By: Samah Sabra
I was recently in beautiful Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where several staff and faculty from Carleton attended the annual Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education conference. I co-facilitated a pre-conference workshop and attended many sessions facilitated by faculty, senior administrators, educational developers and students. The conference was, as usual, inspiring and thought-provoking and I walked away in a deeply contemplative mode. One thing that struck me across various sessions, and which was particularly evident in the student session, is the importance of openness, inspiration, and creativity in higher education.
I have to admit, however, that the most memorable moment for me was the session with the 3M National Student Fellows. During their presentation, they asked those of us in the audience to remember what we “got in trouble for as a seven-year-old.” They each shared what they got in trouble for – ranging from being too slow in getting outside for recess, to reading in class, to doodling in class – and then identified a moment in their lives when someone recognized this very same behavior as a potential strength. For example, being slow resulted from attention to detail and a methodical approach to getting ready, reading in class was about a love of knowledge and learning, and doodling was a way of expressing thoughts in visual format. In those moments, an educator took something these students often got into trouble for and taught them to think of it as a characteristic that could help them excel. These were educators who were open to difference, inspired their students through that openness, and allowed them to be creative. They were educators who recognized the potential in and reached out to a struggling student. In doing so, they fueled an internal motivation and taught these students that a personal paradigm shift can go a long way.
I walked out of that session feeling moved and inspired. It confirmed something I was thinking in two other conference sessions that day: I need to include a form of creative expression in the upcoming year. What I have learned over and over the last couple of years is that creative expression can come in many forms. For instance, as I mentioned in an earlier blog post, a student in my class during the 2012-13 academic year identified as a visual learner. Together, we discussed what I could do differently in my presentation of material to make things more accessible to her. What happened as I sometimes struggled was that I learned a new way to communicate material (some of it heavily theoretical) and discovered that I suddenly grasped some items even better. Designing a visual representation of a theoretical concept was a creative exercise for me, but it was also an intellectually rigorous exercise. It transformed my knowledge and made it more accessible – likely to a lot more than this one student.
This experience drove me to include an element in one of the programs I led last year where I asked faculty participants to find an image that best illustrates their conception of classroom discussion and collaborative learning. They did, and it was a deeply engaging learning experience for all of us as we reflected on the overlaps and differences in the images they chose and what this might say about our teaching and learning styles and what we could be doing differently in our classrooms. (If you are not someone who thinks visually, it might be an illustrative exercise to attempt!). For all of us, I think, openness to trying something new is an avenue for inspiration and creativity.