Creating Cognitive Dissonance in the Classroom

In Ben Johnson's blog at Edutopia, he writes (17 September 2009): "Cognitive dissonance is created by a dedicated teacher who challenges the students' beliefs about their own capacity to learn." In the Creative Community Building program at the University of Connecticut, we seek to create such experiences in the undergraduate classroom (face-to-face and online). Consider signing up for any of three Spring 2010 courses to be offered in Storrs and Hartford, Connecticut, as well as online:

• Creativity + Social Change - Tuesdays in Hartford, Connecticut
• Community Organizing and Social Movements - Mondays in Storrs, Connecticut
• Introduction to the Co-Operative Movement: History, Philosophy and Prospects for the Future - Online
  

Creative Workers as "The New Untouchables"

What examples do you see in your community's schools, where creative thinking is being encouraged, taught and applied? Where are your kids most creative -- in school or out of school? What opportunities for being creative do you provide to your kids at home?

Before we can teach for more creativity in school -- which we absolutely should be doing -- we need to help teachers, administrators and parents rediscover their own creativity so that they can recognize and encourage it in others.

[20 October 2009 - New York Times - By Tom Friedman] That is the key to understanding our full education challenge today. Those who are waiting for this recession to end so someone can again hand them work could have a long wait. Those with the imagination to make themselves untouchables — to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies — will thrive. Therefore, we not only need a higher percentage of our kids graduating from high school and college — more education — but we need more of them with the right education. As the Harvard University labor expert Lawrence Katz explains it: “If you think about the labor market today, the top half of the college market, those with the high-end analytical and problem-solving skills who can compete on the world market or game the financial system or deal with new government regulations, have done great. But the bottom half of the top, those engineers and programmers working on more routine tasks and not actively engaged in developing new ideas or recombining existing technologies or thinking about what new customers want, have done poorly. They’ve been much more exposed to global competitors that make them easily substitutable.” ... So our schools have a doubly hard task now — not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity. More | Public Responses to This Column: "To Promote Creativity, Let’s Start in the Schools"

Public Space ... For Ads or Art?

Who controls public space? Should it be filled with ads? Or art? Or both? What examples exist in your community where commercial signs and messages have been banned?

[25 October 2009 - New York Times] A Battle, on Billboards, of Ads vs. Art ... It was a bizarre cat-and-mouse game, played on Sunday across scores of makeshift billboards in New York. One group of artists and activists spread across Lower Manhattan, transforming innumerous wheat-pasted posters — the ones that readily sprout over scaffolding -- into their own canvas. They would whitewash the posters and then create their own work, or allow anti-advertising advocates to spread their own messages. But just as quickly as they whitewashed and put up art, workers arrived to put up new posters where the artists had obscured the old ones. More

The Learning Revolution - Enhancing Informal Adult Learning for Older People in Care Settings

[28 September 2009 - The Learning Revolution - UK] As part of the discussion on enhancing informal adult learning for older people in care settings, an online discussion area within the "learning revolution" collaborative site has been set up by Becta.  You are now invited to join this group, which will host debate, ideas and issues around this topic. More ... Plus, check out the main Learning Revolution site, designed to gather views from interested people and to share progress to develop a culture of learning for all adults.

NYT: South African Children Push for Better Schools

[24 September 2009 - New York Times] Children are taking into their own hands responsibility for trying to reform the education system. ... Thousands of children marched to City Hall this week in sensible black shoes, a stream of boys and girls from township schools across this seaside city that extended for blocks, passing in a blur of pleated skirts, blazers and rep ties. Their polite demand: Give us libraries and librarians. “We want more information and knowledge,” said a ninth grader, Abongile Ndesi. In the 15 years since white supremacist rule ended in South Africa, the governing party, the African National Congress, has put in place numerous policies to transform schools into engines of opportunity. But many of its leaders, including President Jacob Zuma, now acknowledge that those efforts have too often failed. More

Artists can be prophets

[28 September 2009 - Lincoln Star Journal - Nebraska] For two decades, Enrique Martinez Celaya has been thinking and writing about his life and work as an artist, examining his practice through philosophy, literature and science. What he has discovered is a provocative, sure-to-be-controversial view that stands in opposition to the way artists have been seen in the world since the dawn of modernism more than 100 years ago. Put simply, Martinez Celaya proposes that artists can function as prophets. "The Prophet" is the title of the lecture Martinez Celaya, the University of Nebraska Visiting Presidential Professor, will deliver at Omaha's Joslyn Art Museum on Friday. "To be a prophet an artist doesn't need God but clarity of purpose, character and attention," Martinez Celaya writes in the lecture. Later, he states, "Joseph Beuys, Herman Melville, Marcel Broodthaers, Ayn Rand and Albert Pinkham Ryder were prophets not because they sat around theorizing but because they showed us something of the future and of ourselves."... "Is this too much to expect from artists?" he asks in the lecture. "Probably. It is likely we will all break our backs trying to be artists-prophets, but this is a better fate than letting our backs calcify from lack of action or hunch over in shame. Artists are not needed for anything else. Most artists will not be great prophets, but even very minor ones will make a difference. Maybe a difference in the art world, but certainly, and more importantly, in themselves and in the world." More

$25,000 PRIZE FOR ART AND SOCIAL CHANGE - To be awarded Oct. 23

[29 September 2009 - Creative Time] Creative Time is pleased to announce the inception of a new, annual, $25,000 award: The Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change, presented by Creative Time to an artist who has committed her/his life’s work to social change in powerful and productive ways. The first recipient of the prize is The Yes Men, and it will be bestowed during the opening ceremony for The Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in Public Practice, on October 23 from 6 to 8pm in the historic Stephen A. Schwarzman building of the New York Public Library. The ceremony will feature an introduction by Amy Goodman, the host of the award-winning program Democracy Now!. The award is generously supported by The Annenberg Foundation. More

Can Do - A Visual Exploration of Benjamin Franklin's Inventions

[30 July 2009 - New York Times] How Benjamin Franklin turned America into the land of invention. More

Creativity and Peace: Teens Collaborate in Peace it Together

[29 June 2009 - Advertising Age] Fleming Creative Group, a Vancouver-based print/digital design agency, discovers how creativity and peace-building go hand in hand. Catherine Winckler, partner and creative director, explains. ... Can creative exploration contribute to peace? Can filmmaking become a mechanism to break the cycle of hate? Can a camp on Canada's West Coast effect change among youth in the turbulent Middle East? Like many who learned of Peace It Together's unique peace-building program of dialogue through art, we were intrigued by the possibilities. Since 2004, the not-for-profit has been bringing together Palestinian, Israeli and Canadian teens to collaborate in small, mixed-cultural groups, assisted by renowned volunteer filmmakers, editors and writers. In an idyllic camp setting, away from conflict yet still very much in the face of each other's preconceptions and prejudices, the youth produce short films about personally relevant issues. The result: a body of work that finds its way into their home communities and around the world, casting light on the conflict and educating in the process. More

Can governments till the fields of innovation?

[20 June 2009 - New York Times via Innovator Insights] This New York Times article briefly surveys the emergence of innovation agendas in government, aimed at addressing fields like energy, the environment, and healthcare as well as tackling issues in economic development and industrial policies. The United States, for example, is using the Bureau of Economic Analysis to develop statistics that "uniquely measure the role of innovation." Additional indications of national interest in innovation policy include Great Britain's Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, and Finland’s plan to become a major competitor in developing software and services, relating in particular to medical monitoring and preventive health. More