The Creativity Commons
offers a shared space for scholars and students from across the
university to engage in creative exploration of the role of
innovation in teaching and learning in education as well as the
community groups we serve. The Commons initiates and supports
research in teaching, learning and assessment of creativity within
a shared collective space that offers cross-disciplinary
intellectual and artistic exploration. At the Commons we
recognize the role of design and documentation in curriculum work
and its application to policy and practice in education. The
Commons opens space for the gathering of community and academy as
they explore together creative ideas and solutions for problems we
share.
The Commons continues the long trajectory of innovation and
original programming at Lesley, focusing on what is at the core of
creativity, a quality of thinking necessary for successful students
and faculty in the 21st century. By creativity we
mean ideas or actions that are innovative, imaginative and involve
risk-taking, and that result in outcomes that are original and
novel. Edith Lesley began the tradition at Lesley when she
created the first school for kindergarten teachers in this
area.
Lesley's history of interdisciplinary programming and its
strength in arts programming makes it an ideal location for a
shared space for creativity. With the art school moving to
Cambridge, the Commons opens a space for new levels of integration
and connection between artists and others and provides increased
access to the arts and to creativity for all members of the Lesley
community.
The Commons is a physical, virtual and conceptual space that is
both inclusive and generative. The shared space for creative
exploration will include faculty, doctoral students and
administrators from across the four schools of Lesley, and visiting
fellows. The ideas and actions that emerge from this space
generate new academic offerings, scholarship, workshops and
publications.
The Commons is the physical manifestation of a space where ideas
generated by faculty from across the university can emerge as
actions. The Commons offers the community a shared space, a
commons, where materials and technological tools can be used to
explore ideas collaboratively and generate original projects and
programs focused on creativity in practice. With invited
speakers, conveners and fellows to stimulate creative thoughts and
actions, the Commons fosters new programs, projects and scholarship
for schools, community organizations, and others that support the
mission of Lesley University and contribute to solving social
problems.
Documentation Criteria for the Creativity Commons:
In The Lab: Creativity and Culture (2010) David Edwards remarks
that "the aesthetic process is the substance of hypothesis
generation, while the analytical process is the substance of
hypothetical testing. Inevitably, we fuse both when creating
something new."
The Creativity Commons values documentation as a form of
assessment offering the opportunity to fuse both the aesthetic and
the analytical experience. Documenting the research on teaching,
learning and creativity at Lesley will provide valuable resources
to disseminate within Lesley and beyond our campus.
Documenting our work supports the Commons' goal
1. Share work and provide a feedback loop within Lesley and the
outside communities
2. Archive Commons' work for future use and to support grants
and interdisciplinary-collaboration
3. Support a need to communicate creative research containing
multiple languages simultaneously, such as text, sound, symbolic
representation, painterly and scientific images, moving elements,
the visceral, diagrammatic language, and color.
As part of this work, the Commons asks each person or group
using the studio to leave traces of their work for the community's
use in a binder available in the Commons and online.