Creative Thinking in Art, Technology and Design

Creativity starts from the belief that you can, grows with the accumulation of skills and knowledge and manifests through action to make your idea happen.

Creativity in students is vital. It enables them to be ingenious, imaginative individuals who can find, pose and solve problems with an open mind; making connections, interpretations, taking risks, learning from mistakes and exploring new possibilities.

Creativity engages learners and helps them prepare for the world of work and to shape their future lives. It inspires students to see who they are and envisage what they can do, to realise their potential and what they can accomplish.

What does deep Creativity look like?

Learners have a real talent for identifying opportunities to create economic and social value by solving important real‐world problems or finding unrealised opportunities. They have a relentless drive to question the status quo and imagine completely new futures where lives are better and the world is changed. They are able to look across the talents and resources around them to see who and what they need to bring together to make it happen. And they do.

Learners have an eye not just for novel ideas but for solutions and ways of thinking that could be game changers. They have good instincts for how to pursue these ideas all the way to fruition. Learners are highly skilled at outside the box, creative and innovative thinking that works in the real world, makes a difference in people’s lives, and improves quality for people, environment, and economy. Solutions have clearly been thought through from multiple perspectives.

Creative thinking capability aims to ensure that students develop:

• understanding of thinking processes and an ability to manage and apply these intentionally
• skills and learning dispositions that support logical, strategic, flexible and adventurous thinking
• confidence in evaluating thinking and thinking processes across a range of familiar and unfamiliar contexts.

Art, Technology and Design learning across all the Christian College campuses is helping students believe that they can by providing opportunities to spark creativity and growing their skills and abilities to realise their ideas through action. Here are some examples worth highlighting from the last twelve months:

• The Business of Food elective has seen some of our students build their entrepreneurial skills and put together a business model for a coffee shop at Bellarine Campus for Staff and Students. It has been very rewarding to see how our students’ business skills have grown and innovation thinking has developed in seeking areas for the growth, expansion and longevity of the business.
• Our Year 2 Visual Art students’ STEAM inquiry project has showcased their design thinking and creative talents in the production of 3d artworks for their Robots which were then choreographed to perform autonomously, bringing their artworks, and characters, to life. A fantastic interdisciplinary approach to learning. 
• The collaboration between Guerrilla Art and Drama students culminated at the 2018 Geelong After Dark. This year’s theme ‘Earth’, saw students use both installation artwork and performance to show case the transformation of Geelong’s employment landscape from blue collar to white collar and highlight the local issue of homelessness.
• The Year 5’s have been redeveloping supermarket packaging and its purpose on the back of the recent move away from soft plastics. Who knows what these students may find as a solution to a significant portion of our waste generation?
• Year 7 Visual Art students have been working collaboratively across the year level to bring to life a mural inspired by Visual Artist, Michael Craig-Martin.
• Year 8 Textiles students winning the People’s Choice awards at the state-wide ‘So you think you can Design” competition for their innovation in wearable technologies by prototyping garments that change and alert the wearer to increasing levels of UV radiation.
• Senior Studio Art students challenging the status quo in their individual works and engaging the audience in a wide variety of subjects in an ever-increasing means of mediums, where canvases are been replaced by immersive, visual and auditory installations.

I am looking forward to celebrating all of the creative learning opportunities at our upcoming ‘Extravaganza’ where all campuses combine to showcase our students work across the Art, Technology and Design faculty at Christian College.

Antony Benson
Director of Teaching & Learning, Art Technology and Design