Creative Process

What I learned about the creative process...

I think that the main thing that I learned about creating this workshop was the variability & flexibility that came from it. At the beginning of the brainstorming phase, this was supposed to be a fully music-related personal project. It then shifted to a “street performance” workshop, focusing on busking, dancing, & graffiti. Even in December, half of the units that I ended up using hadn’t existed yet. As I was researching all of these different lowbrow art mediums, the topic came to me in seeing how much continuity there was between the different sources I was looking through. After the idea of the workshop was finalized, I had to figure out how I wanted to structure it. The Fine Art of Not-So-Fine Art took heavy inspiration from my freshman year workshop that I participated in, Appreciate Your E(art)h; introduction, warm-up, mini-lecture, and then around an hour of creating art. I loved how enjoyable the crafts were in that workshop, as well as the mini-lectures being a little more silly in general. Each class would begin with a really silly question that most of my students thought was the highlight of the workshop. From teaching elementary & middle schoolers through my education courses at UMD, I learned that a really good basis of keeping your students engaged was to foster meaningful, personal connections with them, which I was able to do through the warmups and throughout the activity phase of the workshop. Another help to keeping students engaged was by making the lectures less “talkative” and more “interactive.” In CPSA260, we learned how to use meaningful pauses & different techniques for students to brainstorm and share their thoughts, which I began to implement in my lectures. Both fostering connections and allowing students to breathe & retain information presented helped keep the engagement in this workshop as high as it could’ve been.