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The Creative Life with Jane Hilberry
Willa McLaughlin, ’27
On my first day of class at CC, I was asked to describe how I felt as a form of weather. We went around the room, one filled with art supplies and posters, and shared small details of ourselves through descriptions of rainy days or cool summer breezes. Immediately, there was a sense of wonder and curiosity in the room, and that’s exactly what Jane Hilberry fosters in her classes. To have Jane as a professor in her last year before retirement was a gift. Jane has the ability to connect with everyone in her classes. Her warmth and joy surrounding creativity emanate, and her creative exercises are profound. The Creative Life was my FYP; it couldn’t have been a better class to take. The topics we explored across two blocks have benefited me in vast areas of my life as we explored how creativity can be applied across a multitude of subjects.
In our second block of The Creative Life, we had an “open house” to showcase what we had worked on and the exercises we had learned. In an attempt to capture the magic and delight of the evening and class, I filmed and edited a video (which can be viewed by clicking on the photo below). I hope that by watching, one can experience a small taste of the joy and exploration Jane cultivated in her classes. Jane will be greatly missed at CC, but her impact on students will be felt for years to come.
Happy retirement, Jane!
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Taking Final Exams in Watercolor: A Reflection from a CC Senior on Creative Final Assessments
Cecilia Timberg, ’24
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I am an 8th-block senior at Colorado College, and I have not had to study for a single final exam in three years. This doesn’t mean that my classes are easy or that I have endless free time—far from it. The time that most people would spend at the end of classes memorizing, I have often spent creating. This is because many courses at CC have moved towards creativity-based final assessments.
As a self-prescribed “horrible test taker,” I have found a new sense of excitement about the final days of a course: I get to connect what I have learned with my life experience using creativity. I am lucky, too, that the classes I took were more project-based. Not all classes at CC are, but I have intentionally sought out this form of learning.
I have endless examples of these final projects at CC, but I would like to focus on the final projects for my AN361: Climate Change and Cultural Values course. Our final assessment prompt was open-ended: Creatively exhibit & expand upon what we have learned in this class.
On the last day of class, we sat eating baked goods and watched with curiosity as people shared how they addressed this prompt. There were GIS story maps on environmental justice, climate futurism fiction, ironic propaganda, and letters written to the CC administration about changes in GenEd requirements. My personal final project responded to a single quote that I could not shake from an essay published in the climate-optimism bible, Not Too Late:
“Perhaps the story of climate change is a story of flowers” (Auguon, 2023).
After making this claim, Auguon returns to the facts of the story he was telling, of the death toll caused by sea level rise in the Republic of the Marshall Islands. The quote, beautiful and stranded in the wave of facts that follow, is left for the readers to interpret for themselves, which is, perhaps, a rhetorical strategy that demonstrates his point better than any authorial interpretation, as we are left pondering: How is my story of climate change a story of flowers?
My final project combined the course materials, my lived experience growing up in the climate crisis, and my work as an academic studying climate change to explore my interpretations of Auguon’s quote. By evoking the imagery of a flower, Auguon alluded that climate stories can be collected, put in your pocket, pressed, and carried with you. They hold seeds, a plea to grow into something bigger than themselves. When I read that, I suddenly noticed how heavily I have grown in my four years of academia and 22 years of life with climate stories. I had traveled across the world to COP27 in Sharm-El-Sheikh to listen to the global devastation and hope of people who had no homes to go back to. I have embedded myself in my chosen home, the Southwest, through listening to stories of multi-generational subsistence farmers in San Luis whose way of life is at risk due to drought, musicians in New Mexico who write lyrics to the land in hopes of it holding onto the land, in apology. I have also returned to my childhood homes, where I had an acute ear for stories my grandparents told about the places where I grew up as climate stories. What I have learned from growing up through a climate crisis is that more and more each day, every story is a climate story.
In less than a month, I will graduate as an anthropology and environmental studies major. Creating this collection allowed me to reflect on my past four years at Colorado College and notice that my most acute moments of learning were connecting creativity with my course material and listening to others do the same.
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Using Creative Mindsets to Design School Events
Cindy (Chenxin) Xiang, ’26
As the dragon danced, adorned with lanterns, it gracefully wound its way onto the stage amidst resounding drumbeats; the Lunar New Year celebration heralded a fresh atmosphere and a new beginning.
For the Chinese people, the onset of the new year is a time of familial reunion and national jubilation. For Colorado College’s Chinese Student Association (CCCSA), this celebration is a meticulously planned and pivotal event. Participating in the planning process for the first time, I embraced the opportunity to cultivate creative mindsets and skills. Observing the mesmerizing dragon and lion dances amidst the audience’s exclamations prompted me to reflect on the preceding months. From the initial event conceptualization to its success, each step remains vivid in my memory, underscoring the profound influence of Creativity & Innovation at CC’s (C&I) mindset on my journey.
Initially, our team convened to brainstorm ideas for the Chinese Lunar New Year festivities, drawing inspiration from the Year of the Dragon. As the brainstorming session unfolded, we realized the potential to expand beyond Chinese cultural elements and encompass broader Asian influences. This shift exemplified “divergent thinking,” a fundamental aspect of creative skill development that has become natural to us. Transitioning from ideation to implementation posed the question of translating our imaginative concepts into reality. Through task separation, many innovative ideas emerged, including the fusion of traditional and modern elements within performances. This phase exhibited “convergent thinking,” where attention to detail and lateral idea exploration took precedence.
With a compelling concept in hand, we delved into the details, from contacting performers to procuring equipment and securing practice venues. Throughout these endeavors, our creative mindset fostered a culture of possibility thinking, prompting us to evaluate and pursue various avenues. Notably, a suggestion emerged to combine the dragon dance with a shadow puppet performance, leveraging their shared thematic elements to create a captivating, cohesive presentation. This concept of “unexpected connections” underscored the beauty of unifying disparate elements to enhance overall cohesion.
As preparations reached a climax, unforeseen challenges arose, such as potential delays in equipment delivery. In response, we devised a ‘plan B’ that utilized existing resources to design an alternative. This experience underscored the importance of embracing risk and maintaining composure in the face of adversity, ultimately reinforcing the resilience inherent in creative mindsets.
As the festivities ended, the lingering echoes of cheerful music and laughter were accompanied by a profound sense of fulfillment. Amidst reflections and shared experiences with fellow CCCSA members, I recognized the enduring impact of creative mindsets on our collective journey. From divergent and convergent thinking to effective communication and collaborative teamwork, these mindset skills served as the cornerstone of our success. Indeed, where there is a shared will fortified by unwavering determination and mutual support, there emerges a pathway to achievement.
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Feeling and Understanding Dimensions of Creativity
Camila Espinosa-Short, ’25
I stared at the giant, sugar-impressed mushroom in the Fine Arts Center, reflecting on stories of destruction and divinity interwoven into DNA across generations. There was no clear linkage between these things. Still, as I free-wrote in my Possibility Book, a clear story emerged, shedding meaning onto my identity and wider interconnected stories of ancestral resilience. As with many museum visits, I left feeling subtly transformed by the experience of coming into a relationship with art and feeling inspired to create something of my own, perhaps.
Creativity, for me, is, first and foremost, phenomenological. Creativity carries its own internal logic that is difficult to encapsulate and more easily felt than defined. In my Positive Psychology class, however, I was making the connection between the felt experience and the psychological research on creativity. The question that connected the two realms was: How does creativity enhance our human experience? My time with the sugary mushroom piece enhanced my experience in a way that was felt even if the underlying mechanisms remained unknown. Now, psychologists are uncovering those underlying mechanisms, and insights from this research may deepen the felt experience of creativity.
An enhanced life is a life that has a quality of well-being. How does creativity enhance well-being? Researchers say creativity may cultivate openness, including the willingness to consider the unusual, unexpected, out-of-the-ordinary, and ambiguous aspects of life. It may enhance flexible thinking and tolerance of ambiguity (creative mindsets, anybody?). Creativity may even cultivate a higher tolerance for frustration, given the delight taken in seeking solutions to complex and chaotic problems– the mantra “trust the process” springs to mind. All these creative skills reach beyond the creation of a product to how we engage with life itself. When we are open to experience, willing to consider the unusual, tolerate ambiguity and frustration, and trust the process, we may discover a rich world of unexpected meaning that can infuse our lives with beauty, depth, and a smoother movement through a chaotic world.
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C&I’s Big Events of AY23-24
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