Critical and creative thinking skills are nearly-paramount for anyone interested in being a part of the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at UW-Bothell. For me, both being in the program and learning on my own this last year has helped me make significant leaps towards mastery of these critical and creative thinking skills. This includes the ability to assess multiple different perspectives and focus in on their differences and why those differences are/can be impactful, the capability to focus in on central questions and develop my work while remaining conscious of the central question and my own social position that I approach the question with, and the ability to analyze, synthesize, evaluate, and reflect.
My research proposal, “Crowd Response and How Politicians Change Their Speeches,” is an example of how critical thinking has greatly increased my ability to assess multiple different perspectives, and my ability to synthesize several different sources and selections of data to create substantial new information. This research proposal explored how important a crowd’s response is to a politician who’s trying to win the vote of every person in the room. It identified that there is a lack of collected information online regarding what terms create uproars for crowds, what those uproars consist of, and how politicians have previously tried to amend or work with the feedback they’ve received, and my proposal dictated the creation of a thorough research program to identify and evaluate that information. I critically evaluate a multitude of different speeches and analyze the importance of this information versus the information that already exists in the world on this topic.
Another paper of mine, titled “Passive Vulgarity,” is an example of how I utilized my critical and creative thinking abilities to interpret and evaluate a live performance that I experienced by singer and performance artist Holland Andrews. In my paper I analyze Andrews’ musical talents, and how they use them in their performance art piece to create noises unlike any I have heard before. I reflect on their usage of machinery, an instrument rarely seen in the musical world for the actual production of live music, and evaluate their ‘looping’ machine, which allows them to create these stunningly-quick and effective looped noise blurbs. I demonstrate my interpretation skills by reading into the purposefully incoherent portions of the piece, the random bird noises and the screams, intermixed with the soothing soft spoken words and kind singing. Synthesizing the impact of all of Andrews’ noises together, I write on how Andrews was able to bring up emotions inside of me, and how I believe they were trying to teach us a lesson through it.
These two papers are merely samples of the grand amount of work I have created through IAS, utilizing critical and creative thinking to broaden my and others’ understanding of everything around us, going past the “what” and into the “how and why” of every piece.This skill will be an incredibly useful one as I pursue my Masters in Education one day, and will be vital in my professional career as an educator, hoping to broaden the understandings of every one of my students, too.