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By Maria Lironi
What is creativity and what does it take to be creative? These are just two of the questions posed to UVic students as part of a new first-year course being offered by the Faculty of Fine Arts, open to students in all disciplines.
“As creativity is deeply personal, it is difficult to both define and evaluate,” says theatre professor and course coordinator Peter McGuire.
As part of the course, students were instructed to do one creative act every week, then demonstrate it and reflect on it through their blogs. The students also presented their projects during two “gala” evenings. The projects ranged from a sculpture on the publicity surrounding the H1N1 issue to a video on laughter, incorporating a laugh-a-thon recorded outside the McPherson Library.
“This course was transformative for me,” says Deanne Young, 48, a part-time educational psychology student and a full-time palliative care nurse. “I grew up in an age when creativity wasn’t valued. It was seen as something with no future and kind of flaky. But what really came up for me during the course was the need for authenticity at this stage in my life. I don’t want to just study creativity, I want it to be part of me.”
She decided to take the course after being invited to accompany her 23-year-old daughter Emily, a UVic student studying history in art and a participant in the course. Young has made some big changes in her life because of the course. She quit one of her jobs and dedicated every Thursday to commit an act of creativity. Right now she is working on a paper-mâché sculpture.
FINE 100 is the brainchild of Dean of Fine Arts Sarah Blackstone. “The creativity course is an attempt to avoid the old trap of offering art (or music, or theatre) appreciation courses where you listen to famous symphonies or look at famous art work and learn to identify the artist, the period, etc. Such courses do not increase people’s appreciation of art, and they don’t improve our understanding of the process of creativity. Instead, we should be rigorous in our approach to the subject of creativity—from perspectives like brain science (left-brain, right-brain discoveries and other more sophisticated research), health, cognition and behaviour, etc. Creativity should be approached as a complex and interesting research question with profound consequences for human beings—just as math has always been approached in this way.”
Since the class is open to all UVic students, it connects the various faculties on campus. The fall 2009 class included students from business, anthropology, psychology, English, political science, geography, biochemistry, computer science and fine arts. There are similar courses about creativity at other universities.
“The course is part of an ongoing effort to ask, and ask again, what it means to be engaged in the fine arts at a research-intensive university—as opposed, for example, to a technical or training art school,” says Blackstone. “In so doing, it helps set a high bar for the creative work and scholarship in all of the fine arts fields.”
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