Samantha Olshen [00:00:00]:
It doesn’t matter how advanced the output is. It doesn’t matter how perfect the output is. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad. And I know that some educators might be like, well, I don’t know, kind of matters depending on what you’re teaching. But I think in the arts, as long as you’re doing it, that means you’re going to get somewhere. If you’re not doing the work, then you will never arrive at a place that you want to go.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:25]:
Hello everyone. My name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood [00:00:28]:
And my name is Dr. Matthew Werwood.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:30]:
This is the fueling creativity in Education podcast.

Matthew Worwood [00:00:34]:
On this show, we’ll be talking about creativity topics and how they apply to the field of education.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:39]:
We’ll be speaking with scholars, educators, and resident experts about their work, challenges they face, and digging deeper into new and varying perspectives of creativity, all with the.

Matthew Worwood [00:00:50]:
Goal to help fuel the more rich and informed discussion that provides teachers and parents with knowledge they can use at home or in the classroom.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:58]:
So let’s begin.

Matthew Worwood [00:01:00]:
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast. And today we welcome Samantha Olshin, a professor and a colleague of mine at the University of Connecticut’s digital Media and Design department. Samantha is an award winning transmedia artist and educator who works across animation, art and design for films, brands, and experiential media. As an artist and designer, Samantha investigates how storytelling, motion design, and experimental narrative can be a service to underrepresented and underserved communities. As an educator, she combines collaborative, game based, and project based learning in the classroom with digital media as a tool for learning. Samantha, welcome to the podcast.

Samantha Olshen [00:01:44]:
Thank you. It’s wonderful to be here.

Matthew Worwood [00:01:46]:
Now, before we kind of get into the meat of the discussion, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about your combined use of collaborative, game based, and project based learning environment. That sounds really cool and interesting.

Samantha Olshen [00:01:57]:
In my classes, I primarily teach creativity. I teach design, and I teach digital arts. And I find that through experimentation and play, we can open ourselves up to learning more if I give my students a directive and I say, today we’re learning this technique, they’re only learning to the technique and they don’t really know how to apply it after that technique is taught. So I’ve developed a way of using fun or play, which I think a lot of art instructors do. It’s all about experimentation and also gamification. So, for example, I have a class called narrative workshop. And in narrative workshop we come in. This is the ultimate class on experimentation and failure.

Samantha Olshen [00:02:40]:
Because we come in with no idea of what we’re going to do, and we do a semester long project. It’s a creative project. It’s called narrative workshop because it’s about not only crafting your personal narrative, who you are as an artist or a maker or a designer, but it’s also about crafting the narrative of the project itself. So I would say that two thirds of my class will come in and not know what project they want to do. And it’s all about identifying our ideas and identifying where we take our ideas and whether they’ll float once we send them out to sale. So in that class, we’ve come up with this way of identifying the work we want to make, and we do that through game based play. This is actually adapted from a fantastic book by Julia Cameron called the Artist Way. And we do something called artist dates.

Samantha Olshen [00:03:27]:
And I have the students use a hashtag if anyone wants to follow or play at home, it’s hashtag DMD 30 30. And each week, they have to do one thing for themselves that has nothing to do with school or the assignment or class, and they have to do a creative art estate, and they can define what that means. So, for example, my favorite art estate is to take myself to a museum and experience some piece of art, maybe that I’ve seen before in a new way, but they have to catalog it by taking a photograph and using the hashtag. So what’s really interesting is that we’ve been taking a tally of all of these. So the person who goes on the most artist dates are only required to do one per week. The person who goes on the most artist dates and gets the most engagement ends up winning, basically street cred or, like a small postit notepad. But they win a prize at the end of the semester. But really, it’s not about the prize.

Samantha Olshen [00:04:22]:
It’s about this fun competition, this creative competition that we’ve set up. And what’s really interesting is I’ve taught this class since 2014, and if you go look at the hashtag, we actually have students who’ve graduated who are still competing in DMD 30 30. And our highest ranking student is Phil Abrams. So shout out to Phil Abrams, who graduated, I think, in 2016 or 2017. So everyone is competing to beat his number. And we have several students who are still participating. And I think that’s a really fun, interesting, and engaging way to not only take the pressure off of art history, I’m going to air quote art history, but really also how we engage in art within our community. Or creativity within our community.

Samantha Olshen [00:05:09]:
So, for example, some people’s artist state, some people are really into gaming. So they decide for a whole month, every day, I’m going to take five minutes to play this game and discover something new I never saw before, and they’ll take a picture of it. Or we have some people who just go to local coffee shops and meet the owner or take a picture of something locally, small business, and say, I had a really good time eating tacos at the streetcar. And they’ll hashtag and post the location. And then it’s actually creating creative community involvement. So it’s something that I love doing with a narrative workshop. I think the students have really benefited from it because once they’re out of college, they now have this structure in place of the art estate to help get them out of, I call it get out of their kind of rut or their studio. So often with creativity or with large scale projects, right? If we say, okay, you have to do a senior project next year.

Samantha Olshen [00:06:02]:
It has to be completely original, completely creative. There is this panic of, well, what am I going to make? And by doing the art estates, we’re dedicating time to just allowing ourselves to feel engagement or allowing ourselves to play. Maybe you’re playing soccer for your art estates. They don’t have to be about art. It’s about what you find enjoyment. And if we can access our enjoyment, our likes, our creativity, and our passions, and catalog them in a way that’s fun, then we can say, okay, when it’s time to work, what am I making work about? Well, maybe I’m making work about how much I love this community I’m in, or how fun it is to play this sport, or about stories from the people I met on my team, or about I’m going to improve on this game that I played. So it’s a way for us to kind of like a bank, right? We’re banking these creative ideas that otherwise, without this allowed artist date time, we would otherwise not have this pool of creative ideas or engagement to pull from. So that’s one way that we do project based, game based kind of engagement and play in my classroom.

Cyndi Burnett [00:07:07]:
So I love the fact that you referenced the artist way. It’s actually the reason why I got into the field of creativity 25 years ago was because I read the artist way by Julia Cameron and fell in love with artist dates. I have been on many artist date, so I love that you’ve brought that into your class. And there’s just so many things I want to ask you Samantha, first of all, when I meet designers, they often say that they are creative, so they are considered creatives, right? And what Matt and I are really trying to advocate for is that everyone is creative. Everyone has the capacity to be creative. And one of the first things you mentioned was that you teach creativity, design and art. So can you articulate for us what you mean by creativity within that context that’s separate from design and art?

Samantha Olshen [00:07:55]:
That’s my first question. That is a great question. And that is a question I feel like every artist and designer unpacks as they work for their entire life, and maybe every creative person. But that reminds me of the Picasso quote, right? Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain one once we grow up. And I think that somewhere in our growth or education, we disconnect from that. So how we teach creativity, for me, is as simple as reconnecting with what inspired us when we were younger. Everyone is going to have a different inspiration point or access point.

Samantha Olshen [00:08:32]:
We have to teach how to allow ourselves to just experience, participate, and be present in whatever field, environment, or moment we’re in. I think creativity has a lot to do with response or I think as a designer, I often say, like problem solving. I really do think creativity and problem solving go hand in hand. Right. Or innovation and creativity go hand in hand. How I teach creativity. My approach to teaching creativity is, I think, through reconnecting the student to empathy and trust. Right.

Samantha Olshen [00:09:10]:
They have to trust their ideas, I think so often I see, especially at the college level, my students will come in as I teach first years, and I also teach seniors. And seeing that growth over four years is really fantastic because it’s first years, they come in and I give them very vague creative briefs. Right. Most creative briefs or problems that you have to solve for a client or a project will have a vague or ambiguous target. So I think my prompts are vague and they struggle with that. So part of what I teach is being comfortable with ambiguity and being comfortable working with unknown targets in open houses or people that I’ve known through life. They say, why do you really have to go to art school? Can’t you just learn that on the Internet? Can’t you just draw? And the answer is, yes, you could do that. But the difference between, I think, going to an arts school or a design school is that you get this safe space to practice this feedback loop where you get to practice failing, essentially having these ambiguous targets and not meeting the goal, and then redirecting, iterating, and moving on to the next problem or assignment or creative jumping off point.

Samantha Olshen [00:10:27]:
So I think that when you’re teaching, especially, this is one of the things that I think is so important about an art or design education at the college level. When you’re teaching creativity, it’s so much more than just a technique. It’s about trusting your instinct or learning how to understand the problem. I’m air quoting problem in my studio right now. It’s not always a problem. Right. Things are not problems unless we define them as such. But the solution that you arrive at has to be solved with creativity, whether it’s designing a light bulb.

Samantha Olshen [00:11:01]:
Right? The famous quote that Edison didn’t fail, he just learned how not to design a light bulb 10,000 ways. I think that whatever number of times he tried. But I think that we have to learn how to trust our instinct and also practice perseverance. Right. It’s really easy to give up. And I think young creatives, I see this a lot. They go, well, I’m not good at this, so I’m not going to do it anymore. I’ll just do what’s easy.

Samantha Olshen [00:11:27]:
And that drives me crazy when my students go, well, I did this because it was easy, and I never think that’s the right place to access our creativity.

Cyndi Burnett [00:11:36]:
I love the piece around trusting your ideas, because I think it’s very easy when something is ambiguous to sort of give up, as you mentioned, or just go the easy route and go with what’s certain, but to really be able to. In the creativity literature, it’s often called tolerance of ambiguity or embracing ambiguity. But I like this comfort with ambiguity and to be able to make those iterations to create something that ultimately you’re happy with. And I think the interesting piece to think about is how do we get children, even at an early age, to start trusting their ideas and feeling confident in that creative idea that they have and that they would like to pursue and when to know when to pursue it and how to pursue it, and when to know when to let go. Now, you also mentioned that they have to do a project that is completely creative. So if you have them do a project that’s completely creative, what does that look like?

Samantha Olshen [00:12:34]:
Well, you could argue that all projects, all outcomes are completely creative. It’s about how we define or add value to a physical object that’s creative versus a solution or a process that’s creative. Right? So we could argue that regardless of what the project is, each outcome is creative. One of the things I know Matt and I talk about a lot is process. I think our colleagues also talk about this at DMD. But processes are incredibly creative regardless of the outcome. So that could be one method. Like if you’re using design thinking steps, right? If you’re using some sort of process in place, there will be creativity, not only in problem solving, collaboration, and iterative outcomes that arrive to a solution, but if, say it’s for a.

Samantha Olshen [00:13:19]:
I don’t want to use the word traditional, but a traditional arts outcome or design outcome. If we are designing a logo or writing a short film, or we are building an emerging media project, right, like an interactive wall or an animation, some sort of integrated AR VR animation, we have to go through not only that creative process, but then there is the secondary creative outcome. So one of the things that I love about not only our curriculum, but the way that I kind of approach creativity in my classes is that I adopt that iterative process from design thinking. Regard in arts, we don’t call it design thinking in the same way we would in say, design in art. We just start to say, okay, well, what does this form look like? How does it move? What would it be? And we actually fail a lot, right? We don’t know what this outcome will be. We don’t know what. For example, I’m working on a series of digital collages and motion media, kind of site specific motion media, text animations. I don’t know what these things look like.

Samantha Olshen [00:14:29]:
All I have is an inkling of an idea, and that’s very different than the design process. With the design process, I know there is a targeted outcome, I know there is a design, right? So if I’m teaching students how to design a logo, we use these processes, and there’s an iterative cycle, that feedback loop with the client. There is iteration in the design process. Now, with an art project or an experimental media project, we don’t necessarily have the outcome. We might have the site, we might have the intended viewing or audience, but we are just making it for the same way that we would make food or garden, right? There’s a level of maybe interest, engagement, and joy in the making. There’s something that we are trying to say and arrive at, or maybe even reveal a truth, right? We’re trying to reveal a truth through making about the world or about our experience as people or community. So that’s a little different. We’re designing or animating or making in that process.

Samantha Olshen [00:15:33]:
We don’t really have a target. And I actually love that Matt and I have talked about this before, because as a designer, I don’t mind showing my process because I know, that’s part of the game, right? And getting feedback on that process and having that client say, okay, well, this is good, but that’s not good. I don’t really like that. This speaks to me, let’s make it pink, let’s make it blue, that kind of thing. That’s easy, right? But when you’re designing something or making something for artistic purposes with no outcome, really not knowing what it will be, that is the most terrifying thing and brave thing that anyone can do. And I think sometimes, Matt, you and I have talked about this. I think when I was learning, my instructors said, don’t show that stuff, just show me the finished product, right? We call it hiding our brushstrokes. We don’t really show people the messy kind of process or things in progress.

Samantha Olshen [00:16:30]:
And it’s very terrifying. But I actually think that not only teaching this skill, right, this show me the process skill, regardless of it being scary, but also getting your work out there, I think that’s a really valuable and strengthening tool to teaching creativity and also just living it. It’s funny, I don’t say to myself like, oh, I’m a creative person. It is instinctual. You were mentioning that earlier, Cindy. I do think that creativity is something that needs to be accessed and fostered, and I think that’s something we can certainly do with young people. I have a couple of things that I always say to my students, and at one point they said, we’re going to make t shirts and just wear them to class. And during critiques, we’ll stand up because you keep saying the same things.

Samantha Olshen [00:17:14]:
And for me, that’s always, keep going. They’ll show me something and it’s great, or it’s almost great, or it’s not great at all, or I just go, keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going. And also do it anyway. I have a lot of students who say to me, well, I’m not good at that, or this is going to be hard, or I’m tired, or I don’t feel like it, and I go do it anyway. It doesn’t matter how, for me, as an educator, it doesn’t matter how advanced the output is, it doesn’t matter how perfect the output is. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad. And I know that some educators might be like, well, I don’t know, kind of matters depending on what you’re teaching. But I think in the arts, as long as you’re doing it, that means you’re going to get somewhere if you’re not doing the work, then you will never arrive at a place that you want to go.

Samantha Olshen [00:18:03]:
And that’s the best way to say that, I think. Because we can’t quantifiably say, well, that’s good or bad, right? If you’re making, I think that’s good. If you’re not making, that’s bad. So I think those are ways that I foster infectious curiosity, creative inquiry. Even if you think it’s a dumb idea, do it anyway. Keep going.

Matthew Worwood [00:18:26]:
I want to go back to something that you said. We have these procedural steps that we all kind of are familiar with, whether it’s creative problem solving or design thinking, or even just going through the pre production, production, and post production of a film. Typically, when we are working to design and develop something new, there is a sequential procedure of steps that you conduct, and we can go in and teach those steps. But I think what I’m starting to see with those that perhaps bring more of an artistic perspective is the relationship to the individual, oneself with that process and the idea of individual students going outside of their classroom environment to find inspiration, to look at the interests and look at their community, to make new discoveries, and then perhaps think about how these experiences that you’re tasking them with, reflecting about and capturing actually inform their relationship with the process and what they’re bringing in. Do you see someone who’s gone to a coffee shop, interacted with a situation, and then seen that situation find itself into the design and development of the project in the narrative workshop?

Samantha Olshen [00:19:39]:
100%. It doesn’t work for everybody. Sometimes they just need more time. I shouldn’t say it doesn’t work. Sometimes it just takes longer to work. But I absolutely have seen that. We had a student who didn’t know what to do for her senior project, and all of her art estates were about her passions, which were riding horses and being outside. She connected to that interest and then developed a project where she modeled a horse photorealistically, anatomically correct.

Samantha Olshen [00:20:10]:
So not only did it serve her passion, but it also served her project. And it coalesced. Right. Her creativity coalesced with her potential industry career. So that’s one example. We have had students in the past who created small businesses based on their art estates, their art estate passions. We had a student who was really struggling and had been producing this animation, and the animation was good, and he was interested, and it was okay. But his passion didn’t lie there, and he ended up creating.

Samantha Olshen [00:20:43]:
I think he has a small business where he sells really creative out there, rugs. And he started doing them as art estates because he was building these cardboard kind of puppets and sculptures, and he just was playing with found material in his house. This was pre pandemic, so it wasn’t during the pandemic. But I think that that’s one of the art estates I think we really love is when we say, okay, only go to a store, you have a dollar, buy whatever you can and make art out of it. Right. It’s these lateral thinking prompts, and that’s something I do in several of my classes where we do quick, we have something called Photoshop Hero, which is based off of the old game guitar hero. We do this in our first year design lab, one class. And Photoshop hero is based on something I used to do when I worked in broadcast design, where I used to work in broadcast design for live news.

Samantha Olshen [00:21:33]:
So we’d have slow news days, and someone would shout out a prompt, and we would take five minutes and go, okay, here’s the graphic. Here’s another graphic. And we’d just have them ready to go in case it happened. Right? We always know there’ll be a hurricane somewhere. We always know there will be rain or something like that. So we do these lateral thinking prompts with Photoshop hero, where I have small words or sentences, and the students respond to them in 20 minutes or less. And it’s absolutely terrifying for a first year because they go, no, I need a week. I need a week and a half to do a project.

Samantha Olshen [00:22:04]:
I have to do these processes. There has to be thinking, and then I need to do a thumbnail, and then I need to do my fact gathering, my research, all of that. But what’s really interesting is that these fantastic visuals, these great ideas, and this sense of freedom that comes with not having to plan everything, right? So it’s teaching them sort of the seesaw of creativity, which is, yes, you have to plan, but also be open to ideas that might not happen otherwise. So I think with the art of states, we see that it definitely helps the students connect to. It’s almost a survival system, too. It’s like, what if you’re working a job after college and you like your job and it’s in your skill area, but you’re feeling burnt out, right? So it’s just giving them that creative support that they need to keep going and keep working on the work that matters to them.

Matthew Worwood [00:22:55]:
We are starting to see, I think, at least a little bit of a trend in high schools, and I think, even to a certain extent, in our program, a recognition that, yes, the industry wants students that can work in collaboration, work in groups, but then there is now more of a value in giving students an opportunity to work on their self and then also thinking about their individuals. We had Liz Reddy from Ed advance come on and talk about a project that she’s working on around. It was called personalized interest projects. And in some ways, it sounds to me that you’re creating an environment very similar to PIp, where you’re allowing students to literally just go out and connect with something that interests them, something that they’re curious about, and then bring that back to the learning experience and engage in an artistic design process to produce an outcome associated with that interest. And it just makes me think about how important it is throughout a student’s experience in education. Every semester, having at least one class, I think I recognize we can’t do that in all of the environments, but being able to make sure that there’s one class where that can happen. And of course, I think that then, once again, validates why the arts is so important in education throughout.

Samantha Olshen [00:24:15]:
Absolutely. And I think that early on in my career, I had a lot of friends who worked for Google, and Google had adapted their program to have something called 20% time. And in that 20% time of your job, you worked on a passion project. And often those passion projects became something else or something that Google supported or something that the person took away and built into a business or some sort of creative outcome. And I thought that was really valuable and almost a tonic to the way that we were working and the way we still are working, which is all the time. Right. 24 hours a day, especially in post pandemic Zoom world. So I think that, yes, it’s something I’m setting up in my classes, and honestly, I keep going back to Julia Cameron, but I think that it’s such a wonderful model, right.

Samantha Olshen [00:25:08]:
The input for output cycle that she mentions, which really allows creativity to keep breathing. If we are not constantly right into our creative tank, how are we able to output creativity? So, for example, those artist dates, or it could be rest, it could just be going outside. But if we aren’t experiencing or present in our world in a personal way, it’s very hard for us to have a pool to draw from to make more creative output. And I think that that’s a really important model. Whether it’s 20% time or setting up personal projects within classrooms, we’re very overprogrammed, not just adults, but I think children especially. So it’s very difficult. But how do we allow for, or how do we I should say organize what looks like unorganized time.

Matthew Worwood [00:26:02]:
This is such a wonderful conversation because the idea of an education system that allows for those kind of passion projects, and if you think about Google, I’m assuming that they have probably pretty specific constraints within the environment, goals that they must meet, budgets that they have to adhere to when they’re working on a project. But then when you think about some of the outcomes that have come about with this 20% time, I believe Gmail was one of those outcomes. I think even Google Cardboard and I think either Google Maps or Google Earth was also projects that just came out of an individual working on their own 20% of their time exploring some type of interest that they had related to the technology or feature. So when you think about it from that perspective, if we teach children or give them opportunities to have that time, we begin to think about the skills that we’re developing and the hope that they can then go and pursue and develop those innovations in their spare time as well.

Samantha Olshen [00:27:03]:
Absolutely. And I think one of the key findings is that we take pressure off of the outcome. For me, I see that in class when I give them the space to explore, experiment, fail and create, there’s less pressure on the deadline, there’s less pressure on the outcome, and I think that can be adapted, but maybe harder for younger students. But the kind of growth mindset is more activated when there’s kind of no grade involved or there’s no deadline involved or no pressure involved. And that works very well, I think, for the college student or the college level in creative classes, because it allows them breathing room and ideas need to breathe, people need to breathe. Collaboration is, I think, best when there’s space now that it can’t always happen. Obviously there are clients that have certain constraints in some classes, but as it relates to these passion projects, or 20% time, I think there’s a balance that can be struck between project based learning to industry, so that they’re prepared for the job market, the job hunt and actually working, and then also these passion projects which really stimulate growth in creativity and what’s next beyond that industry job if they seek that.

Cyndi Burnett [00:28:21]:
Well, Samantha, thank you so much for your time. Today we wrap up every show with the question, what three tips would you give to educators to help them bring creative thinking into the classroom?

Samantha Olshen [00:28:32]:
I would say practice empathy. Think about your students, even your younger selves, and think about what you would be excited by. Give yourselves permission to try new things and ask questions. I ask lots of questions. I always think that the people around me will provide more than I ever have or ever need. Right. I always try to fill the room with people who know what I don’t know. I would also say, be open or find a mentor or be a mentor.

Samantha Olshen [00:29:00]:
It’s easy to say. It’s not easy to do, but there are a lot of people within your community that are there to support and also engage with your students. Some of my favorite memories from the school system I grew up in was when my teachers and professors brought in artists, musicians, local designers, people from their community who taught me something in a fun way. I don’t remember answers to tests. I don’t remember questions on tests. But I remember every song a professor or a teacher made up so that I would remember. I remember I before E. I remember all of my vowels, right? I know these are things from when I was little, but these were really creative solutions.

Samantha Olshen [00:29:44]:
And there are times when I spell things now and I go, oh, I remember that teacher and what she used to sing to me. I also think that. I think funding is always a hard issue in education, especially when it comes to bringing creative supplies into the classroom. But there are ways to engage with your community that might help, whether that’s partnering with a local organization to do a supplies drive or parents or classrooms and finding materials. I think that we have a lot of materials that are going to waste, and there are a lot of educators that could use those. So I think that engaging with the community for creative materials is a really important outreach and building block for your classroom. I also think that one of the key takeaways that I would say is that creativity is about exploration and engagement, not tools, not objects, and not outcomes. So if we can think about it like that, experimentation and exploration, I think that we can really grow and apply creativity to any situation in our classrooms.

Matthew Worwood [00:30:49]:
Well, Samantha, there’s not many guests I can say this to, but I’ll be seeing you next week, and I wish you all the best to the start of the new semester and for our listeners. That concludes another episode of fueling creativity in Education podcast. If you like this episode, we ask that you either share it with a friend or colleague at your score institution or post it on social media and type myself, Cindy, and perhaps Samantha into the post. So we can thank you for listening to our show. My name’s Dr. Matthew Warwood, and my.

Cyndi Burnett [00:31:16]:
Name is Dr. Cindy Burnett. This episode was produced by creativity and education in partnership with warwoodclassroom.com. Our editor is Sina Yusefzade.