Shouldn’t they be out there playing or something?

Some mental notes turned to words after a very interesting couple of months navigating the puzzle of creativity and innovation during our first Creativity and Innovation week.

Creativity: Are we born with it or do we need to learn it? can it be practiced? what prevents it from happening? does it have an economy? does it need an ecosystem to flourish? does it have enemies? should it be practiced? is there such a thing as good and bad creativity? has creativity ever harmed someone?

Innovation: same as above but with a more scientific optic?

This is what i’ve leared:

Making Human Connections: With the internet age, knowledge is available to most of us at the click of a mouse. Instead, bring experts in to talk about their life and routines. Many experts really like talking to students even when their experience of school was terrible.

Evolution of the Job Market: A quick glance through LinkedIn and you come across positions like Directors of Creativity, Cultural Brokers, Innovation and Disruptor Theorist, Unapologetic Marketing Truth Teller, Cultural Managers, People Culture Specialist, Human Technologies, Innovators in pretty much any field, Coaches and Well Being Managers. Same old jobs with new fancy names? Or a real change in the job markets? Are we preparing students for these kinds of positions

Ideas vs Creativity: Don’t confuse being creative with having ideas. The latter is much easier and it’s programmed in the human consciousness. We all have ideas, our brain is generating them all the time. What is challenging  is to realise those ideas. Perseverance, tenacity, courage, collaboration, inventiveness… Character education.

The Hidden Curriculum:  Intrinsic motivation, activating that desire to learn is necessary and it’s one of the hardest things to do. Offer opportunities to work on intrinsic motivation. It will give students the fuel they need to keep discovering and trying things, to be curious and be willing to accept change. You might have been a very average painter at the age of 5 but that doesn’t mean that you should stop doing it. And its not because you are a great painter at the age of 5  that you are going to be the next Picasso.

 

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4 Comments
  1. Really interesting thoughts Felipe. I agree that often times we make the number rather than journey more important. Creativity helps balance us as individuals and the more we’re allowed to fail the more we strive to be creative!

  2. There has to be some link with motivation. The apathy is a death trap- i once had an idea that creativity is dead, because you don’t need skills to make a photo look good anymore, just a thumb and access to filters. That used to take forever, but now you can do it so easy, and if you can’t figure it our immediately, the apathy sets in and its given up on.

    • Thanks for the message Stephen. Motivation is a big one. I think skills are changing, it’s true that one click nowadays can make something look/sound great but funnily enough the analogue ways seem to be coming back somehow, look at how vinyl is suddenly on the rise. Maybe the dark room will bee cool again!
      After Kodak’s failure to jump on the digital photography wagon maybe they’re working on a massive scale analogue photography comeback!

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