Fostering creativity is a key element of the LREI experience and one that is at the center of how we structure learning opportunities for students. So we were intrigued to read about the current OpenIDEO challenge, “How might we inspire young people to cultivate their creative confidence?” OpenIDEO is an innovation platform that brings people from around the global community together to solve big challenges for social good. It seemed self-evident that young people themselves might have something significant to say about this challenge question.

Given that progressive inquiry should always seek to bring learners as close as possible to real issues and direct engagement with the world and others in it, this challenge seemed like a perfect avenue for inquiry for our fifth graders in Adolescent Issues.

In our initial inquiry focused on the inspiration phase of the challenge, we explored a number of questions (What is creativity? What prevents you from or gets in the way of your being creative? Where/how are you creative? What helps you to be creative?) and posted the results of our barnstorming on our class blog and on the OpenIDEO site.

Students then went out and interviewed parents, relatives, and friends to learn about their experiences with creative confidence. Many of the people they spoke with talked about how creative confidence related to their personal lives while others talked about how it related to their professional lives as writers, programmers, designers, doctors, entrepreneurs, lawyers, musicians, architects, artists, business owners, contractors, poets, actors, scientists to name a few. Students then created simple drawings and identified key insights from their interviews, which we assembled into the following video.

Already, students have seen that their ideas matter and that they can have an impact in a global learning space.

Read more at http://www.lrei.org/podium/default.aspx?t=204&nid=879330