Today we’re talking to three guests who are involved with the Cultivating Creative & Civic Capacities project, “a 3-year research-practice collaboration between the Columbus Museum of Art (CMA) and Project Zero-Harvard to investigate and document ways to catalyze young people’s capacities for creative and critical thinking and a sense of community with room for divergent perspectives, and the conditions that promote young people’s curiosity about complex issues, openness to engaging multiple, often divergent, viewpoints, and a sense of social responsibility about actions they may take.”

And a lot of that comes down to answering these two questions: What does it look like to cultivate creativity toward more sustainable and equitable worlds? How do we cultivate imagination, thinking with complexity, and taking action?

Our guests are Jennifer Lehe, Jason Blair, and Britanie Risner, and they have some interesting answers for those questions. Jennifer is the Manager of Strategic Partnerships of the Columbus Museum of Art, calls herself a recovering right-answer seeker, and is fascinated by how we can create the conditions that encourage discovery and curiosity in kids; Jason is an 18-year veteran arts educator who says that, every day, he learns from the creative geniuses that he teaches; and Britanie is a 19-year veteran teacher staunchly believes in children's abilities to think and act in ways that move the world to be a better place. All three are educators who should be celebrated in their own right, but together, they’re really doing something special.

To learn more, visit: pastfoundation.org

Resources:

• Columbus Museum of Art
• Learn more about Cultivating Creative & Civic Capacities
• "Back-to-School Creativity Resources for Teachers"

Learning Unboxed is produced in part by Crate Media

Recorded by Eric French at WOSU Studios in Columbus, Ohio