Creative Process

What we learned about the creative process...

Our workshop began with a passion for the art of crochet and the idea that it could be used to make a direct impact on our community. To further develop our plans, we used concept maps to explore social issues, brainstorming, collaboration, and an abundance of peer feedback to create a more actionable, refined plan for what we wanted the workshop to look like. During the research phase, we educated ourselves about the historical backdrops of the social issue of homelessness as well as the surprisingly deep history of crochet connecting to activism, feminism, and independence. For a workshop, we learned that the more specific your plans are, the more successful the project will become, so a lot of effort went into the development of our central mission, methods, syllabus, and learning timeline in the months leading up to the Spring semester. The other unique aspect of leading a workshop for a capstone project is that learning how to become the best teacher is an adaptive process that must continue throughout the semester. We gained a strong teaching toolbox for methods and activities that can be used to help engage our audience, help them understand, and reinforce their learning. Our learning assessments, with the addition of the specific 3-2-1, concept map, gallery walk, and think-pair-share activities that we discussed in CPSA260, became much stronger over time. Another area of teaching that we improved upon was classroom set-up, exploring how we could group desks to get students to engage more effectively with themselves and with our discussion questions based on previous studies (Rands et al., 2017).  Overall, our workshop allowed us to build our skills not just in creating art, but in teaching and building the skills of others. 

Rands, M., & Gansemer-Topf, A. (2017). The Room Itself Is Active: How Classroom Design Impacts Student Engagement. Journal of Learning Spaces, 6(1), 26–33. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1152568.pdf