For this topic we used a Miro platform and used the Lotus flower technique to “Re-designing of opportunities for group collaboration and assignments. The result is pretty nice and colourful.
I have make some suggestion for some “creative techniques” for group work. In particular
– drama for exploring a topic
– dance as a method of collaboration
– feminist empowering techniques
Concerning group collaboration, I wish to share here a recent pedagogical experience that I have conducted with a colleague of mine who is dance teacher.
We proposed a workshop proposed within a course in sustainability for students of industrial engineering. In particular the workshop intended to use methods from creative dance (Brehm and McNett, 2008) to complement “traditional” lectures on the topic of urban water management challenges connected to climate change, and in particular to flooding.
The workshop was anchored in research on aesthetic learning processes (Styrke, 2015; Burman, 2014), that can generally be defined as addressing sensitive/sensorial and embodied (instead of only discursive) knowledge. It has been argued that such processes – as they engage the body, playfulness, creativity, personal expression and emotions – allows for meaning-making and the exploration of a multiplicity of relations and perspectives.
In the workshop, students were guided to explore elements and materialities involved in the urban flooding issue through basic dance-making and improvisation. They physically experienced being water – in the case of flooding – encountering “hard”, protective infrastructures such as dikes, and more sustainable, “green” solutions such as soil-based, filtering devices. They both explored the physical characteristics of these elements and invented their own movements to describe the relationships between them.
In this way the workshop emphasized creative problem-solving tasks in groups and pairs – in combination with verbal brainstorming – thus engaging the body and movement as means for interaction with the topic but also with each other. This showed the relevance of this method to foster creative as well as collaborative skills that are more and more valorized in sustainable and responsible education (Concina, 2019).
References
Brehm, M. A. and McNett, L. (2008), Creative dance for learning – the kinesthetic link. New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education.
Burman, A. (red.). (2014), Konst och lärande: essäer om estetiska lärprocesser. Huddinge: Södertörns Högskola.
Concina, E. (2019), “Participative Teaching Methods for Sustainable Development”. In Leal Filho, W. (eds), Encyclopedia of Sustainability in Higher Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11352-0_411
Styrke, B.-M. (2015), Kunskapande i dans: om estetiskt lärande och kommunikation. Stockholm: Liber.
