Lynn Book
Faculty Fellow in Creativity
Department of Theatre and Dance
Wake Forest University
Posted 12.1.2006
As professor of Creativity, how do envision your
role in the Fine Arts units and Wake Forest University's
campus-wide entrepreneurship efforts?
My role is one of invention, the visionaries on faculty and
the administration here at Wake Forest who dreamed up the
position and strategically gave it a home base in the
Department of Theatre and Dance, and my own - but with
equal weight in the Office of Entrepreneurship and Liberal
Arts. The initial call was for someone with a background in
the arts and creativity who had the experience and
abilities to teach creativity across disciplines.
Historically as a self-identified interdisciplinary artist
who has taught for 20 years while pursuing her artistic,
professional career with gusto and has also been an
entrepreneur, this was a quality challenge! The invention
piece can be attributed to several relational factors. I'm
inventing my role in a position that didn't exist before I
arrived in August, 2005 and the best of creative and
entrepreneurial behavior is generally born of invention, or
at the very least, resourceful innovation. Also, given the
border crossing that occurs on a daily basis, from
department to department, domain to discipline, idea to
action, invention is the necessary condition of my role.
That said, the idea of constant invention can be taxing and
even threatening, so the metaphor of a bridge is an apt one
in further describing the complex nature of my role. I am a
bridge between, not so much fine arts areas and the
entrepreneurship program (now a full-fledged minor -
Entrepreneurship and Social Enterprise or ESE), but a
bridge whose name is creativity offering vibrant
connections between all the liberal arts areas and
entrepreneurship. And of course, a good bridge is
approached from divergent locations and is well traveled.
Can you describe the courses you teach and how
they've been received by students?
I began by teaching what might be called a 'soft
entrepreneurship' course, which was really conceived more
as a full-on creative process exploration seminar as part
of a broad First Year Seminar program. Its title is Border
Crossings: Creativity in the Mix and the Margins and
engages students in the study of innovative artists whose
work has arisen over the past 50 years from a broad array
of fine arts arenas, from contemporary opera to performance
and installation art to multicultural theater practices.
The key to this class has been in looking at the quality of
creativity that comes from the maverick, the border crosser
and the dynamic interface between previously separate art
forms that merge and yield new hybrid possibilities. The
young students that encounter this class are definitely
coming away with a new sense of agency so far as
individual, artist-like thinking goes and no doubt have
never had an experience like this that enables them to not
only respond to creative propositions, but to propose and
even perform or execute them themselves. This is the
beginning of a self-directed cultural citizen.
The other course I’ve developed is called Foundations in
Creativity and Innovation and sets the stage for the new
ESE minor. The following is from the course syllabus: "This
course is intended to broaden the notion of what creativity
is, what conditions foster it and how one can access and
develop creative actions that stimulate value for self,
community and society as a whole. It is an interactive
seminar that reflects the spirit of creativity itself:
complex, innovative, exciting, mysterious, shockingly on
target and profoundly transformative. Consequently, we will
attend to current creativity inquiry, research and
development in a variety of ways in order to reveal the
range of this vital human experience."
The focus is explicitly on process more than product,
proposals instead of programmatic ventures. However,
alongside the emphasis on the experiential, I foster an
environment for a 'critical creativity' to unfold that
sharpens critical thinking and adapts it to larger,
embodied imagination processes, and depending on the
student - their orientation, their particular interests -
concrete projects or programs inevitably come into
existence. Ultimately, I'm committed to helping the
students create new ways in which to view the world and
innovate ways through which to transform it; whether subtly
or directly, communally or in individual strokes – there is
room for every voice. I think this kind of inclusiveness,
this kind of attention to process rather than programmatic
results, allows the students the gift of time, of quality
exploration of ideas through consciously taking on lively
and rigorous forms of creativity, gets them questioning
assumptions about it and most certainly offers that
fruitful encounter with a diversity of ideas and approaches
that are brought to the table through the interdisciplinary
mix of students and course materials.
Here's a student response after having taken the first "C
& I" course: "This class allowed me to grow in ways I
never have in a classroom before. It was so cool to explore
areas of my life, thoughts, ideas, feelings, and such that
I had never had time or desire to deal with before. Your
class really stirred up a lot within me, its hard to place
a finger on exactly what that is, but I do know that I have
a new--better--mindset after having taken the course with
you. Also, I want to commend you on your professorship (is
that a word? well... it’s creative!) you were so open to
anything and everything without being judgmental, and the
learning environment you created was awesome." And at the
end of the pilot class last spring, the students presented
me with an "Excellence in Entrepreneurship" award for the
most creative course development, so something meaningful
is getting transmitted here.
What has been the faculty response to your efforts?
Are they noticing more "creative" students?
In brief, faculty response has been quite positive. While
the notion of entrepreneurship is sometimes a complicated
proposal as a course of study in a liberal arts
environment, the idea of creativity, as investigated
through research and practice, is more readily embraced.
Given this, I felt the imperative to establish conditions
that could provide a vehicle to discuss these issues
through looking at the myriad forms of creativity. So I
conceived of a cross-campus community forum called Cook It
UP! - a multifaceted series of events to stimulate
discourse and to promote ways in which to cultivate
creative practices that would benefit individual incentives
and cross-disciplinary collaborations. Central to these
events is the staging of the conversation around invited
WFU faculty members from divergent disciplines -
Biology/Music, Chemistry/Theatre, Political Science/Physics
and the most recent, a trio - Film/Philosophy/Economics
(with a distinct social entrepreneurship twist), to name
just some of the partnerships. As I said, these
conversations are open to all students, faculty, staff, and
even people from the local community and other colleges.
But the 'where' is one of the key innovations - I shifted
the site from a traditional academic setting to an
unconventional one where students from my 'C & I’
course collaborate to create culinary and environmental
designs for each event. So the common area of a dorm (w/
kitchen in close proximity) offers the kind of space that
can be dramatically transformed, immersing the participants
in a heightened state of receptivity and creative exchange.
See the photos for an idea of the ambitiousness of the
design teams. I have no doubt that this kind of quality
involvement from the class is already translating into
parallel and ensuing work the students are doing elsewhere
on campus. I am quite sure they are empowered to be more
imaginative, more enterprising. As for concrete response on
this from other faculty, at the finish of the second
semester, I'm starting to get a pulse. I can say that many
of the faculty that have been guests speakers, are
especially excited by the prospect of getting out of their
'silos' and having this kind of diverse encounter. They are
piqued by the idea of investigating what creative practice
looks like (especially when they have never identified it
as such) in their own research, professional work and
teaching.
You're based in the theater department. What has
the response to your efforts been from the other fine arts
departments?
Theatre is a joint department that includes dance - then
there’re the art and music departments. We are all located
in Scales Fine Arts Center, so that proximity makes for
good communication and awareness between our respective
areas, and even recurring collaborations on such things as
musical theater productions. My background (MFA, School of
the Art Institute of Chicago) and professional life as an
interdisciplinary artist (performing frequently in new
music contexts), affords me real working knowledge of
issues and perspectives across disciplinary divides. So my
efforts both working within the fine arts context and with
the e-ship program have been welcomed. This spring, for
instance, I’m thrilled to teach a contemporary performance
production course out of theatre/dance and cross-listed
with both art and music. It has been supported by other
campus entities such as the Creativity and Innovation Fund
from the Pro Humanitate Center for its community outreach
component as the subject of the course and performance
project is utopias. The university community as a whole
appreciates and encourages the kind of ambitions
exemplified in such an enterprise.
There is a particularly strong and growing commitment from
art department faculty for the entrepreneurship program as
the nature of art production lends itself readily to
entrepreneurial modeling. Also, a sculpture faculty member,
David Finn, was an early champion of the Kauffman
Foundation proposal and he is developing a design oriented
seminar that will be taught next fall. Another instructor,
Jennifer Gentry, who is also an entrepreneur with a graphic
design and medical illustration business, will be teaching
a parallel ‘C & I’ course with me this spring. We have
had such a HUGE influx of students signing up for the minor
– at the end of the first ‘official’ semester we are close
to 70, making it suddenly one of the largest minors on
campus.
WFU has a strong commitment to Entrepreneurship in
the liberal arts. How do your classes fit with this
ideal?
Important question, because I feel it reflects a kind of
sea change going on within several cultures at once –
higher learning, business, innovation in the light of
globalization. So, a little context to set the stage: Wake
Forest University is nationally recognized for its high
caliber liberal arts program (the business schools rank
high as well). The forward thinking folks that mapped the
entrepreneurship program here made a couple of important
decisions: the first was to position it within the liberal
arts college, not the business school, and the second was
to feature creativity as central to the mission of the
program which was named the Office of Entrepreneurship and
Liberal Arts. This name clearly identified entrepreneurship
or entrepreneurial studies as a burgeoning field of study
absolutely appropriate to the liberal arts mission of the
college. This conscious alignment distinguishes Wake Forest
among the “Kauffman 8 campuses” (the eight schools that
received first round funding from the Marion Ewing Kauffman
Foundation to establish flagship programs in
entrepreneurship). It also distinguishes it from other,
already existing university programs of entrepreneurship,
which have been historically located within business
schools (despite the fact that most entrepreneurs are a
boundary defying collection of folks with completely
unpredictable backgrounds).
The growing scholarship on entrepreneurship from business
and other perspectives outside that world, psychology and
sociology for instance, has contributed to expanding
definitions and shifting perceptions about the term. Amidst
all this flurry of interest, activity and scholarship, the
creativity piece has been identified as a key indicator of
quality and success of entrepreneurial innovation in
particular. Research on the breadth of creativity, of
course, has been a lively, if not elusive aspect of human
behavior for decades, and some of this scholarship has
dovetailed with and increasingly complexified notions of
creativity. The creativity seminars that I teach at Wake
Forest necessarily bring these various streams together in
a synergistic way that I feel affords the opportunity for
students from a whole host of disciplinary orientations to
gain experience and skills necessary for a deeper creative
engagement. The integrity of the class depends upon this
depth of critical, exploratory investigation of creative
processes which lends credibility and depth to
entrepreneurial processes and validity within the context
of a rigorous liberal arts environment. The class is
exciting because students from political science, art
history, physics, English, history, theater, economics,
communication and others have access to the challenge of a
creatively inspired imagination and the critical actions
that unfold from it. Creativity, then becomes more than a
bridge, but rather a catalyzing force – born of
conditioning processes, procedural practices, flexible
principles – that propels one forward into uncharted
territory.
What are the metrics you use to evaluate the
production of a creative student?
Ah! Such an important question – and challenge,
particularly when the thought of creativity is appealing
and downright seductive on the one hand, it is also held
suspect as a ‘field’ due to its overly generalized and/or
subjective qualities. It is also conventionally viewed as
discipline-specific, that is to say – the arts, thereby
requiring encompassing technical knowledge and socially
sanctioned talent. These popularly held ideas of creativity
present a deterrent for both the student who does not
consider herself ‘creative’ in the common sense and for the
instructor who is attempting a construct that allows for a
diversity of perspectives. Consequently, in my case, the
so-called metrics used to evaluate the production of a
creative student in the conventional sense of the word –
theater or art student, let’s say – is only somewhat useful
when faced with evaluating students who have had very
little or no background in the arts and therefore little
exposure to quality creative processes. The typical history
or finance and accounting student, will only have popular
culture models of what creativity is in terms of a product.
So, it’s quite interesting and did I say this already,
challenging to not only create an environment that is
conducive to creative behaviors (easier to do), but to
craft evaluative processes and procedures for such a widely
divergent group of students, many of whom do anticipate
moving towards an entrepreneurial solution to post-college
life. This past semester (my second teaching the course), I
instituted more ways in which the student could evaluate
their own project process and outcome based upon some
useful models. For me this does two things: allows the
student to enter into an ‘artist-like’ process by spurring
a quality of concentration and attention to the process,
and enables them to take on greater agency as
self-evaluators. We used a phase model of creative process
by Arthur Cropley (education, psychology) so that the
students could gain a sense of detailed stages of the
experience, rather than just a generalized play-time kind
of experience. We also adhered closely to generative
feedback models for critically responding to others
projects and then applied that to personal projects –
challenging assumptions, uncovering hidden or unintended
meaning, etc. So far as my evaluative procedures go, I am
evolving and refining them both in the set-up of projects
and in what for me are fairly skillful ways of discerning
imaginative engagement, innovation in process and quality
of commitment, honed over 20 years of teaching students and
others in creative production.
What student successes have you seen?
For me, success is relative. If by that you mean, the
establishment of entrepreneurial enterprises, then it’s too
early to say. Although, I had a student athlete and
sociology major last spring who, along with a fellow
student, began the process of getting legal and financial
support to found a non profit organization called Pro Life
– a ‘give back’ program to assist ‘at risk’ urban youth. I
generally see success in terms of personal realization of
the capacity to open up to a broad spectrum creative
engagement that can integrate, in a dynamic way, with a
matrix of concerns and interests.
For instance, I have a current student who is a history
major, a Chinese and entrepreneurship minor, who is African
American with strong belief in social justice. This class
is providing her with a rich skill set that responds both
to a need for ‘whole person’ activation and for innovative
approaches to navigating complicated circumstances. The
Wake Forest student is special, in that we have the Pro
Humanitate mission here fostering socially purposed
applications of their learning to the ‘real’ world. But
even the students who wanted to develop a T-shirt business
(how can that not yield some sort of economic success on a
college campus?) clearly took on my challenge of critically
examining and yes, philosophically supporting their concept
and design solutions. Here the success was measured in a
thorough grappling with more than market analysis; they
took on an investigation of the cultural formation of
identity and a careful design process that did result in a
quite an innovative idea.
Around the country, business schools are reaching
out to the fine arts for creativity education. Do you see
business students in participating in your
efforts?
As I mentioned before, the minor in Entrepreneurship and
Social Enterprise is a liberal arts minor, thereby
offering, arguably, an easier stepping stone for the
‘unconventional student.’ However, the relationship of
entrepreneurship to the graduate business school at Wake
has long been established, and is recognized around the
country. So the pattern of linking entrepreneurship with
the business school was historically there, but only
recently have creativity components been added. (I taught
the first module in a Creativity and Feasibility class that
Stan Mandel offers in the Wake MBA program last spring).
Even though a conscious decision was made to place the
entrepreneurship program in the liberal arts undergraduate
college, the Calloway Business School was integrally
involved.
That said, in the second semester of the course offering
and the first in which it is a required foundation course
for the minor, it is still a strong cross-disciplinary mix,
but this time around with a few more business and economics
students. They are mostly juniors and seniors; at the lower
level, there are still students from an array of
disciplines such as communication, religion, history,
theater and so on. About a third in the class (out of 20)
have declared the ESE minor. I believe, that the course
will continue to appeal to a cross-section of students and
to students who don’t necessarily sign on to the minor. I
think all the students see that philosophical, cultural and
practical aspects of creativity are absolutely relevant and
critical for today’s world. With rapidly shifting centers
of power (particularly economic) occurring, the business
world is of course identifying that creativity and
innovation are essential to remain competitive while most
hard sciences see technological innovation as critical and
the social sciences and humanities know that by envisioning
and creating new models of livelihood linked with
innovative models of community – both virtual and real –
that meaningful, humane future(s) are possible.
Do you see creativity education in higher education
expanding in the future?
I certainly hope so. Creativity is complex, compelling and
absolutely necessary for the radical imagination to remain
alive, and enable society as a whole to move forward
through individual leaps and bold communal strokes.
Creativity is relational; engendered through personal
formation in collaboration with others (both direct and
indirect) and generally leading to positive, proactive
outcomes. It reflects back and impacts beyond its
measurable acts. For these reasons alone, higher education
should not only embrace it in the liberal arts mission, but
pioneer its study and practice. In the larger picture, the
re-valuation of creativity and its role in building a
vibrant, humane and sustainable world seems to be a
cultural imperative. The liberal arts mission in this
country is at a crossroads as the changes in the world and
our country bring new and ever-complex challenges – from
the diversification that immigration and fluctuating values
brings, to the challenges of its relevance in response to
monumental forces stoking conflict and strife. In today’s
global environment, the freshness and vitality that
creativity brings to whatever arena it’s allowed to
flourish in, signals the promise of humanity in concert
with its ideals.
You can respond directly to Lynn Book
