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Introducing the Student Facilitator Development Series (SFDS)
C&I has created a new program for students interested in leading creative workshops called the Student Facilitator Development Series (SFDS). If the announcement above caught your attention, read on for more about the program. We encourage you to join us!
This program builds upon students’ experience in an immersion and deepens their understanding of creativity through learning how to facilitate creative thinking workshops. After completing an immersion experience and a facilitator training, students work in pairs, getting paid to lead creative exercises to groups across campus.
This series was designed specifically for the block plan. Each block involves training for a different creative exercise. This enables students to lead that one exercise across campus even if they’re not available for trainings offered in other blocks. In each block that they take the training, students add a new exercise to the repertoire of workshops they can lead. The trainings include understanding basic learning strategies, such as inquiry, engagement, and visual communication. While learning how to facilitate, students offer peer feedback and deliver small workshops to student groups while being observed by the director of the Creativity Lab until they feel confident in their skills and aptitude for facilitating the specific exercise. At that point, students will get paid to facilitate creative workshops for groups on campus and possibly in the Colorado Springs community.
The first opportunity for students to participate in the SFDS begins with an immersion in half-block 2024, January 15-16, and a facilitation training directly after that, January 17-18.
Sign up via SUMMIT or scan the QR code below.
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Why Seeing Should Not Be Believing
Jessica Hunter, PhD
Director of Creativity & Innovation
“Seeing is very easy—and very hard. Look around you: it is easy to see the world. Now try to explain how you see that world, and you will begin to find out how hard seeing really is.”
—James V. Stone, Vision and Brain: How We Perceive the World
We live in a world of sensation, a continuous onslaught of sights, sounds, smells, textures, temperatures, and touches that the brain must transform into the perceptions that guide our thoughts and actions. According to neuroscientist Eric Kandel, sensory information “is made enduring by the brain and becomes coherent when the brain assigns it meaning, utility, and value” through perception.
However, the world offers us far more sensory data than we can use, so the brain must continually evaluate incoming data based on our prior experiences. While highly efficient, this process means we stop seeking information about something new once we identify it. This can lead us to make incorrect attributions or cause us to ignore things that do not correspond to anything we’ve previously experienced—a phenomenon called inattentional blindness.
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A classic example of inattentional blindness comes from a 2013 study that asked 24 radiologists to examine a series of X-rays for evidence of lung nodules. The last x-ray in the set contained an image of a gorilla measuring forty-eight times larger than an average nodule. By tracking the movement of the radiologists’ eyes, the researchers determined that despite looking directly at the gorilla, 83 percent of the radiologists missed it.
This experiment, and others like it, demonstrates that the power of expectation affects even highly trained observers. As psychologist Edward Neçka comments, “People are likely to see (hear, sense, etc.) what they expect to see, and the opposite is also true—they are unlikely to notice things that they do not expect to exist or appear in the particular circumstances.” Or, as Christopher Bardt puts it, “When a perception is grasped by the mind, seeing is both powered and blinkered in a single stroke.”
While the processes of perception are outside of our conscious control, we can intentionally interrogate what we think we perceive. Many of the exercises offered at C&I ask students to make careful observations about elements of their environments to find details and nuances they might have otherwise overlooked. The goal is to help students learn to slow down and attempt to see what is in front of them, including an unexpected gorilla.
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Visual Notebooks: Connecting Creativity & the Classroom
Auna McConnaughey (’26)
The blue lines indicated where to write, red margins instructed when words should start and end, and one blank white page. Tearing out page after page, only stopping when it reached some level of perfection. The words weren’t too far above the line or scooping below it, the never-ending choice of whether I adhere to the red line seeping through the other side. Not only did I commit myself to this practice, I felt as though it was the only way.
Block 4 2022, I was a student in an Education class. It was here that the black notebooks, with not a line in them, were laid in front of me. A pouch with various tools to utilize in the notebooks was given to each of us students. We were encouraged to take a chance, to use the various colors, to sketch, and to create, all while in class. I was sure this was never going to work for me.
Yet, a year later, I still utilize the Visual Notebooks provided to me by Creativity & Innovation in every one of my classes. It has only been through the means of creating that I can fully participate in the dialogue of my education. Notes paired with marks, drawings, collages, and no expectation of perfection have aided in my belief that I am not limited. The Visual Notebook allows me to explore aspects of education that I previously never allowed myself to enter.
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Behind the Scenes of Creative Threads: An Evening of Experimental Weaving & Music
By Cecilia Timberg (’24)
Ever been curious about how different creative mediums can be combined to make something completely new? You’re not alone! Ian Widmann (‘24) and Forrest Tucker (‘24), curious about how to combine music and fiber arts, produced Creative Threads: An Evening of Experimental Weaving & Music this block. I chatted with Ian Widmann prior to the program to learn about the inspiration and goals of holding this event. Check out the interview below!
Who came up with this idea?
I originally conceived of this program as part of a collaboration with Rebecca Parker, the director of Arts and Crafts, as part of my programming for the housing area where I am the RA, the Expression of the Arts Lifestyle and Living Community (LLC) in McGregor. We were chatting earlier in the semester about putting together a program for the end of the semester for my residents, and we came up with the idea of bringing in John Fifield-Perez, the inaugural fiber arts fellow in the studio art department, and Ryan Seward, the new music librarian, to collaborate on building some sort of big artistic thing. As we were building the program, it started to blossom into something bigger, and we decided to open up the event to the broader CC community to get people involved in the work we were doing!
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What will the event look like? Why combine weaving and music?
The idea for the event is to bring people together for a collaborative and experimental creative performance experience by engaging with a variety of materials, such as loom weaving, graphic scores, contemporary music performance, weaving with non-traditional materials, and thinking of the act of weaving as a performance. This combination of different artistic disciplines really came about as an expression of my and my collaborators’ artistic and musical backgrounds, as well as the self-awareness and community engagement elements of the Residential Experience curriculum. The goal is to bring in creative and artistic members of the student body, and to collaboratively discover a connection between the ideas of weaving and music.
What do you hope the CC community gets out of this experience?
To be honest, part of the cool thing about this program is that we won’t really know what we’ll get out of the program until we see how people engage with the different materials we have provided. But I personally am hoping that getting all these creative people in the room together will encourage people to engage with artistic materials they might not encounter in other contexts, and to build lasting connections with each other to continue creating art beyond this event. I especially hope the residents of my building use this as an opportunity to build connections with creative spaces they might not already be a part of!
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The Colorado College Art Loan Program
Sophia Hartt (’26)
The Art Loan Program (ALP) is a student-led project started in 2022 to give students, staff, and faculty the opportunity to live with and experience art. This year, more than 60 pieces were loaned out, including four newly acquired works. ALP loans art from the Colorado College Campus Collection and includes a variety of works in different mediums and subjects. Currently, the Campus Collection interns are in the process of finding art to acquire for 2023-24 to diversify the collection and offer more options for loans.
The art loan period is during Blocks 2 through 7. If you missed this year’s application deadline, the Art Loan Program will return in Block 1 of next year with even more pieces to choose from! To find more information, visit the Art Loan website.
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