From the Spellings Report to the New York Times best sellers,
creativity and innovation are the new educational buzz words.
This February, the University of Wyoming is hosting a national
conference on what “creativity” means for a 21st Century education.
We’ve invited a range of stakeholders to participate, and several
inventors, entrepreneurs, and artists are already lined up. Now all
we need are our voices.
Below is a Call for Proposals for the conference. Hope you can make
it, and perhaps even go skiing when the conference is over!
What Does the Future Hold?
Call for Proposals
The Community for Curiosity, Creativity and Collaboration invites
individuals and teams to submit proposals for its upcoming conference
“Teaching Creativity: What the academy can learn from entrepreneurs,
inventors and artists.” The conference will be held February 24 – 26,
2009 on the University of Wyoming campus.
Founded on the assumption that the academy is meant to generate ideas
and projects that seek to improve the quality of life for society at
large, this conference aims to showcase how higher education can
provide students with direct access to the creative side of problem-
solving. By moving our students from critique to creativity, we can
prepare them for a future where there are no guarantees--a future
that only they can bring into being.
Through the “Teaching Creativity” conference, we hope to begin
creating a blueprint for
1) transforming the academy into an arena for cultivating the
creative and imaginative powers that reside at the heart of the
individual, and
2) bringing those powers to bear on collaborative projects that
engage the most pressing problems of our time.
As we conceive it, the pedagogy that will meet this challenge must
embrace the civic-mindedness that lies at the heart of service-
learning, the high intellectual and performance standards that define
the academic community, and the open-ended creative energy that fuels
the work of the entrepreneur, the inventor, and the artist.
Among the questions the conference intends to explore are
· How can we foster curiosity in an age of No Child Left Behind?
· What can be learned about teaching creativity from some of
today’s most creative minds?
· How do we teach the collaborative process in an increasingly
globalized economy?
· How can we better prepare future leaders to face the
challenges of contemporary society?
· What is the role of assessment within a pedagogy that prizes
innovation and encourages risk-taking?
· How do we accurately measure faculty accomplishments at the
point of critical evaluation – hiring, tenure, promotion – in the
messy, fertile space of interdisciplinarity?
· What responsibility does the academy have for training
students to think of themselves as change-agents committed to
creating a better future?
·
These questions are merely meant to suggest the kinds of questions
that the conference will engage. We welcome any proposal that engages
with the project of reimagining the work of the 21st century academy,
both in theory and in practice.
Please submit the following materials in MS Word format to Mary P.
Sheridan-Rabideau (
msherid1@...) by Monday, October 27, 2008.
Note: Only 1 submission per person.
· A cover page that includes the title, speaker(s), address(es),
email(s), and phone number(s), along with a brief 25-50 word
description of your presentation
· A one-page abstract prepared for blind review that describes the
proposed talk and identifies the format for the presentation, for
example,
o 20-minute talk (think TED.com), which may be combined with
similar proposals to form a 60-minute panel
o 60-minute plenary talk, with up to 4 speakers. We are
particularly interested in interdisciplinary panels
o performance or workshop that illustrates the creative process
o experiential workshop that engage attendees in the creative
process
Curiosity. Creativity. Collaboration.
The Future is Ours for the Making.
Join the conversation. Shape the future.
åwww.newhumanities.org
