Pedagogical Creativity

I've been thinking a lot about creativity this week, what it means to be creative, and how some folk feel more comfortable defining themselves as creative than others. Ultimately these thoughts had me thinking about what pedagogical creativity could be, and how often we usurp the word creative to instead use the ever present innovative instead, even though both of those words are very different in origin and connotation.

Discourse around generative AI in academe sees a lot of calls for innovation, which is kind of funny because what we are seeing instead is a return to in-person blue-book testing, which I feel is kind of the opposite of innovation connotatively. Yet innovation etymologically is a mid 15th century word, from the Latin, that means to restore or renew. So I guess a return to in-person testing is a restoration of old ways of being.

Creative is a relatively newer word and we thinking about it in relation to imagining something, we can look to folk like Wordsworth and the 19th century uses of the term from there. To the root create shares a 15th century Latin origin space to innovation, but feels much more hopeful in that it means to bring forth, to make, and to grow. Creation is supposed to beget new things for the future, where innovation literally means to go back. So I don't know about you, but I am really pushing towards team creation/creativity right now as where we could focus as we start new semesters and think through our pedagogy. What does that look like in practice though? This is an important thing to remember to embody praxis instead of just empty words and theory.

Well last week when I said I wanted to write more in the fall, what I really meant is to write more creatively. I want to focus on giving myself space to write more poetry and work on short fiction. And this is still very true. But I am also seeing spaces where the more writing I will do is also be more academic in nature, or live in the grey literature space like this blog and the Accessagogy podcast does. And this kind of writing can still, and in fact, must use more creativity or evoke the same kind of creative spark that I feel and hope to inspire with my poetry. There is room for different types of organization and media in that writing.

Similarly what I am hoping to see more of in post-secondary spaces is less leaning on "innovation", and more leaning on pedagogical creativity, and pedagogy that is foundationally inspired by creative arts like writing, drama, performance, music, visual art, material arts, those kinds of things. I am already seeing this tendency a bit in the HigherEd podcasts talking about drama and performance pedagogy, as well as in journal articles emphasizing the same. What this leads to is pedagogy that is in different ways a bit more sensory minded, so that we can get away from the only thinking of the cognitive of Blooms and see affective and psychomotor registers as well in the eduspaces we are in different ways. In ways that acknowledge different bodyminds, and the dynamic nature of disability. 

There are already great groups of folk doing this kind of work in the spaces I am in here. Groups like Mirror Theatre that do participatory theatre to enact socio-cultural issues or provide more tactile means of understanding a concept as applied theatre. Or faculty bringing in more Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles and supporting reflection activities or assessments where students don't have to only write, but can draw or even enact depending on the course, context, and student demographic. Or having more literal materials in class to help process thoughts and ideas, like fidget spinners, modelling clay, connector bricks or other tangibles. The more we are creative with how we can be creative, it becomes a movement away from a disciplinary signature pedagogy that may need more current review and revisiting.

So what can you do to bring more creativity in your class as options? When's the last time you thought about the role of improv in your course, seminar, or tutorial? When's the last time you took song lyrics and made it appropriate to a scientific phenomena? (You know The Irrepressibles In this Shirt to explain proprioception- trust me this is a TED Talk I want to give one day and don't be surprised if this exact thing comes up a lot this term in my writing.) What does pedagogical creativity feel like for you right now? We should be talking about this more.