education that are focused on building skills for the modern workplace and once again providing an education that opens doors for new economic opportunities.

IMAGE CREDIT: Courtesy of Bill Owen

Creative Collisions

By | Art & Social Change, Of Love and Concrete | No Comments

We often think of collisions as destructive…the intent, head-down student colliding with another, papers flying everywhere; two cars running into one another at an intersection. We are also emotionally sensitive to the destructive nature of collisions. The person who judges our physical form. The person who critiques our idea. The person who confronts our interpretation of the world. We know that collisions alter the world.

If we look deeper into nature we find that collisions are among the most creative activities on earth. At the subatomic level, it is the action of two bodies/energies colliding that changes everything. We move from a menu of a proton, neutron, and electron to 118 different elements and an innumerable amount of molecules. Similar things could be said about biodiversity. As a result of DNA being torn apart and recombined endless combinations of individual species are created. Collisions create. Collisions are places where opportunity is found.

Powerful creative change also occurs when we consider the result of the human mind colliding with new perspective. It is the point where our understanding is expanding beyond its current state. Yes it certainly happens knowingly and willingly in an academic setting. However it can happen at any point where our mind welcomes a new perspective. It can happen if we explore the judgement that others have for us. It can happen if we consider the critique of the idea we have been forming for months. It can happen if we indulge in the new world view that shatters our upbringing. Creativity is often rooted in the point our perspective collides with a differing view. Collisions change us. Collisions change the world!

Art is a powerful intersection for mental collisions! It is that captivating song lyric that elucidates a human relationship using an unexpected analogy. It is the novel that delves deep into the current human condition but is set eons in the future. It is the shiny contemporary metal sculpture set in front of a railroad station that makes us ask why. Art is an extremely powerful platform because it allows for safe and meaningful collisions of human minds.

Along with art, events can serve as intersections for creative accidents. Three years ago four gentlemen decided to heighten the collisions among Baltimore’s creative thinkers. Specifically they were interested in mixing artists, technologists, social change makers and entrepreneurs, or what has been deemed the creative class. The four men operated in these distinctive silos and valued their own relationships. They realized that others might value similar relationships. Thus CreateBaltimore was born.

On a weekend in mid-February 2013, the third annual fest of collisions among Baltimore’s creative minds took place at the Johns Hopkins University. Over the course of eight hours some of the cities most creative minds explored 18 topics to enhance the city. There were no physical products produced. There were no new services delivered.  However, foundations for meaningful relationships were laid, inspiration was found for new projects, and ideas came into contact with reality in front of a disparate but welcoming audience. The collisions of CreateBaltimore are a birthing ground for change in Baltimore!

This year’s organizers are working to share the wealth of creative carnage that resulted from the collision of minds. The event’s twitter feed is littered with ideas, and the website will be updated over the next weeks with spin-off events and projects.

When minds collide with new ideas in art or at events, creativity abounds and changing the world becomes a possibility.

IMAGE CREDIT. By Michael Wyszomierski (FLKR).