As a visual artist, I have an immense passion for encouraging and empowering my students' creativity in the classroom. Unlike traditional methods of teaching, whereas the professor implicitly communicates an expectation for students to be passive recipients of knowledge and the course assessments are designed to test a culmination of memorized content, I prefer a different approach. Truly embracing the power of creativity in the classroom and how to leverage it in my teaching strategy prepares my students with the necessary 21st Century skills they need to succeed in the global workforce.
I believe each student has talents and strengths unique to them and the educational process is meant to nurture and unearth what is dormant, and in the stages of development. I believe that by encouraging our students' creativity, they can think outside of the box and truly enjoy the educational process as autonomous co-creators of knowledge. Active-learning activities that incorporate creative projects not only give student new skill sets, they provide students with an original voice to express their viewpoints and embrace critical-thinking. Creative pedagogy teaches learners how to learn creatively and how to gain confidence in utilizing their imaginations to derive unique solutions.
On a quest to delve deeper into creative pedagogy, I earned my Adobe Creative Educator in Higher Education certification. This course provides a pedagogical framework bolstering the value of creativity in the classroom. It encompasses the integration of creative teaching methods, designing creative lesson plans, and fostering a creative learning environment. This certification also addresses the principles of great instructional design to infuse creativity into higher education courses while encouraging students to express themselves in creative ways to demonstrate knowledge acquisition.
In relation to the revised Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning Objectives, I know creative thinking and expression is the highest level of learning, the pinnacle for cognitive tasks. The ability for my students to design and invent new solutions not only empowers them to gain confidence in their decision-making, it creates an environment where uniquely innovative perspectives are welcome. This course taps into this process, in a very practical manner. I really appreciated how this course outlined how to write and plan creative learning outcomes for university courses and how to scaffold and sequence creativity into a course. It made me realize that we do not just want our students to "learn", we want them to "create" and innovate by utilizing the knowledge acquired in the courses we deliver.
This course was very much theoretical as well as it was practical, providing concrete examples regarding implementation. One of my favorite parts of this course was how it emphasized the importance of fostering a diverse and inclusive learning environment for all students, integrating summative and formative feedback, and how to personalize and differentiate the process of teaching to enhance creative learning outcomes. I can honestly say that I am looking forward to even more educational resources from Adobe that emphasize the creative process and how to utilize Adobe tools to build creative teaching strategies for all students.
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