Creative Process

What I learned about the creative process...

Through planning and running a workshop, I learned about classroom management and lesson planning to keep students engaged and learning.  For example, when designing the lesson plan for each week, I considered how the icebreaker activity would draw students into the lesson while learning about each other. In addition, I altered the structure of the lesson plan weekly to promote engagement within the workshop (Milkova 2005).  For instance, one week students worked within a group to create a zine using a random prompt, while another week students designed digital political/educational zines. This creative process can be applied to various art and design processes to keep the artist engaged and producing unique work rather than finding themselves in a creative block. 

Another way in which I built upon my creative process was by listening to the feedback of my workshop participants. Whether that was by reading over their journal reflections or simply asking for their preference with a lesson plan structure or activity, I found that using the students' preferred learning styles helped keep them engaged.  In addition, using their feedback allowed me to have multiple perspectives. For example, when curating the Arts Fest display, students had great advice as to how to display their final zines since they could picture how the audience would interact with the work and what way would be best received.