UARTS 150: Intro to Creative Process-Creating a More Integrative Experiential Teaching and Learning Environment

UARTS 150: Intro to Creative Process-Creating a More Integrative Experiential Teaching and Learning Environment

Academic Year:
2017 - 2018 (June 1, 2017 through May 31, 2018)
Funding Requested:
$9,570.00
Project Dates:
-
Overview of the Project:
This request will provide the resources to redesign and refine UARTS 150: Introduction to Creative Process. This is a required 4-credit interdisciplinary arts-integrative project-based writing course for first-year Living Arts students, a Michigan Learning Community (MLC) housed in the Bursley Residence Hall on North Campus. Themed around arts integration and collaboration, this MLC actively recruits students from the School of Art and Design; College of Architecture and Urban Planning, School of Music, Theatre and Dance; College of Engineering; and the College of LSA. The purpose of UARTS 150 is to introduce students to creative process across disciplines, as an exploration of their own creative process as a lifelong skill for success. The course was redesigned prior to the Fall 2017 semester to formally fulfill the LSA First Year Writing Requirement (FYWR) for arts and architecture students (for engineering it fulfills the "creative expression" breadth requirement). A significant challenge of this course is to integrate the FYWR (academic writing) curriculum into this complex and time-intensive course. The existing writing curriculum seeks to connect with the "making" components of the course through written essay assignments concerned with the broad theme of "creativity." However, students report (and instructors agree) that the academic writing portion is separate from the "making" parts of the course, and the disciplinary sections could be better integrated with each other. With Whitaker Fund support, we hope to co-evolve the FYWR curriculum alongside the making component of the course, seeking deeper and more specific connections between the making and writing.
Final Report Fields
Project Objectives:
The primary objective of this project was to restructure the UARTS150 course. Our aim was to make the course more interdisciplinary and better reinforce the creative process through each of the UARTS disciplines (architecture, art, engineering, music, writing). Previously, the course presented siloed creative projects in each of the disciplines, and thus, students did not appreciate the overlap between disciplines nor understand or apply a creative process across disciplines. Furthermore, this course serves as a first-year writing requirement for students, and we aimed to better teach and integrate writing throughout the course.
Project Achievements:
The main achievement of the project was restructuring the UARTS150 course successfully, as evidenced by positive student feedback and as proven by the results of our rigorous assessment. We created a new course structure that comprised of (chronologically): a writing unit that introduced important first-year writing concepts; two creative projects rotations, focused on engineering/art and music/architecture; a conclusive writing unit that had students reflect on their creative process and create a mixed-media, interdisciplinary product. The engineering/art rotation assigned students with identifying important problems to solve, and creating an engineering prototype that would solve the problem and an art artifact that represented the problem. The music/architecture rotation assigned students with translating sound between audio and visual media. This new course structure was assessed with pre- and post-course surveys that included both Likert scale items and open-ended survey questions. From statistical analysis of the closed-ended questions and coding of the open-ended responses, it is clear that the course positively impacted students. There were significant increases in students’ understanding of and confidence in applying the creative process to each of the course disciplines; students’ understanding of their own creative process; and students’ views of the overlap between the engineering/art disciplines and music/architecture disciplines. When qualitatively analyzing the students’ open-ended responses, students’ definitions of creativity and interdisciplinarity grew more complex and incorporated more mentions of various elements of creative process that were discussed in class. (A full assessment report is available for distribution if needed.)
Continuation:
This project is continuing somewhat beyond the grant period, in that the course is continuing to be offered every Fall semester. In the next iteration, we are considering the results of the assessment; most specifically, that students’ viewed the creative project disciplines (engineering/art, music/architecture) more clearly, but did not better see the overlaps between the other discipline pairings. Therefore, in the next course offering, we will aim to incorporate more discipline pairings beyond those we presented this year. We also plan to assess the course next year to see how the course progresses.
Dissemination:
We plan to submit a journal paper to present our new course structure and assessment results, in order to inspire other institutions to incorporate interdisciplinary courses focused on creativity. We will also use this paper to advertise the success of the course to our colleagues within the university. We are also considering holding a workshop at future conferences to present the course and our findings, to help others implement this type of course.