• --> Read the full course description and tentative schedule <--

Contemporary education increasingly focuses onteaching how to generate new ideas and critically address problems. Accordingly, creativity is quickly taking hold in the educational domain. Yet, it remains subject to serious misconceptions, which consider it as the stroke of genius of gifted individuals, or as an innate capacity. The course will challenge these conceptions by illustrating many strategies to nurture, train, and ultimately improve creativity. By its end, participants will be definitely convinced that creativity implies tinkering with tools, assessing the results, making tweaks, and ultimately visualizing the idea emerging from this endeavor. Participants will practice many methods to generate new ideas across a variety of tasks and domains. By focusing onhow creative thinking works rather than seeing it as an outcome, they will realize that creative thinking is a process that can be scaffolded by tools and external structures. Course participants will learn to use some of the most famous tools in the field of innovation for boosting creative thinking. They will discover different techniques to scaffold problem-solving, come up with new solutions, create stories and narratives, nurture imagination, and visualize non-existing realities. Moreover, they will devolve time to experiment with these techniques in idea-generation, storytelling, as well as concept-art. Participants will also learn how to lead their students to adopt these tools as an individual practice as well as a collective process during daily classroom interactions. Hitting the new challenges raised by our society, not only the course will h...read more.