In Hands-On Creativity, you will have the opportunity to create all those wonderful things you might remember from after-school craft activities in your childhood — but at a whole new level. Maybe you were a regular in the craft room and feel completely at home in creative processes. Or maybe you’re the kind of person who stopped drawing at the age of nine — and it shows. No matter your background or experience, this course will show you that creativity can be trained and techniques can be learned.
With creativity at the center, we will engage in a variety of activities and creative projects designed to challenge the craftsperson within you and help your creative flow fully unfold. The focus is on aesthetics, craftsmanship, and creative immersion.
We will create an experimental workshop filled with bits and pieces, play and fun, seriousness and practice. You will find yourself becoming absorbed in materials and techniques and discovering that your hands are capable of more than you thought. We will generate new ideas by learning from ancient methods and explore how creativity can emerge from many different sources.
Throughout the course, you will also discover that creative processes and innovative tools are skills you can apply in many other areas of life and in your future education. Creativity is important for the individual, but we also recognize that imagination, play, physical engagement, and aesthetics are essential for development and for solving complex challenges — both in life and in society as a whole. Therefore, we will also learn strategies for creative processes and reflect on concepts and theories within the field of creative thinking.
So if you feel the need to get out of your head and into your hands, Hands-On Creativity is the course for you.
For example, we will explore how folding paper can teach us something — and more broadly investigate paper as a material. What is paper? What is its history, and how can we create beautiful objects from it? Along the way, we will also talk about how people learn. What is apprenticeship learning, for instance, and what does it mean to have a good mentor?
Around May 4th or All Saints’ Day, we will cast candles and explore the meaning of light in human development. We will enjoy the simple act of lighting a candle — to remember, to honor, or to reflect.
We will work with scrap materials, redesign, and sustainability.
We will make toys and explore why play is important for children — and why adults often stop playing. Or perhaps we will investigate how adults do play. This may also lead us into conversations about gender and gendered toys.
We will get our hands into clay and express ideas through the material. Using clay, we will show gratitude and create a gift. We will learn about printing — when humans invented printing technology, incredible changes occurred in history. We will print on and with different materials and experiment with various techniques.
