This week I'm participating in a 5 day version of #creativeHE Its day three and Chrissi has posted the daily activity
Storymaker: Read an interesting article and re-create the story using 3 photographs/cartoons/doodles, with captions and share here in the community. Comment on stories contributed by others. Reflect on this experience at the end of the day. Where could this experience take you?
I decided to read and create a story around the posts made for the Jam Jar activity on day 1. A summary is provided at the end of the post.
JAM JAR STORY
One day a group of people who shared an interest in creativity in higher education teaching and learning were invited to share the contents of their jam jars. Several people looked around in their immediate environment and found jam jars that they used. They described their contents creating and sharing meaning in the process.
Their stories revealed that jam jars are used to accumulate and store resources. These include materials (like screws, bots and tea-bags) and tools like scissors, glue sticks and digital tools, that have potential to be used, in the right context, to enable us, or others, to use our creativity. It seems that creativity is more likely to emerge if certain resources are readily available in our immediate environment and we have the desire or need to design, make or fix things. In other words, jam jars (both physically and metaphorically) are important in the ecologies we create to learn, develop and achieve.
Storymaker: Read an interesting article and re-create the story using 3 photographs/cartoons/doodles, with captions and share here in the community. Comment on stories contributed by others. Reflect on this experience at the end of the day. Where could this experience take you?
I decided to read and create a story around the posts made for the Jam Jar activity on day 1. A summary is provided at the end of the post.
JAM JAR STORY
One day a group of people who shared an interest in creativity in higher education teaching and learning were invited to share the contents of their jam jars. Several people looked around in their immediate environment and found jam jars that they used. They described their contents creating and sharing meaning in the process.
Their stories revealed that jam jars are used to accumulate and store resources. These include materials (like screws, bots and tea-bags) and tools like scissors, glue sticks and digital tools, that have potential to be used, in the right context, to enable us, or others, to use our creativity. It seems that creativity is more likely to emerge if certain resources are readily available in our immediate environment and we have the desire or need to design, make or fix things. In other words, jam jars (both physically and metaphorically) are important in the ecologies we create to learn, develop and achieve.
Participants were aware of the affordance in their jam jar: the potential to act creatively through the objects they stored in their jam jar. Even the most mundane objects like a tea bag can be used in the right context if the user has the imagination, skills and desire to do so. Linked to this is the idea that we involve ourselves in certain mediums to express ourselves creatively and our desire to express ourselves can be triggered by anything eg a typing error!! The creative mind can play with any idea or combination of ideas and create new meaning and value.
Talking about how we use our jam jars triggered many interesting questions, enabled people to share their perspectives, the resources they used, their beliefs and values, feelings and experiences but ultimately the process enabled participants to share and co-create meanings in the shared context of the conversation.
Talking about how we use our jam jars triggered many interesting questions, enabled people to share their perspectives, the resources they used, their beliefs and values, feelings and experiences but ultimately the process enabled participants to share and co-create meanings in the shared context of the conversation.
From a higher education teaching perspective, perhaps the wisdom in the story is that the role of the teacher is not only to create jam jars containing resources for themselves and their students to use, but also to encourage and enable students to create their own jam jars full of things that they will need to tackle the problems and challenges they will encounter in their life.
From a professional development perspective we have to keep on developing our own jam jars and finding jam jars that others have created who are willing to share their affordances. Perhaps the #creativeHE itself provides us with a good example of a collegial jam jar stuffed with affordance for learning and development which are open and accessible to anyone.
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