How To Be Creative In Curriculum Design?

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Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works.

Of the many creative projects I completed with teachers, artists and schools when I was director of the Biscuit Factory Arts Centre in Fremantle Western Australia, THE NONSENSE PROJECT holds special meaning for me pedagogically. Originally created to highlight how arts-based learning could and should encompass the development of ‘high-order thinking’ skills, it also provided me with evidence on the motivational power to focus students on complex tasks. This also included exploring how to ‘digitally transform’ how students engaged in creative tasks. When I first ran the projects between 2001 and 2006, I invested in the use of

  • 10 Macbook lapbooks
  • A data projector and
  • equipped the BFAC with WiFi

To be human is to be technologically equipped. As Tiffany Schlain points out in her TED book Brain Power, 

…the technology we create is a direct extension of us, not something separate. As Marshall McLuhan wrote in The Medium Is the Message, first published in 1967, “The wheel is an extension of the foot, the book is an extension of the eye, clothing, an extension of the skin, electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system.

Following this logic then, the digital transformation of a teaching and learning project could be described as seeking to extend the cognitive, social, emotional and cultural processes with digital tools.

Design must reflect the practical and aesthetic but above all… learning design must primarily enable students achieve valued outcomes.

Designing Nonsense Projects

The original structure of the ‘meaning making’ projects was an eight week programme that blended dramatic play with ‘learning how to learn’ activities. This turned out to be eight half-day workshops presented once a week (designed to fit neatly into a term’s work).

It focused the energies of middle to upper primary students on thinking – thinking smartly, avoiding to think ineffectively, thinking ‘what’s the difference between the two?’

The project structure is aimed to enable students to review and explore what it means to begin a task, view its progress and arrive at a conclusion.That means that each element is treated metacognitively through stage properties and costumes.

‘Thinking’ was never so much fun! As the content of the project is about making meaning, the challenge of creating comic NONSENSE is asked as a ‘big question’ aka a ‘philosophical inquiry’… ‘What do we mean when we say ‘this makes sense’ and ‘this is nonsense’?

Other nonsense stuff

On the other hand, the project also used a variety of ‘low-tech’ props such as coloured materials of different textures and sizes, large geometric shapes created with cane or PVC, large rolls of butcher’s paper/ newsprint: in fact, predominantly elemental, non-constructed resources that students could safely use over and over again to characterise a location or situation that the creative project called-up for them. For instance, students ‘made costumes’ as a facility of ‘marking the body’ and ‘dressing’ chairs to demarcate a particular setting.

Thus, digital learning was always contextualised within an embodied activity which used artistic processes at the core of the ‘learning how to learn’ approach.

Interestingly, what I discovered in my busyness is that the use of technology in teaching is most powerful when it enables me to be reflective. It seemed paradoxical to be looking at this principle in order to apply a technology of such speed and power of connectivity: nonetheless, I decided to re-design THE NONSENSE PROJECT to do more reflecting. Ironically, the neuroscience has only recently revealed to us precisely why in neurological terms, reflection, mindfulness and meditation are so vitally interconnected in human cognition.

For instance, the Coursera MOOC Learning How To Learn, delivered by Drs Barbara Oakley and  Terry Sejnowski at the University of California, San Diego show being reflective as a function of the brain’s two modes of working, focused attention and diffuse thinking. The important fact to grasp here is that successful learners need to learn to apply both modes effectively.  One of the key readings in the course is Brigid Schulte, (May 16, 2014). “For a more productive life, daydream.” CNN Opinion.  Schulte opens her article with

In 1990, a 25-year-old researcher for Amnesty International, stuck on a train stopped on the tracks between London and Manchester, stared out the window for hours. To those around her, no doubt rustling newspapers and magazines, busily rifling through work, the young woman no doubt appeared to be little more than a space cadet, wasting her time, zoning out.

But that woman came to be known as JK Rowling. And in those idle hours daydreaming out the train window, she has said that the entire plot of the magical Harry Potter series simply “fell into” her head.

… It all has to do with something called the brain’s default mode network, explains Andrew Smart, a human factors research scientist and author of the new book, “Autopilot, the Art & Science of Doing Nothing.”

The default mode network is like a series of airport hubs in different and typically unconnected parts of the brain. And that’s why it’s so crucial. When the brain flips into idle mode, this network subconsciously puts together stray thoughts, makes seemingly random connections and enables us to see an old problem in an entirely new light.

What Informs My Use Of Drama & The Arts In Learning-How-To-Learn?

The amount of content and information available to us & our students today is unlimited. As a result, we need to apply the most effective and efficient ways of handling the resources for making, writing, experimenting, exploring, creating, problem-solving and playing.  For instance, for the project I made use of:

Comedy Techniques and Comic Writing in Learning-How-To-Learn

The project also made use of research from Matthew Hurley’s, Daniel Dennett’s and Reginald Adams’ Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind that defines “a zone of experience and state of mind in which we experience a sense of pleasure in futility, chaos and incomprehension”. In doing so, it attempted to show how human fallibility arises from the process of building our working memory on ‘illusions of competence’ and our long term memory, which neuroscientists call ‘reconsolidation’, built on ‘false memory’: learning to learn thus involves us doing what  David Dennett describes coming to know how the human brain has a “Chevy engine running Maserati software”.

Ultimately, I saw the projects as helping me create many and varied ways of interacting with students to discuss existentialist topics in accessible ways.