CREATIVITY SCHOOL: LEARN, MAKE, SHARE Embedding creative and entrepreneurial thinking into the school-wide curriculum By Oğuzhan Aygören Assistant Professor of Marketing, Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Boğazici University Faculty Innovation Fellows candidate
The formal education system makes us rely on analytical thinking and puts limits on what we know and achieve. However, as Einstein has famously said: “Logic takes us from A to B, but imagination takes us to anywhere.” Instead of knowing, we should focus more on learning. A wise man knows he knows nothing yet, a layman knows everything. So, the Creativity School project aims to nurture the creativity skills of individuals. While doing that, creative thinking and teaching methods are applied by a diverse range of instructors including students and professors. Also, these methods are embedded in multidisciplinary courses with diverse participants in any subject. Teaching itself becomes creative where the chakras of participants open and they unleash the preexisting limits on their creativity. Almost all people, even the most educated ones, talk from memory with preexisting statements in line with their beliefs. So, the only thing that separates educated and uneducated minds is mostly memorization of different arguments. Producing original ideas and owning those is a rare occasion. At the same time, it is an act of courage and confidence. People are afraid of creative thinking. Forget about execution of creativity, they are even afraid of thinking. Afraid of losing their beliefs, afraid of getting lost in real life, afraid of authority not giving permission. However, the most important tool of advancement and improvement is ideas, products and actions that are independent from the existing order and mostly contrary to the status quo. Therefore, creativity, imagination and inspiration are both exciting and frightening. It needs guts to do those. Like an artist. Indeed, creativity is a skill that needs to be learned from artists. In the school and education system, creativity has a very limited area. Unfortunately, this leads people who go through the formal education lathe to become more mechanical and more angular. 16
Creativity starts with dreaming, wondering, questioning, understanding, empathizing and learning. Then, the execution stage is quite analytical. Like an artist who knows in what ratios to use the colors with which brush strokes. In that sense, the artist is also like the chemist. She measures, experiments, fails, learns, tries. Or she is like a physicist who knows how hard to hit the canvas with which brush and how long the brush stroke should last. However, what distinguishes the artist from the physicist or chemist is not only knowing how the mechanisms work but also adding beauty, aesthetics, form and soul. That’s why the design thinking mindset is becoming more popular within business and engineering communities. Today, it is not enough to produce and sell a product. It is expected to be beautiful, smart, aesthetic and create a “wow”. The way to do that is both understanding and observing the outside world and also heading towards one’s inside world to combine logic with feelings and emotions. The world has become more uncertain, volatile, ambiguous and complex than before. Knowledge and knowing used to be the most important, but today, constant, fast learning is important. Because we admit that we can not know more than Google. Now, it is time for wisdom in this information noise and clutter. Wisdom is about identifying, filtering and combining the relevant knowledge. So, it is imperative to produce novel and creative works and ideas. The business world is trying to increase productivity by 10%, 20%, 30% with industrialization. However, the entrepreneurship and innovation world is aiming to disrupt everything by 10 times, 20 times, 30 times by resetting what we know and searching for the quest of the ideal final result. If not for a wild idea, Bitcoin, iPhone or Cybertruck would not even have been possible. This is
