critical & creative thinking

Critical and creative thinking, as an objective, is difficult to capture in academia because it's something the student essentially has to internalize and express on their own.  In other words, it can’t necessarily be taught or graded, rather, it is encouraged and supported.  Critical and creative thinking asks the student to reflect on their own lives.  Objectively see their place and role amongst a society and be able to hear or read the words and perspectives of others who may come from drastically different backgrounds and circumstances.  That said, hearing and reading is not the objective without the ability to fully comprehend, analyze, and understand what they are engaging with.  This learning objective, to me, can be rewritten as, students should possess the ability to recognize the systems by which the world operates outside of their own race, religion, gender, culture, socioeconomic status, age, country, etc. and, with that understanding, be able to apply unbiased and rational thoughts towards various discourses surrounding multiple subjects and debates.  It asks the student to make well informed arguments rooted in careful analysis and interpretation of subject matter while also being open and receptive to counter arguments within the same discussion.

I personally find this learning objective to be one of, if not, the most important objective out of all the learning objectives.  In some ways, this objective encompasses all of the objectives in that critical and creative thinking, in an ideal student, would pull from all other objectives to generate the most well informed and unbiased body of work.  It matters to me because, now more than ever, I feel as though people react and engage with the most topical levels of information and it would be a net positive if more people thought critically and dove deeper into world issues and were able to engage reasonably with one another to propose solutions.

The first artifact I chose to represent critical and creative thinking is a goliath of an assignment I completed in March of 2023 (See at the bottom of this page or in Archive). This final assignment was for a class called Politics And Popular Music taught by professor Susan Harewood, a professor I admire deeply and have since taken another of her classes as well as facilitated two of her classes.  To keep it as brief as possible, this essay asked us to create a 2 disc album (6 songs per disc) of music we covered in the class as well as music we listen to outside of class.  The objective of the essay was to dissect each song and explain the political and historical contexts of their significance at the time, as well as how each song creates political meaning.  Finally, we were asked to explain why we chose the songs we did and the significance of the order by which we put the songs on the album.  My essay ended up being 28 pages long and I can say it was my greatest challenge throughout my entire college journey.

This assignment aligns with critical and creative thinking almost exclusively as I painstakingly researched 12 artists’ backgrounds, histories, U.S. politics of their individual times, activist movements, their songs’ usage in other areas of media, etc.  I was forced to see the world through their eyes, the injustices they witnessed, and the resilience and non-compliance they bottled and spread to as many people as they could.  Through this assignment, I critically analyzed music and had to curate an album with a natural cohesion while politically linking each song to the next.  This required creativity on my part when deciding just how I wanted to tell this story of so many artists who have suffered atrocities that I never had.  I had to hear their stories, put myself in their shoes, and do my best to capture their life's work meaningfully, and with respect to the politics of their time.

The second artifact I chose to represent this learning objective was a final assignment for an English class I took in 2021(See at the bottom of this page or in Archive). Though this class was a basic general education requirement in my first year of college, it embodies my first real life academic intersection between critical and creative thinking.  In short, the assignment was pretty vague.  We had to create…something…that had to do with incarceration in the United States.  Now, vagueness is something I’ve come to appreciate in my later college years but, in the beginning, it was quite daunting.  Some students made posters, brochures, essays, one student even made a game we could play.  I chose to make a video.  In this video, I decided to explore the school to prison pipeline and how children find themselves in this track.  Speaking practically, choosing video as my medium to explore this subject gave me the opportunity to add key visual aids when discussing certain metrics.  Video also allowed me the opportunity to incorporate other videos within my video to further explain key details in my presentation.  It also offered me the ability to pause and elaborate certain sections further in person or answer questions as it went on.  This all captures the creative side of critical and creative thinking.  Critical thinking came from the research process.  I had to dig deep into systemic racism, more specifically the incarceration and education branches of systemic racism, and create a compelling narrative as to how primarily minority students end up on this pipeline.  It’s a tricky subject to navigate, especially as a white man, so I had to make sure that I was well read on the issue and was able to collect and present evidence clearly and effectively to my audience.

Critical and creative thinking is more than just a learning objective.  It's a valuable skill that anyone can possess but not just anyone can master.  My time at the University of Washington and Cascadia College has provided me numerous opportunities to express this learning objective in my work and I can only hope I did so flawlessly.  My first artifact captures this objective in its apex.  In my opinion, that assignment elevated my own personal abilities and confidence to a new level.  My second artifact was the infancy of this skill when I was still learning, for lack of better words, how to learn.  It wasn’t very polished, it wasn’t very succinct, but it got the ball rolling on how important critical thinking and analysis was, while inspiring me to pursue video production works throughout the rest of my college career.