WE ARE INFINITE！
Assignment : To Design a
new Curriculum that can help students to be more creative.
What is Creativity and Innovation
Design the New Curriculum
Backgrounds
The future employee is from the marketing
or sales industry. What they mostly concern about is the employer’s oral-presentation ability and creativity thoughts.
Traditional English Course
The typical English exam paper is as above.
‘Listening’ and ‘reading’ are both tested by doing multiple choices; ‘writing’
is like giving a certain situation and writing something in fixed format, which
seldom contributes anything to students’ creativity thoughts. Most of the time,
these three parts are taught simply by practicing and analyzing the test
papers. What’s more, the ‘speaking’ part is seldom covered.
To put in a nutshell, this kind of
traditional English course in mainland China cannot foster students who are
ready for the future employee to use.
Innovative English
Course
Course aims:
This course aims to provide students
with an interesting way to learn real English and teach them to think
creatively at the same time.
Teaching philosophy:
The principle is to excite students’
creativity by leading them to think in others’ shoes and provide the
opportunity for them to turn their ‘crazy’ thoughts into reality.
Course Intended Learning Outcomes (CILOs):
No
|
CILOs
|
1
|
Have no difficulty in reading materials and catch the
points.
|
2
|
Be able to do oral-presentation before the whole class
fluently.
|
3
|
Be able to understand others’ oral-English and thoughts
through their expression.
|
4
|
Be able to hand in English reports with both good order
and good logic.
|
5
|
Have much more creatively thoughts.
|
Teaching and Learning Activities (TLAs):
CILOs
|
TLAs
|
1,2,3,4,5
|
Role play
|
3,5
|
Games
|
Assessments:
Type of assessments
|
|
Continuous Assessment
|
Mini-drama, group report
|
Final Assessment
|
Individual report
|
Detailed process:
First of all, students are divided into
small groups consists of 4 to 6 persons.
[Role
play]:
We provide several themes for students
to choose, such as ‘cartoon’, ‘interview’, ‘blind-date’ etc. Students will be
marked based on their performance on the class and the group reports after
class.
1. Before the class, each group
will receive a piece of reading material listing some characters and their characteristics. All the group members
should choose their own role and understand the character’s personality through
the material, and then each group is asked to come up with a short situation
drama which can express each character’s personality.
2. After choosing the role, all the
students have to design and practice the short drama in groups in order to make them
understand by others. The drama can be very dramatically since the characters
are from different areas which lead to infinite possibilities.
3. In the class, each group will
perform the drama they designed before the whole class. And of course, they
will watch other groups’ show as well. After all the performance, teacher will make comments on each
group and give some leading feedback to help the group do better for the next
time.
4. After the class, each group is
asked to write a group
report to summarize their
performance during the class, and to make some comments on other groups.
[Games]:
Games are not only provided by the
teacher, each group is welcomed to raise an interesting game. Games are mainly
concentrating on arising
students’ enthusiastic in class. It may take 20% time during the whole semester. Let’s take
‘PICTIONARY’ as an example.
Pictionary is a funny game that requires
a person to describe in sentences or act by body language or simply draw
something for another person to guess an object.
During the acting process, students are trained to express
themselves in diversity ways. Hence, their imagination is the most important thing.
While through the guessing process, students need to try their best to
think from the acting person’s perspective, which can motivate them to think ‘out of the box’.
In addition, some bonus marks will be
given for the groups who play better as an excitation.
How the New Curriculum Make Effect
The role-play will have different themes.
The students should be familiar to the background materials and then create a
new drama basing on their own understanding. In order to perform the most
exciting scenes in limited time, the students in the same group have to choose
which part of the original drama to be retained and how to recompose it in the
interesting new angles using limited words. The process to generate a new drama
can help the students foster the abstractive play that is one of the factors to enhance the creative potential. Besides, in
order to have a wonderful show, the students need to comprehend the characters
by putting themselves
in other’s position,
which minimizes self-concern and ego issues within one’s creative work. In
addition, by offering the chance for students to realize their little creative thoughts in the
drama, they will be more willing to try
new ideas and have the belief that their ‘crazy’
thoughts will work.
By arranging playing games in the class,
students will not only be more active but also be more familiar with the
English expressions. As a result of group dividing, even some really quiet
students could force themselves to fight for the honor of their groups. Under
such tense but funny atmosphere, the taught English expressions would be
recalled and the imagination would be excited. Students should express
themselves in as much way as possible while the others should try their best to
think from the acting one’s angle. That’s why the ‘Pictionary’ game will be
easier to play among a group of cronies, because they can really understand
each other and totally think from the other one’s perspective. This is an effective way to learn from
other members in the group and absorb different thoughts.
When the thoughts of one are diversity, and
have a producing channel at the same time, as a result, he or she will be more
creative.
The Additional Information
The famous artist :龚琳娜
Gong Lin Na is a famous singing artist in
China.
The audiences have different comments on
her ‘exaggerate’ performance. Some think her product is delivering her music
philosophy through international way while some think what she sang is just abracadabra.
However, from our point of view, she is just doing what our philosophy says: ‘think out of the box’ followed by ‘belief in producing thoughts’.
During the performance
in the video, she is playing the role ‘Sun Wu Kong’. She totally loses herself
when singing. It seems that all the melody and lyrics are come from the monkey’s
mouth. What’s more, other performers on the stage are doing the role play as
well.
Even though not
many people can appreciate her show, Gong insists creating new songs. She believes
her idea is unique and excellent, and she is so sure about her product which
comes from her ‘strange’ ideas.
All of the above
leading to the final result ---- Gong is an creatively singing artist.
Reference:
1. Linda Naiman - Creativity at Work
3. Sabaneev, Leonid. The Psychology of the Musico-Creative Process pp. 37–54.
4. John Cleese on Creativity
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VShmtsLhkQg
