Understanding and Enhancing Creativity

Catalog description

Creative work challenges the existing ways of seeing and understanding the world and is at the heart of many disciplines. This course will be an integrated general education course (GA-GS) that encourages students to approach Creativity through the concepts, principles, and the methods of scientific inquiry. This course will begin with an overview of the various approaches and theoretical views of Creativity. This will be followed by a module applying these to analyze the role of creativity in several global and cross-cultural works in the fields of art (paintings, sculptures), writing (prose, poetry, comics),mass media (movies,recorded music, magazines), strategic communications (advertisements, public relations, digital/internet marketing) science, and organizations. Students will develop an understanding and appreciation of the comprehensive role of creativity in the creative works, literature, and history of arts. In the third module, students will be introduced to techniques and strategies for creativity enhancement. During this module, students will learn of empirical investigations of how creativity enhancement has been studied and apply those techniques to their own work. The course will conclude with students producing their own creative work. Over the journey of this course, students will be sensitized and introduced to the science of creativity. Students will develop a better understanding of what is creative and what is not. Students will learn to think in an integrative way across disciplines, improve their critical thinking and analytical skills, while creating their own creative work.