The Importance of Teaching Creativity Across Cultures
Who do I want to become as a creative educator? How can I foster creativity in my courses? How can I infuse creativity into a curriculum and course design that is culturally responsive and inclusive across cultures? As a Cuban American, born and raised in a multicultural city, I have grown up around amazing cultures from all over the world. I have always been surrounded with individuals from various walks of life, with rich and beautiful traditions, food, music, and cultural backgrounds. I became fascinated with culture at a young age and surrounded myself with friends from different countries. I heard different languages everywhere I went and fostered a deep appreciation for world languages, traditions, and multiple viewpoints. I believe creativity can be integrated with cultural expression to open up even more possibilities for learning across the lens of humanity.
I am an adjunct professor and higher education manager with nine years of experience serving students in college settings. I have a huge passion for student development, program management, instructional design, and I specialize in managing international education programs with students from over 65 countries. My international students teach me about the world every day. The offer perspectives across borders and customs. In the process of teaching my international students, I have actually learned quite a lot about different worldviews and perspectives. I have learned that intercultural communication is tied to creativity because creative thought can be expressed in various manners, independent of language barrier or language level proficiency. Creative expression allows students from all over the world access to express themselves via means that increase inclusivity, multimedia mediums such as graphics, video, and computer animation as well as drawings, paintings, film, and much more.
As a creative educator, I aim to enhance important skills like critical thinking, communication, and collaboration in my students. When students are given an opportunity to utilize their creativity, they have the opportunity to increase essential higher order thinking skills. The usage of Adobe products is one way my students may tap into the power of creative tools to expand their ability to create. Adobe has a plethora of options for my students to incorporate new ways of thinking, communicating, and collaborating into their assignments and learning outcomes. I aim to incorporate lessons drawing upon the importance of creativity across cultures, where students will develop a growth mindset and foster digital literacy skills that will last a lifetime. In today's global world, we must equip our students with the global citizenship skill sets to interact effectively across cultures, as so many businesses include a cross-cultural workforce.
Cross-Cultural and Global Business Success
Developing Student Creativity: Growth Mindset
I really enjoy how in the "Creativity For All" course, there was an emphasis on growth mindset and the importance of learning from your mistakes in the educational process. Having a growth mindset is an essential life skill and a valid disposition when learning and integrating complex creative technology tools within the classroom. In many traditional courses, students are expected to be passive recipients of lectures, with no active-learning components to their coursework or usage of technology to attain learning outcomes. I aim to continue integrating the latest technologies to help students grow and learn, while teaching about growth mindset to destigmatize failure in the learning process.
With Adobe apps, students can learn and reflect on their mistakes as opportunities, while expanding their capacity for creative thinking.
Culturally Responsive Teaching and Teaching with Technology: Fostering an Empowering Learning Culture
Creative tools have immense power and our access to them expands our ability to create. Adobe's tools inspire new ways of thinking, communicating, and collaborating with each other. This truly opens up access for our students with new tools that foster digital literacy skills and that they will find applicable and relevant in their future careers.
Integrating culturally responsive technology yields fantastic benefits for our students, facilitating brain processing and cultivating those critical thinking skills we aim to develop in our courses. When we utilize digital tools, it is always a great idea to use images that represent different identities and lived experiences to demonstrate respect and honor the inclusivity of cultural differences. Instructional materials and tools with Adobe's Creative Cloud expose students to racially and ethnically diverse populations, therefore enhancing our students' classroom engagement and critical thinking skills.
Many professors are looking to introduce culturally responsive teaching into their curriculums and classrooms, and through the correct tools, they can be well equipped with culturally relevant educational materials that represent all walks of life. One way to integrate culturally relevant learning materials is to use the Adobe Stock photos as well as Open Educational Resources (OER). OER's are free for educators and students to use, customize, and share, which is fantastic for integrating cultural inclusivity in the classroom. OER's are fully customizable, and we as educators can incorporate different voices, examples, and activities that reflect our students’ backgrounds, thus making our lessons more relatable and meaningful to all.
Infusing Creativity into Every Subject
In this course, I further learned about the interdisciplinary nature of integrating creative thinking into course design and development. It is actually quite simple to adjust lessons and activities to make course content an opportunity to encourage students’ creativity and truly promote critical thinking and innovation.
Student Access for Creative Tools
For example, if students are assigned a cumulative college-level portfolio project, despite what subject they are enrolled in, why not utilize Adobe creative tools to express all areas of learning and growth within the course? As faculty members across disciplines, we must steer away from traditional memorization and passive learning. Incorporating assignments where my students can get hands-on experience through creative tools and peer-to-peer collaboration will give them direct industry knowledge across multiple fields before they graduate. Companies want to know potential candidates can effectively use various forms of technology and having this skill set is advantageous in the job market.
Despite the subject matter, we as professors may use our own creativity to promote our student’s creativity. Many times, students may think creative thinking doesn't impress faculty members, or lacks usefulness, but it is quite the opposite. Creativity is one of the top qualities educators and employers are looking for. So, in a sense, we as faculty members should foster creative thinking, as we are preparing our students to be successful in their learning as well as fostering essential career-readiness skills necessary to succeed in the global workforce.
Creating a Professional Spark Digital Portfolio
Assessing Creativity Across Cultures
It is vital that we as instructors learn how to recognize creative behavior within our students and affirm the creative process. As professors we are always connecting student learning to the proper formative and summative assessment to truly ensure that our students have learned the material and can apply it, evaluate it, and create new assumptions. We must embrace the use of assessment and feedback to allow for further creative development as our students engage with one another in the classroom.
Merriam Webster dictionary defines the word "creative" as the act of producing through imaginative skill and to bring into existence. When we think about assessing the originality of student work, and the imagination of our students, it may seem difficult to create an assessment because we all have heard that the beauty of art is that it is subjective. However, there is still a way to assess whether students have utilized creative tools and processes to produce something original.
When it comes to artistic expression among cultures, much of one's expression is tied to their cultural worldview. I look forward to integrating creative assignments and assessments into my international education courses.
Utilizing Adobe’s Teaching Resources, Technology, and the Education Exchange
Adobe’s Education Exchange is a collection of free teaching resources including lessons, activities, videos and professional development courses designed by educators for fellow educators. The Adobe Education Exchange emphasizes creativity and challenging our students to grow in this area, to embrace their creative ideas. I am amazed that this resource exists and I am grateful to be a member!
The Importance of Digital Literacy
The Adobe Education Exchange has a multitude of resources and learning opportunities to help educators engage students through online learning, including, Khan + Create Activities, industry speakers, relevant webinars from experts across disciplines, and various curriculum examples and help make our distance learning experiences more engaging while incorporating the most amazing technologies.
Adobe Creative Educator Community
Overall, I highly recommend the Adobe Creative Educator (ACE) Community to all fellow professors, across all subject areas in Higher Education. I am excited to connect with other creative educators, infuse creative learning outcomes into my curriculum, and utilize more Adobe Creative Educator resources. I aim to continue growing as a creative educator, fostering creativity in my courses, and infusing creativity my curriculum and course design that is culturally responsive and inclusive across cultures.
Credits:
Created with images by sasint - "students computers laptops" • MabelAmber - "europe map globe" • gauravfkumar - "indian culture weeding" • MichaelGaida - "globe map country" • nonbirinonko - "greece parthenon temple" • jacejojo - "african women africa" • innokurnia - "dance balinese traditional" • Daniel_Nebreda - "people portrait adult" • Glavo - "bada bagh temple cultural site" • Pexels - "art brushes colorful"