Digital Literacy & Creativity
Creative I: Script
Creativity within the classroom has become less and less present in the twenty-first century. Yet, these skills are arguably more important than they have been in previous years. As we move into the digital age, with our social lives, personal reminders, and classrooms moving to tech-based systems, teaching our students to utilize the technology they have access to has become crucial. Accessibility to modern technology has changed the meaning of literacy. To be successful in higher education and their career fields, students need to be literate in more than reading and writing. Over the last few decades, digital literacy has become a prominent concept in the discourse of higher education pedagogy. Our students have access to digital mediums of learning that were not present before the turn of the century or even five years ago. A large part of digital literacy is the ability to utilize digital spaces to convey knowledge while being able to analyze these spaces critically. Many platforms that house and showcase digital literacy today promote creativity by providing space to write, draw, record, and various other modes of communication that engage students with one another and the world around them in an accessible and meaningful way.
Encouraging creativity in the classroom setting should not be limited to art courses. As educators, we should foster a learning environment that allows students to grow both the skillset we are teaching them and the skillset they will need as they move through their educational journey and into the workforce. Part of fostering a healthy learning environment is encouraging students to step outside of their comfort zones, take risks, and make mistakes. Our goal is to teach students how to think critically about the world around them to provide them with skills that will benefit them in the future; part of this process requires students to make mistakes in order to learn. Providing students with opportunities that promote creativity can make this process of learning from mistakes more approachable to them. If given assignments that allow creativity and are assessed by processes and application of techniques rather than end results, our students are more likely to take more significant risks and gain more skills.
These ideals can easily be implemented in English classrooms at any level, but the college level is where they will be the most crucial. After years of participating in public education systems, students will have had creativity taught out of them. College classrooms allow greater freedoms than K-12. Utilizing this freedom to develop students’ skills and promote creativity is imperative. Within these classrooms, we can advocate for creativity by assigning low-stakes multimodal projects that will give students experience crafting arguments and conveying their ideas in a format that teaches them far more than the traditional paper. As educators, we should advocate for our students, strive to teach them beyond the textbook, and foster learning through a multitude of assignment types. They have the means to utilize technology in a way that previous generations have not.
They should be able to bring these skills into the classroom because they will use them in the workforce. We must teach them to be risk-takers, critical thinkers, and innovators. Students of the twenty-first century need creativity in education more than ever. It is our responsibility as educators to engage students with their capacity and understanding of digital literacy in ways that allow them to be creative. As accessibility to the world around them changes, so should their educational experiences.
