By Kathryn Crowther
I was so inspired by how excitedly and with what hands-on innovation the students had responded to the assignment that it led me re-think a lot of my traditional assignments. I started examining the ways that more innovative pedagogy – pushing the boundaries of my own knowledge and comfort – -could inspire students to do the same in their own work. So, as I worked on the syllabus, assignments and outcomes for my next course I kept thinking about the role of creativity in the classroom and asking questions like: To what degree should we expect out students to be creative or original? Is there a place for that in the composition classroom? Our composition classrooms here at Tech already push against traditional notions of composition, expanding the limited definitions of communication to include WOVEN (Written, Oral, Visual, Electronic, and Non-Verbal) and encouraging multimodality in all aspects of our pedagogy and the students’ work. The use of digital pedagogy, I feel, opens up the doors for creativity – both for us as teachers when designing assignments and thinking about innovative ways to help our students learn and for students to practice the essential skills of communication and rhetoric that they’ll need as students at Georgia Tech and as citizens of the digital world.
Tonya Howe 