Creativity Core Curriculum

Contact Information

Program

Name: Maribeth Kradel-Weitzel
Position: Assistant Provost, Academic Affairs & Director, MS Health Communication Design

Curriculum Information

Artificial intelligence, automation and the blurring of digital, biological and physical worlds have brought change of an exponential scale unlike anything humanity has ever seen. This change is rapid, broad in scope and systemic. New connections among previously unrelated fields are rapidly transforming the workplace. Human creativity, which has, in part, been responsible for these changes, is essential for success in this environment.

Watch a virtual Creativity Core Curriculum presentation below (6 mins.):

The Creativity Core Curriculum exists in response to this and embodies the mission: to cultivate a confident and flexible student mindset through learning opportunities that explore individual and collaborative creative aptitude and equip students to yield novel and valuable results.

The curriculum consists of two courses and one experience component that service students on the East Falls Campus:

  1. Course #1 – Creativity Intensive Courses: Every major will have a course that includes creativity content and skills development within a disciplinary context.
  2. Course #2 – Philosophies of the Good Life (from the Hallmarks Core): All students take a common course that is the culmination of their liberal arts education. This course focuses on the incorporation of design thinking methodologies, reflective writing and prototyping strategies to help students imagine and plan for meaningful and fulfilling lives after graduation.    
  3. Experience – Creative Making Workshops: These experiences will provide students with the opportunity, materials, guidance and time to experiment in a risk-free environment in absence of expectations and deadlines and in a context outside their discipline. Upon completion of a workshop, students reflect on their experience, having made a unique artifact—whether tangible, digital, performative or conceptual. Undergraduate students at our East Falls Campus will complete two individual workshops during the course of degree completion. Each workshop is 3–5 hours in length.

Learning Objectives

The Creativity Core Curriculum has six learning objectives that are tied to different components as noted below:

Hallmarks Learning Outcome

  • Formulate new insights through unexpected connections across disciplines, perspectives and contexts.

Creativity Intensive Course Outcomes

  • Create value by producing novel output relevant to professional and real-world endeavors.
  • Devise effective strategies for individual and/or collaborative creative production.
  • Engage empathetic and critical thinking skills when framing opportunities and solving problems.

Creative Making Workshop Outcomes

  • Embrace complexity and risk with a flexible and open mindset.
  • Activate creative aptitude through personal reflection and examination of biases about creativity.