Creativity and Multicultural Communication.
What does that mean? It's the title of a Massive Online Open Course I've been taking at Empire State College, SUNY.
Creativity, the act of being creative and the study of it is the basis of a Masters or Science program at Buffalo State, SUNY. Creativity is in part what we do with our imaginations when we are given time and space. Often creative collaborations can solve puzzles that are difficult to solve on our own. Musicians discover this when writing and composing work. Scientists also work alone and often in teams testing, hypothesizing, researching,and gathering more and more information to prove a point or a thesis.
I didn't think of theses things when I signed up for the class. I was thinking more in the lines of creativity and talking, or creativity and other people in the community and how to either bring people together and understand something about them or myself in the doing. Maybe it is the same thing.
I asked my professor what could I do for the final project, "Whatever you want."
the course was pretty open.
The arts in education organization I work with asked me to manage a one day a week after-school program for teens at risk of social and academic failure. For 4 hours a day they met at the library had a meal and took part in music, theatre, visual, and or dance workshops. Each discipline had a 6 week residency.
I wanted to have each participant create a blog, or a podcast in which they would take turns hosting. But most of my tenure was spent with dealing with discipline and focus issues. There was absenteeism, attention deficit issues, self esteem problems, and anger issues between the teens in my group.
I felt I wasn't as prepared as I thought I was.
I created a website for my final project that told the story of the program. Using photographic images of field trips, and art making workshops, video recordings of original poetry, audio recordings of songs they wrote and also a collection of their original poetry written during writing workshops I lead.
I learned so much during the 12 weeks I lead this program. I learned about a culture within my community that
I thought I knew all about, the culture of a modern urban youth.
I considered myself hip and cool, someone who knows what's going on and maybe I do, but I am not a teenager anymore and there are lots of things that I now take for granted. Lots of feelings and daily disturbances, people, that I may have misunderstood in the past but today as a middle aged woman, perceive much differently. I have experience.
My daughters, my sons think that I am a cool parent. They say their father and I are some of the coolest they know, but I preface that by saying, "Yes, I'm a cool parent but I am still a parent, and I was a lot cooler before I became one."
As an artist and as an educator I feel I made an impact on the students I lead for those 12 weeks. I was asked to take over a 4 day a week summer program with a very different population, and a replacement was found to replace me in the "at risk" program.
The kids were upset, I was upset. the change happened after a challenging event which removed two participants in the program after a cell phone was stolen. This theft came after an the first day of an extremely successful music workshop. I reported the incident and the events to my superiors and our partners. The next day I was reassigned. I saw it as a reprimand. It took me a few days to get over the feeling of having a project you started taken away from you, I worried about my program teens, they didn't like change and we were learning about each other.
Sometimes I see them traveling through the library, they give me hugs and tell me about the new projects they're working on. They ask me when I am coming back.
I am scheduled to lead a 6 week poetry residency with them in the fall. We will use the website I designed with their work samples and add the podcast component to it, we will also add more poems and other content that they may come up with to help enrich the site for them to own it.
As for Creativity and Multicultural Communication, I think my challenge in the course was sharing with my course mates. The idea of online classes for me is attractive because I can work on my time at my pace in my on space. However what I neglected to realize is that some courses rely on students to interact on some level at a more regular or even structured basis. I dealt with this class more like an independent study, with the goal of creating a final project. For me that meant doing what I normally do, work alone and checking in when I need to. Unfortunately this type of behavior doesn't aid in the 'Communication' part of the course. And that takes us to the idea of life-long learning.
This course uses the life-long learning approach of collaborative interaction, in other words, share with all of us what you have discovered as you discover it. Which can be very, very helpful when you are part of a group, a team of scholars. The problems that I was having with my after-school students, I could have discussed them during a twitter chat, or on a face-book post. The rest of my classmates could have had an opportunity to learn about my puzzle and through this discourse we could come up with a solution earlier, or not, and they could have just learned something else about the world they live in, the 'Multicultural' part of the course.
We don't live in a bubble. College is about sharing, learning, researching, collaborative learning.
Musicians, actors, athletes, scientists, and educators know about the power of collaborative learning, collaborative art making, collaborative problem solving. We also know that there are many lessons to be learned alone. Having access to a creative team and knowing when and how to best use that team comes with knowing yourself and the project.
This link will take you to the website project www.writeactplay.wix.com/mostatrisk
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