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Teamwork concept : hands over the desk, representing brainstorming moment

Creativity Core Curriculum

Contact Information

Program

Maribeth Kradel-Weitzel
Assistant Provost, Academic Affairs & Director, MS in 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.

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 Jefferson students take a common senior-year course that marks the completion of their liberal arts education. By reading, discussing and writing about the works of key thinkers from across centuries and around the world, they explore how transformative ideas about living a meaningful life can be applied far from their original contexts to guide them as ethical professionals, engaged citizens and inspired individuals.
  3. Experience – Creative Making Workshops: These experiences 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 complete two unique 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.