Article by Laura Sgreccia, Warehouse hub
In the past 10 years or more creativity has begun to be talked about as a twenty-first-century competency: (UNESCO, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 2006); The World Conference on Arts Education: Building Creative Capacities for the 21st Century: Working Document (Lisbon, Portugal, 6–9 March 2006. Lisbon: UNESCO).
Creativity and problem solving are listed among the top 10 key skills that will be needed in the world of work by 2025, according to the World Economic Forum.
In the EntreComp framework, the Entrepreneurship Competence Framework issued by the European Commission in 2016, creativity is presented as one of the 15 competences that any learner can develop to become entrepreneurial, one of the key competence for lifelong learning that can be trained and developed.
Creativity is characterized by the ability to perceive the world around us in new and different ways to make connections among apparently unrelated phenomena and to generate innovative solutions. It is the ability to produce new solutions without using a logical process but establishing distant relationships among facts.
The European Creative Hubs partner in this project, as well as other organizations and communities operating within the Creative and Cultural Industries (CCI), strongly believe in creativity as a competence and a generative process that stimulate deeper insights into multiple and alternative ways of seeing, understanding, and acting.
Creative hub Leaders in Europe have been experimenting a lot using art-based methods to stimulate transformational learning and development, exploiting the potential of arts to support their communities of professionals in finding new solutions to complex problems.
This is the reason why the CHLaYdoscope Training Package, a training guide to develop community leadership key transversal competencies in youths, about to be issued as Project Result 2 within this pilot, dedicates a specific Module, the Module 5, to Creativity as a Competence.
Module 5, co-designed by Warehouse hub, the creative hub leading the process of this project result, Materahub, the lead partner of this pilot and PINA, is centered around Creativity as a competence and as a generative process.
Creativity entails the capacity to imagine innovative solutions and new answers for new challenges in our changing world, the ability to integrate different perspectives into a new understanding, a product, or a service; the capability to see the world in new ways, find hidden patterns, make connections between seemingly disparate things, and generate new ideas.
Thus, to be effective community leaders and create new possibilities for communities, prospective youth community leaders must learn how to guide their communities to become more creative. Creativity is a key leadership competence. Great community leaders are creative and are able to unleash creativity from their communities by facilitating collaborative and generative processes.
Creativity is a key competence to adapt, and to bring change.
In the Module 5 of the Chlaydoscope training package are presented and suggested a few methodologies and tools apt to develop creativity as a competence.
These methodologies and tools are part of the knowledge base used by the Creative Hub Leaders with their communities of youths, professionals, creative people.
For example, Workshop 1 described in this module is titled: CREATIVITY=REMIX. It was designed and tested in different context and with different target groups by Warehouse hub, and it aims at presenting to prospective Youth Community Leaders a focus on some methodologies (such as Lean, Agile, Design Thinking), processes and tools (Double Diamond Design; the Product Vision Box) which can support them to experience and to look at the nature of the creative process, to unleash creative thinking and to explore new possibilities for social and individual change.
Creativity is experienced through this workshop as a crucial process to ideate and to connect new ideas with existing experiences: the reuse of existing knowledge is an indispensable part of the creation of novel ideas. In the creative domain knowledge reuse is a common practice known as “remixing”.
Other workshops in this module present the LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® methodology, a hands-on, experiential process designed to enhance innovation and business performance and suggested in this training package to train creativity as a competence and in particular to support youth leaders and their community members towards a creative process based on experimentation, which allows them to start envisioning, building, and visualizing ideas.
Finally, a further technique presented to develop in prospective youth community leaders
reflectivity and identification capacities, is the interactive drama techniques known as the Forum Theatre described in workshop 3. The techniques under the umbrella term of Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) a type of theatre created by Brazilian theatre director Augusto Boal, is introduced in the CHLaYdoscope Training Package as a clear evidence of how a technique borrowed from theatre can become a useful methodology for creating a creative and participatory process for solving complex problems.
Don’t miss the publication of this collection of training techniques and methodologies for community leadership development in young people and keep following us on our website chlaydoscope.eu
