Having been asked for a guest blog post about creativity

I direct an unusual graduate program called Critical and Creative Thinking (http://www.cct.umb.edu).  I think we do quite well in achieving our goal, which is to provide our mid-career or career-changing students with “knowledge, tools, experience, and support so they can become constructive, reflective agents of change in education, work, social movements, science, and creative arts.”   Before explaining my sense of creativity, let me explain why critical thinking is combined with creative thinking and also, ‘though it is not in the name, with reflective practice.

Critical thinking, creative thinking, and reflective practice are valued, of course, in all fields. In critical thinking we seek to scrutinize the assumptions, reasoning, and evidence brought to bear on an issue-by others and by oneself; such scrutiny is enhanced by placing ideas and practices in tension with alternatives. Key functions of creative thinking include generating alternative ideas, practices, and solutions that are unique and effective, and exploring ways to confront complex, messy, ambiguous problems, make new connections, and see how things could be otherwise. In reflective practice we take risks and experiment in putting ideas into practice, then take stock of the outcomes and revise our approaches accordingly.

Against this backdrop, my thinking is that creativity comes not out of individual inspiration, but from borrowing and connecting.  The more items in your tool box—the more themes, heuristics (rules of thumb), and open questions you are working with—the more likely you are to make a new connection and see how things could be otherwise, that is, to be creative.  Yet, in order to build up a set of tools that works for you, it is necessary to experiment, take risks, and reflect on the outcomes.  Such reflective practice is like a journey into unfamiliar or unknown areas—it involves risk, opens up questions, provides more experiences than can be integrated at first sight, requires support, and yields personal change.  We might then say that creativity is part of what happens to “journeying inquirers.”

As an educator, I like to play with the 3Rs (only one of which actually starts with an R).  Here (from page 257 of Taking Yourself Seriously) are the many Rs that journeying inquirers might pursue—sometimes focusing in, sometimes opening out—in their personal and professional development as critical, creative, and reflective practitioners.

Reading

Review

Reasoning w/ respect to evidence & alternatives

Relationship w/ oneself (moving towards autonomy)

Reflection & metacognition

wRiting

Relationships w/ peers & allies (dialogue & collaboration)

Risk & experiment

Rest

Rearrange, adapt & create

Reception: being Read, heard, & Reviewed

Relationships w/ authority (negotiate power & standards)

Revision (incl. dialogue around written work)

Relaxation

Research & evaluation (learning from the work of others & your own)

Respect (explore difference)

Responsibility (concern w/ aims, means & consequences)

Repose

Recursion & practice (address same concern from many angles & in variety of settings)

Reevaluation (of emotions at root of responses) so as to better take initiative

Reconstruction (personal/organizational/social change)

Critical, Creative and Reflective Practice: Contents of a possible booklet

The previous post introduced a possible booklet on supporting the development of critical thinking, creative thinking and reflective practice.  Here is a possible Table of Contents (drawn from article as well as from the book Taking Yourself Seriously).

Part 1
Sense of Place Map (with diagram or example)
Daily writing
Phases of Research & Engagement
The many Rs of personal and professional development
Making Space for Taking Initiative in and through Relationships
Developing a Critical Thinking manifesto (with example)
Supportive Listening
Varieties of feedback (excerpts from Elbow with permission) & example of believing and doubting
Challenges of supporting critical thinking
Avid learning/Probe-Connect-Reflect-Create Change
4Rs
Dialogue Process
5-phase format
Small group roles
“Office hours”
Conditions for a successful workshop

Part 2
Stories of people developing as reflective practitioners

Critical, Creative and Reflective Practice: Sketch of a possible booklet

The small critical thinking guides of Richard Paul and Linda Elder have received wide circulation, but the Critical & Creative Thinking graduate program at UMass Boston has something distinctive to convey about supporting the development of critical thinking, as well as creative thinking and reflective practice. Thus this sketch of a possible booklet.

A small guide to Critical, Creative and Reflective Practice

Tools and Processes

In a sense subscribed to by all teachers, critical thinking means that students are bright and engaged, ask questions, and think about the course materials until they understand well established knowledge and competing approaches. This becomes more significant when students develop their own processes of active inquiry, which they can employ in new situations, beyond the bounds of our particular classes, indeed, beyond their time as students. My sense of critical thinking is, however, more specific; it depends on inquiry being informed by a strong sense of how things could be otherwise. I want students to see that they understand things better when they have placed established facts, theories, and practices in tension with alternatives. At this level, critical thinking should not depend on students rejecting conventional accounts, but they do have to move through uncertainty. Their knowledge is, at least for a time, destabilized; what has been established cannot be taken for granted. Students can no longer expect that if they just wait long enough the teacher will provide complete and tidy conclusions; instead they have to take a great deal of responsibility for their own learning. Anxieties inevitably arise for students when they have to respond to new situations knowing that the teacher will not act as the final arbiter of their success. A high level of critical thinking is possible when students explore such anxieties and gain the confidence to face uncertainty and ambiguity. To develop as a critical thinker is, then, like journeying into unfamiliar areas, which involves risk, opens up questions, creates more experiences than can be integrated at first, requires support, and yields personal and professional change. In a similar spirit, in Reflective Practice students take risks and experiment in putting ideas into practice, then take stock of the outcomes and revise their approaches accordingly. Creative Thinking is about generating alternative ideas, practices, and solutions, exploring ways to confront complex, messy, ambiguous problems, making new connections, and seeing how things could be otherwise—that is, formulating alternatives that can be held in tension with previous ideas and practices.

This booklet describes a range of tools and processes that provide space and support for students to develop as critical thinkers, creative thinkers, and reflective practitioners. The key challenge is to help people make knowledge and practice from insights and experience that they are not prepared, at first, to acknowledge. Each entry then raises some questions for further inquiry or discussion. The hope is that the booklet as a whole stimulates readers to grapple with issues they were not aware they faced and to generate questions beyond those any teacher presents. We invite readers to understand this booklet’s emphasis on the intra- and inter-personal by placing it in tension with philosophical formulations of teaching critical thinking that insist that students scrutinize the reasoning, assumptions, and evidence behind claims and adopt the connotations that the term “critical” often has with judgement and finding fault according to some standards.

See next post for possible Table of Contents.

Guided Tour of my teaching (1998-2009)

Although my training is in the life and environmental sciences, critical thinking and critical pedagogy became central to my intellectual and professional project as I encouraged students and researchers to contrast the paths taken in science, society, education with other paths that might be taken, and to foster their acting upon the insights gained. Bringing critical analysis of science to bear on the practice and applications of science has not been well developed or supported institutionally, and so I continue to contribute actively, to new collaborations, programs, and other activities, new directions for existing programs, and collegial interactions across disciplines.

(Thus began a guided tour to my teaching, which I prepared in February 2009 to support a nomination for our University’s teaching award.  It continued…)

As a UMass Boston professor I have taught twelve different graduate courses: six in my original specialty of science and its social context; four required courses in the Critical & Creative Thinking [CCT] Graduate Program on critical thinking, research, writing, and reflective practice; and another two concerning computers and learning/education. Each of these courses has involved development of a new syllabus (or, in one case, a substantial revision) and subsequent ongoing revision. In my statement for tenure review in 2001, I noted:

• One strength of my teaching lies in my willingness, in response to programmatic needs, to take on courses outside my specialty or without previous models and to learn from the experience of doing so. This learning is evident in the evolution of: the textual materials of my courses (syllabi, course packets, handouts, etc.); the course mechanics (use of email and websites, records kept to track each student’s development, required conferences with students, etc.); and the teaching/learning interactions I establish. My learning is also evident in the opportunities I have taken to get training and experience in experiential and problem-based learning, facilitation of group process, and leading faculty development workshops. Finally, my learning from teaching is evident in original contributions I have made to wider discussions about conceptual and pedagogical issues that have arisen.

This “guided tour” to my teaching is divided into three phases (in the next three posts), more to make use of the materials compiled for my tenure and promotion than to mark any disjunctures–experience gained in the earlier years feeds into actions taken in the later ones and the themes continue from one phase to the next.

Future Ideal Retrospective Activity to Reflect on a program’s Strategic Directions

This Future Ideal Retrospective activity required each of the participants to: make notes as we spent 60-90 minutes reading the exit self-assessments submitted by graduating students of the Critical & Creative Thinking Graduate Program and surveys of alums; do a “future ideal retrospective” brainstorm; and  cluster everyone’s brainstorming post-its into strategic directions.

The future ideal retrospective  approach asks us to imagine that it is a few years in the future (Future) and we’re explaining to someone how wonderfully the Program has done (Ideal) in maintaining what had worked well and in addressing  shortcomings and challenges.  The person asks what things happened (Retrospective) that contributed to that state of affairs.  Our answers to the person are the items we record in a few words on the post-its.  (These items could range from the mundane and practical to the more visionary.)  The naming of  the clusters provided directions or themes that might help guide the Program faculty as we  attempt to maintain what has worked well and in address shortcomings and challenges.  These directions or themes were presented in the main body of the report.  The post-its and their clustering by one participant are depicted on the figure below.  In this illustration, the clusters are grouped into further clusters, resulting in an overall vision for the program:
“People ready for self-directed, life-long learning find CCT via marketing that shows such learning emerges thru mentoring, reflection & horizontal + vertical connections of students & alums.”

(For the full self-study and appendices, see http://www.cct.umb.edu/aquad10appendices.html)