I’ve started a new class through Coursera – a MOOC – that apparently has close to 125,000 people signed up for it worldwide. Mind boggling to think of that many students going to class together. The topic is Creativity – and in keeping with the course’s intent to promote more creative lives among the students, I’ve joined a subgroup of French speakers enrolled in the class. A challenging way to resurrect my skills with a language which I once spoke and wrote fluently, but which I’ve had little occasion to use in the last thirty years. Since the class is on-line, that means I’m writing French – the most difficult way to use a language skill. Should be an interesting eight weeks!
The first assignment included an option to make a sort of life map – identifying a core value at the center of everything one does, and then listing 3-5 priorities in each area of life, such as family, career, community, etc. I found the exercise relatively easy to do, given that my spiritual path (MasterPath) calls for a consistent effort to examine and process one’s life experiences. But I also attribute some of the ease to age – one doesn’t get to 70 and still engaged with employment, learning and community service, without having examined one’s priorities, and kept tabs on how they evolve over time.
What didn’t get addressed by the Life Ring activity was what I’d call a question of style – how do you, I, we approach daily life? I’m scheduled to facilitate an Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP) workshop with a competent co-leader who is very organized, detail oriented, and most comfortable when every aspect of the workshop is clearly spelled out in advance, including how each activity links to a small number of specific topics. I on the other hand, like to ‘wing it’ for at least part of the weekend. I’ve put together an agenda that includes exercises which can be related to a number of different topics. Part of the challenge – and the learning – that I value in AVP is how it reveals interrelationships that participants have not previously considered. I trust my own skill at helping tie those relationships together, and therefore like to leave room for the unexpected to emerge as the activities are processed.
There’s a lot to be learned co-facilitating with someone whose style differs from mine. Birds of a feather may indeed flock together – but do they learn how to get along with those of a different plumage? We draw reassurance from associating with others like ourselves. We learn and grow when challenged by those with whom we have differences. Which makes the concept of thousands of students from a hundred or more different cultures all joining together to explore creativity a highly innovative concept.
The Francophone subgroup is on LinkedIn, enabling me to check the careers and interests of other members, as they can review mine. Most of those I’ve looked up so far are younger, in business, engineering, industry, very few list teaching, none that I’ve found so far work in social service or health-related careers as I have done. The instructors for the course want the students to find ways to apply the concepts we study to our fields of endeavor, and to work together in teams to develop those projects. I seem to have set myself up to stretch my creativity to the max, finding ways to apply my skills, in a second language, to areas of life with which I have little if any experience! Should be fun…Meanwhile, the course does stress that we all have the capacity to be creative – and that our styles do indeed differ. We have all been asked to take a survey that classifies us along a continuum from adaptively creative to innovatively creative. I come up moderately innovative. I suspect my AVP co-facilitator would land somewhere on the adaptive end of the dimension. I’m realizing, as I write, that by putting on the workshop with her later this month, I will have completed the major assignment of the course – which is to apply the principles of creativity, in conjunction with others, to an aspect of my professional life. Thankfully I don’t have to put on the workshop in French!
1eclecticwriter 