Creativity in Teaching & Learning @ Mizzou

by | Monday, May 27, 2019

I was recently invited to conduct a workshop for the Celebration of Teaching Conference at the University of Missouri around Creativity in Teaching and Learning. This was my first time at Columbia, MO and the conference organizers were wonderful. I did two versions of my workshop: a 3-hour extended session and a shorter 50-minute version. I think we had around 60 people in the first one and around 20+ for the second one. I thought both sessions went really well—we covered quite a bit of ground (both conceptual and pragmatic) though the 50 minute session was a bit too short and I know I could have planned that better.

Jerod Quinn (@jquinnID on twitter), an instructional designer created these wonderful visual-notes from my first session that he subsequently tweeted out.

Visual notes taken by Jerod Quinn
Visual notes taken by Jerod Quinn from my first session (© @jquinnID)

I am always impressed by people who can do something like this on the fly. It is an amazing talent, particularly around apportioning space and making connections between the ideas. Many thanks to Jerod for these notes and sharing them with me.

Here are a few other photographs from my visit.

Photo of Memorial Union on the Mizzou campus
Photo of the Memorial Union on the Mizzou campus. I was told there is a historic error in the clock… Can you find it? (Photo by Punya Mishra)
Detail from street art at Columbia MO
Detail from street art: Columbia, MO (Photo by Punya Mishra)

Finally, here are a couple of haiku’s created by the participants, seeking to capture some of the ideas discussed. (Sadly, the best and funniest of the poems was not shared with me… but that is a relatively embarrassing story, personally speaking, for another day.

Teach me deja vu 
Flip it, create something NEW
Teach me veja du

Making the old new
Novel, effective and whole
Familiar and strange

The Zen of WEN: beginning with the whole in mind.

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