Matthew Worwood:
Why does creativity make so many adults uncomfortable? In this episode, we are joined by art educator Jason Blair, who explores that discomfort and discusses with us how we can shift the message we are unintentionally sending to our students. Hello, everyone. My name is Dr. Matthew Worwood.

Cyndi Burnett:
And my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood:
This is the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast.

Cyndi Burnett:
On this podcast, we’ll be talking about various creativity topics and how they relate to the field of education.

Matthew Worwood:
We’ll be talking scholars, educators, and resident experts about their work, challenges they face, and exploring new perspectives of creativity, all.

Cyndi Burnett:
With a goal to help fuel a more rich and informed discussion that provides teachers, administrators, and emerging scholars with the information they need to infuse creativity into teaching and learning.

Matthew Worwood:
So let’s begin.

Cyndi Burnett:
Jason Blair is an art educator who believes creativity is not just a skill, it’s a way of seeing, thinking, and being. With over two decades of experience in the classroom, Jason is passionate about empowering students and fellow educators to embrace imagination as a force for transformation. He challenges traditional boundaries of education, blending art, empathy, and innovation to create learning environments where curiosity thrives and voices are heard. Welcome to the show, Jason.

Jason Blair:
Thanks. Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here. So.

Cyndi Burnett:
So, Jason, we ask all of our guests for three questions they’d like to talk about. And I want to ask you about this first question you posed, which was, why do you think adults are so uncomfortable with real creativity? What do you consider real creativity?

Jason Blair:
So, for me, I think of real creativity as these inconvenient moments that happen. And that’s where I sort of came up with this term of inconvenient creativity. I think, you know, as adults, we like to say to our kids, you know, be creative. You know, here’s some paints, whatever. Be creative. But the moments that happen in between those, when they’re being creative in different ways, we frown upon. So I’ll give you an example to frame that. So my daughter, when she was younger, she was in her room one night, and I went up there to see what was going on, and her room was torn apart.

Jason Blair:
Completely torn apart. There was stuff everywhere. There was. All of her closet was completely emptied. Nothing was in her closet anymore. So I walked in there, and I stared at the room for a second, was sort of overwhelmed by this catastrophe that was in our room. But I knew that there was a moment there of how I was going to respond. I could have simply focused on the mess and been like, okay, get this back in there.

Jason Blair:
Let’s get ready for bed, whatever else. Or I could have leaned into it. So instead, what I said was, can you tell me about what’s going on here? And she said, yeah, you know what? I watched this show called tiny house on YouTube, and they made this tiny house. And so in my closet, I made a tiny house. Come look. And so she had a place where she was getting dressed in the morning, she was reading books, she had breakfast. And it dawned on me that those are the moments that are so impactful. And it made me realize that when we come in contact with children every day, it’s the little moments that we do that either sort of illuminate and lift up their creative spirits or discourage it.

Jason Blair:
And so I was sort of in tune to that. And so a classroom example of that, how I started seeing this play out in my spaces was, you know, in the art room one day, a bunch of students were working on a project that I had outlined for him. Teacher, you know, this was, you know, back in the day when I was still transitioning to be more creative, centric, I guess. And so there was a project we were working on, and one of the kids came over to me and said, hey, Ms. Blair, do you mind if I start working on a card for somebody? They’re moving today, and I want to make them a card. And so I was like, sure, go ahead. So the students started making a card. So about five seconds later, another student comes over and says, hey, do you mind if I work on that card with her? And I was like, okay.

Jason Blair:
Couple minutes later, five or six kids over there, and then they start saying, do you mind if we get a big piece of roll paper? Okay, let’s try it. Ten minutes go by. Do you mind if we start splatter painting? So all of a sudden, now there’s this chaos in the room. There’s this splatter painting on this rollpaper. And it’s just nobody is working on what I had outlined. Not one person. They’re all working on this huge, gigantic mural. So the end of the class comes and they put it aside, and I think, well, that’s it.

Jason Blair:
You know, we’re not going to see this anymore. And that’ll be it. Well, at the end of the day, they knock on my door, and they said, Mr. Blair, can we pick up that artwork that we created? And I said, well, sure. Where’s the rest of your class? And they’re like, well, they’re out here. And so I look out in the hallway, and there’s the whole class. And what they’ve done was they take this huge mural. And they put it on the right outside the bus for the girl who.

Jason Blair:
Her last day, she was able to break through that mural on her way to get on the bus for the last day. Now that’s the moment that highlights how inconvenient creativity is all around us. We have to be open for it. And so that’s what I mean by. I think sometimes adults are uncomfortable with it because it’s out of our control. It’s discomfort for us because we can’t control that situation. I think if we lean into those moments, we can start to see the beauty that’s there instead of the mess that we typically might see.

Matthew Worwood::
I want to follow up on this topic of control a little bit because we just interviewed my son’s middle school teacher, Emily Jameson, which was a great interview. Jameson is, as I said, an elementary school teacher. And we. We had a conversation around control. And it. It came about because I was sharing a story of when I’d been on a recent field trip with the class. We went to Sturbridge Village, which is an early 1800s village here in Connecticut, with actors and opportunities to see what. What life looked like during that period.

Matthew Worwood:
And it. It obviously serves as a. A great learning experience, right? It’s a way that you can teach the content, but within our con, it’s.

Jason Blair:
It’s.

Matthew Worwood:
I don’t know if we use the word chaotic, but we certainly said that, that it’s challenging to control the learning experience because I had a group of six boys, I think, and we went into the sawmill and I noticed all six of them be fascinated about different things in that environment. And, you know, they were asking different questions. You know, the. I think the actor got a question about, you know, do they live in the village and are they married? And then another actor got a question about, you know, the sawmill. And then another question was around, where does the wood. What do you do with the wood? And so you kind of have these six students go in. They experience the same learning event in the same environment, but they can come out with. With six completely different, you know, outcomes from that experience, or at least the.

Matthew Worwood::
The knowledge that they’ve gained from that experience. And so, you know, talking a little bit about the serendipity aspect of what you’re offering and this idea of. Of having this learning environment and perhaps to a certain extent, willing to give up some control so those students can find those serendipitous moments of creativity. I’m curious how. How far are you willing to go in terms of that control? Because I Suppose we have to give up a little bit of control, but not too much, otherwise it becomes a little bit too chaos, chaotic, and we potentially, you know, find ourselves all over the place in terms of what students are learning and how they’re learning. You’re curious to get your thoughts about that?

Jason Blair:
Yeah, I, I see that for sure. I, I, I love how you brought the field trip idea. And it goes to, you know, how I’m sort of cultivating more of those moments in the classroom. One is this element of surprise and speaking to those serendipitous moments is I think what we’re seeing right now when we have this sort of engagement crisis going on in our schools is because of the monotony, kids are zoned out. They’re approaching the day mindlessly instead of mindfully. And not mindfully in sort of a meditation sense, but mindfully meaning that they’re on the lookout for opportunities to inject creativity, to make connections. And so what I’ve started to do is thinking about how do I create more of those moments in there, how do I help them? How do I, in a sense, train them to slow down in a world that’s moving at breakneck speed? So one of the things I tried last year was I thought specifically about how I wanted them to enter the classroom, right? And I thought, you know, on the first day they come into the classroom and we’re talking about rules and expectations, then first of all, that feeds in the whole schooling of kids and that’s what they’re used to doing, is like, okay, here’s all the ways that I have to comply and conform to the system. So I thought, what’s the point of that on the first day? You know, is that the message I want to send the first day is this going to be a space of conformity and compliance.

Jason Blair:
So instead what I did was I created this way where the kids, when they came to the door the first day, I had them sit outside the room and I said, I want you to think carefully about how you enter the space. I want you to know that every time you come to this space, I want you to use your imagination and I want you to make sure that you bring your whole self into the space. And so we had this whole conversation. I opened the door and there was this imagination tunnel. And so they crawled through this imagination tunnel. Um, and then once they got in, there was, you know, things hanging and, and there was just all open ended materials around the room. There was pieces of cardboard, there was ropes, there were blankets, there were clips Paints different things like that. And when I opened the door, just the awe that I heard from them, like, wow, oh, look at that.

Jason Blair:
That’s all. Just that right away. I knew right away that I had them hooked. And so what I was starting to do the rest of the year is I need to find more ways to sprinkle those, to sort of break the monotony. And then once I’ve done that, then they started to look for their own situations and they realized this is a space where we can break free from the sort of chains that we’ve been used to having. And it’s modeling, right? It’s all about modeling. If I’m modeling, I’m taking a risk and I’m going to see how this plays out. Then they take that too.

Jason Blair:
And so another example of that was, you know, a student who came down and asked me to have some extra time for an art project. And I said, sure. It was, you know, later, later in the day that they came down and they said, can I bring a friend with me? And I was like, yeah, sure. So he came down and he started playing. He started building something with his project. And then he ended up building some swords and masks and things. And the next thing I knew, I see them, both of those boys are playing in the middle of the room, right? They’re having a play session. And so in my head, I’m starting to think like, well, this is really inconvenient for me because they’re not working on what they said they’re working on.

Jason Blair:
They’re playing with these tools, they’re playing with these materials that they made. But then I stepped back and realized, like, this is iteration. This is them getting a focus group, right, and testing out the products that they made. And it’s just that way of looking at that. And so then what I do is I articulate that to an administrator that comes in, you know, this is. This may look as play, but let’s stop and talk. What this is. They are iterating because when they hit the swords to each other, one breaks.

Jason Blair:
They have to go back and revamp it. This is all sort of practical, real life, sort of creative expression that. That I can’t. I can’t construct in a lesson. So I have to be open to those moments of serendipity all the time. And I’m trying to create more of those by the classroom environment that we have there. And another way to think about that is it goes back to. I’m sure you’re both familiar with the 100 languages for Reggio Amelia and having different tools in there.

Jason Blair:
And I think one of the ways we can create serendipitous moments are if we recognize that in our classroom there are a hundred different languages spoken. Right. Kinesthetic, visual, dance through all different ways of expression. And one of the simplest ways I can do that is if I’m in a high school biology class, there should be books of poetry. If I’m in a math class, there should be microscopes. If I’m in a language arts class, why can’t there be forms of measurement and different things to discover? Like if we start having those things, then people feel welcome to have those serendipitous moments. They also feel like they have a seat at the table and we create opportunities to make connections that maybe they wouldn’t have otherwise. So, yeah, I’m just constantly on the lookout for not only do we create those serendipitous moments, but then also the most important part is how do we articulate the learning behind that so that people move away from, oh, well, that’s really cute that they were playing in your classroom.

Jason Blair:
It’s more than that. Right. It’s these dispositions they’re gaining doing that that’s going to help them in a constantly changing world.

Cyndi Burnett:
Jason, what a great story. And I love how you’re framing real creativity and inconvenient.

Jason Blair:
Inconvenient creativity.

Cyndi Burnett:
Inconvenient creativity. That’s not. Not something I’ve heard of before. So I really appreciate that. Inconvenient creativity and especially in it always makes me cringe when I see an art educator and they’ve got their students doing all the same project and creating all the same artwork. And I think, oh, there’s so many opportunities and so much flexibility here. Why aren’t they doing that? So it’s really refreshing and inspiring to hear your story around what you’re doing in the art classroom. So I want to take this outside of the art classroom and put this into an elementary school classroom.

Cyndi Burnett:
I know you mentioned to me earlier on that your wife is also a teacher. Elementary school.

Jason Blair:
Yes.

Cyndi Burnett:
So how would you recommend if she sat down with you and she said, I want to do what you’re doing. What are some things that I can do in my classroom that’s not art education and still meet these standards that were driven into all the public school systems right now?

Jason Blair:
Yeah. So there’s sort of two ways. I’ll give you a shorter way and then a more in depth way. The shorter way would be, you know, thinking about what Little things you can do, what little tweaks you can do to surprise them. So again, if you’re going back to a classroom experience and first day or any day really, that if you’re talking about like maybe a middle school classroom and you had the. A day they came to the class and you had a post note on the door that said, let’s meet outside by the front door. And the door is locked. Right away all the kids are going to be like, what’s going on? Like why is the door locked? We’re supposed to go meet outside by the front.

Jason Blair:
So they all go out there, so they’re having this shared experience. But then when you’re outside, you talk about like, how do we want to really enter this space? And you have those conversations that can be done in any classroom. But what it’s doing is, it’s breaking their frame of reference. It’s making them all of a sudden realize like, this is going to be a space that’s different than my other classes. You know, that’s. Those are little elements we can do here and there. Another way is getting a little more in depth is thinking about questions in your classroom. So I’ve worked with classroom teachers before in collaborative projects that are based in student questions and interests.

Jason Blair:
So last year, one of the, one of the lessons we explored or the questions we explored was what if we did school differently? And so we explored that. And by exploring this idea of what if we did school differently, it was a way for us to work together. So in the classroom there was doing research on all different aspects and we let the kids sort of guide that. So what happened was we had some students that said, you know, if we did school differently, what if we had a restaurant in school? So a couple kids researched what a restaurant would be like in school. And so they actually for a day hired some kids in the class. They ended up getting another class come in to have them. We ended up making pancakes was the safest thing to make in this classroom. So they did that.

Jason Blair:
They researched the menus, what they were going to have on it, how to make it. They got other kids to play music. So there was an ambiance to it. That was one. We had another group of kids that were worried about the social, emotional well being of their classmates. So they created a tiny free art library where on the outside of their door they had little tiny canvases you could take if you wanted to, or you could leave some for other people. We had another group that was really fascinated with dance and why can’t dance be more in school. So they created a dance class and they got some kindergarteners that they taught these kids how to dance.

Jason Blair:
And so what that was was it was a chance for us to. To make learning more holistic. So I was giving up my classroom time, like my planning period to go into his classroom, and he was giving up his planning period to come into mine. So we had this really fluid blend of time. The kids weren’t thinking. This was isolated to one specific time block. It flowed throughout the whole day. And so I think if we can get to those points in the classroom where we can let questions guide our learning so that we focus more on cultivating the dispositions of what it means to be a creative thinker as opposed to the specific standards we have to cover, I think that’s one way we can start to shift to cultivating that creativity in the classroom, no matter if it’s an art room or gen ed classroom.

Matthew Worwood::
I find that fascinating and I want to connect it to a story that I’ve shared before about a project that I was working on many years ago called the Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, and it was funded as part of Obama’s Investing in Innovation grant. I want to say around 2013, 2014. And you know, we, the. The goal ultimately was to forge a better connection between science, engineering, mathematics and technology. And really what we were kind of hoping for is a final project where students were tapping into content from all of those subjects and having freedom to express it in different ways. And you know, when we first started, we just targeted in at the science class and the technology class. And one of the requirements of being in the program was making sure that the teachers had, you know, had a schedule where they could actually work together and plan together. But, but, you know, when I met with, with the two teachers at school one time, what was fascinating is I think the unit was on molecular biology.

Matthew Worwood::
And I think that the. What they were being tasked to create in the technology class was an animation that expresses their understanding of molecular biology. And it was interesting because the technology teacher was talking a little bit about the challenges that the student faced and that them not having enough knowledge of molecular biology to create this animation. And that was a problem that she was running into. But at the same time, the science teacher was, was talking about how well they did in, in his classroom when it came to demonstrating their understanding of molecular biology through the tests and the conversations that he had with them. And so we kind of found ourselves talking a little bit about, of maybe it’s not that they’re not knowing what they need to know about molecular biology. The content which is in the program, you know, was. Was taught in the science class.

Matthew Worwood::
So we could say that we’re ticking the boxes that you have to tick. Maybe the problem was more about the challenge in the transfer of that knowledge from one space or one class or one subject to another space or class. And that really, I think, highlighted the challenges that we were facing in the relationship. And so I was wondering if you’ve got some, some thoughts or comments about that particular situation in regards to, you know, the challenges of the S. And it might be that the silo, for example, provides a way of making learning more efficient. So you speak a little bit about efficiency in the classroom, efficiency of communicate, of delivering content. And so is the silo approach that we have, is it more a case, is it a case of that’s actually better for efficiency, but as we can see, it creates. It creates other challenges that we have to address?

Jason Blair:
Yeah, I believe so. I think one of the ideas, efficiency to me is sort of the antithesis of creativity. And we speed up everything we can. And for me, it’s shifting away from the content information and more towards the dispositions. What types of dispositions do we want to cultivate in our kids? And I go back to this idea of, I think right now how powerful it would be that if we had every student in every classroom learn to think like an artist and a designer and a change agent. I feel like those three dispositions, those three sort of mindsets are going to be key for a constantly changing world. So what does that mean? It means that if we focus on dispositions, we all have a seat at the table, right? So if you say we want to cultivate curiosity, okay, what does it look like from an artistic lens, from a scientific lens, from a historical lens, and we start bringing more people together to start seeing a 360 degree view of a problem. And so for me, like the artist, you know, if we’re talking about, you know, leaning into curiosity and imagination, and we think about the designer being more human centered and empathy and collaboration.

Jason Blair:
And what does that look like to practice dispositions? One of the things we did a few years ago was we had a fort building challenge. So when the kids came in, we wanted to sort of see where they were as far as collaboration went and leadership traits and their empathy. So we had them. We had a box of different sheets and things like that. And the challenge was they had to build a fort that their entire class could fit in. And so that was all the direction we gave. And we watched them. It was supposed to take 30 minutes, but ended up taking two weeks.

Jason Blair:
And we watched them and we watched shouting, we watched tears, we watched people taking other people’s resources. And the reason why that was powerful is because then we were able to talk about the dispositions that were there and we had practical examples to talk from. I think a lot of times when we talk with kids about sort of, you know, bigger picture projects like going down to city hall and sharing research they did on a community issue, I think those are extremely valuable. But I think the other thing, the yes and part is how do we slow down to start seeing the dispositions that we’re trying to cultivate? Because if we move over those, if we say, well, collaborate in this project, but they don’t know what collaboration looks, sounds or feels like because we don’t give them time to exercise that. So it goes back to those dispositions. And I think that, you know, having those sort of bigger projects are important, but it’s also the idea of slowing down to see what do our kids need, what do our students need and how do we, how do we create an environment where they can cultivate those dispositions. So it’s almost project based learning, but also like discipline, disposition based learning. You know, how do we, how do we build those, their capacity.

Jason Blair:
And the artist, designer and change, change agent mindset for me came in the idea of, I think if we can cultivate the dispositions of those, then they’re going to be prepared for world that’s constantly changing. Artists. What artists do is they slow down. Artists look for connections that other people miss. Artists have a very sort of emotional attachment to the world. They feel things on a level that nobody else feels. They feel sort of in like A, an 8K or a 4K with regards to, you know, education. So I don’t know.

Jason Blair:
For me, I just think that these isolated silos are not helping our kids. The world is not like that. I think that’s why there’s an engagement crisis too, is because they come into school and we tell them to put on headphones and blinders while they know that the world’s on fire outside. And so what they want is they want to be prepared to how do I gain the skills and dispositions that are going to help me in this world? And I think to some extent we’re ignoring that. We’re saying, well, focus on this information because this will help you be successful. And they just know that’s not true anymore.

Cyndi Burnett:
So Jason, one of the conversations we’ve been having on the podcast over all 10 seasons and now into the 11th season, and I’m sure you’ve heard it because I know you’re a listener of the show, is around do we need an evolution around education or do we need. Do we need to evolve what we already have or do we need a full on revolution? And Matt and I have sort of gone back and forth on this and I know you’ve been really active on LinkedIn and sharing your viewpoints on what we need in the future of education. So I’d love for you to share what you think we need going forward. So you’ve shared about the dispositions and the thinking and being and doing, but do you think we need a full on revolution? Do we need to overhaul our whole educational system or do you think we just need to take what we have and really evolve it?

Jason Blair:
Yeah, I definitely have been tuned into this for a while now and I think from my perspective, I tend to lead towards a revolution. I think an evolution marks a slow and steady change. And we have had that. We’ve had the changes in education slow and minimal, but we have had changes. But I think what we’re seeing is the speed at which the system is changing right now. What the world is changing is not being kept at pace with our educational system. So it needs to completely revolutionize what that is. And so for me, what I think that looks like is more opportunities for students to engage in learning experiences that focus on service to others.

Jason Blair:
I think what we’re going to see with AI especially is if AI is sort of, you know, geared towards information, content and offloading that. What we’re going to see is this idea of how do humans interact with other humans. And for a long time our education system has focused on, and it still does on the individual journey in education, you scratch and claw your way to the top. And it’s a sort of zero sum game. You know, I need to get the highest gpa, the highest this, the highest that, and I don’t care about the other classmates around me. And I think part of this revolution would consist of you look to the left and the right of you, to the people left and right before you look forward to that goal. So before you focus on the career down the road, talk about the people who are in the room with you, talk about the people in your community, learn about their perspectives. How do you put yourself into somebody else’s perspective? So for me, it’s all about learning about how do you understand Yourself deeply, How do you understand others around you? And then how do you understand their interconnectedness? I think that’s where the revolution for me comes in, is it moves away from solely focusing on an individual approach and one that’s focused solely on information and sort of outdated content, to one that focuses on our interconnectedness and how, if we do that, we start to see the benefits and how we can work in tandem with AI as opposed to it’s just a competition between the two.

Jason Blair:
I think AI obviously is going to have a huge impact on education, and we can control how much impact it has, but we have to do that now before it’s too late. Because I feel like if we solely say. If we say AI is going to help us make this existing system more efficient, I don’t think that’s the way to go, because all that’s going to do is just speed up what we already have. I think we need to say is how can AI help us revolutionize the system altogether?

Matthew Worwood:
You know, I’m finding this conversation so fascinating, and, you know, I want to kind of pick up with what you’re saying around efficiency to a certain extent, but go back and connect it to control and dispositions. And you use the word looks like sounds like. And I do find the looks like sounds like piece very relevant and fascinating in education because, you know, I’ve been working with the school and we’re talking about problems or challenges in the learning environment, perhaps problems or challenges with where a student currently is. Or, you know, maybe there’s a behavioral challenge that we need to address to improve or enhance the opportunities for learning. And we talk about what it looks like and sounds like. And then if we conduct an intervention, we think about what that success looks like and sounds like. And even to a certain extent, with a portrait of a graduate. Right.

Matthew Worwood:
If you think about a portrait of a graduate, quite often we are envisioning what, you know, an individual student interested in this space looks like and sounds like. And I’m just wondering if, I mean, one that could be an efficient way of looking at it, but to a certain extent is also a level of control because we think we know what a successful student looks like, who is going to go and be successful in the sciences. And we think that we know what, you know, a design student should look like when they graduate, if they’re going to go and pursue a design or engineering degree, for example, at the university level. And I’m just wondering if maybe it’s a case of letting go of our grip a Little bit. And thinking about when students come to the. The end of their learning experience, their formal learning experience, maybe, you know, if you’re thinking About K through 12 or all the way through the university system, it’s a case of letting go of what we think that emerging scientist looks like or that emerging engineer looks like, and just having faith that long as we have established the right dispositions, the type of dispositions that you’re talking about, and it could be, and it probably is, that employers actually care more about those dispositions. Can the student work with others? Do they have empathy toward the problem and the people that they are serving? And maybe it’s a case of AI can potentially fill in some of the gaps that they might have in their knowledge. In the same way that we recognize if we get a good hire, we can teach them all the skills, teach them all of the knowledge that they acquire to be successful.

Matthew Worwood::
Maybe that should be the focus of the education, is those, those dispositions and focusing a little bit less on the content that they must know, focusing a little bit less on how we think they should be applying that knowledge at this time. And maybe it just is, you know, at the very minimum, a little bit more around the dispositions. But I do want to say at the same time, I can see how that’s incredibly scary. Right? Because if you don’t. Because that kind of speaks to setting a goal for oneself and it provides a little bit of clarity and it provides a little bit of a focus. But I’m just thinking about what you’re saying. I feel like we do need a little bit of easing up of how we envision success if we are to probably do a little bit more of what you’re talking about we should be doing. What’s your thoughts about that?

Jason Blair:
Yeah, I 100% agree with you on that. I think that the profile of a graduate or learner, you know, we’ve all heard this so many times, we don’t know the jobs are going to be out there and things like that. And so I think to sit there and keep holding that facade up is just doing a disservice to our, to our students. And if we can create those dispositions, those are what’s going to be more. Those are those more durable skills. Right. If we want a kid who’s curious, then whatever job they go into, we want somebody curious to keep investigating in that job. We want somebody who’s empathetic.

Jason Blair:
And whatever they’re going to do and thinking about how they’re designing, that’s going to meet the best needs of everybody in the community. So I think to let go of those are scary. And so what does that look like? I think part of it looks like is we’ve got to get back to the village approach. How do we, how do we bring the community in? Not, you know, for a long time. And still our schools, you know, educate our educators and they sort of keep going up and rising with all their information. They’re learning constantly, but our communities stay stagnant, right? They don’t know sort of latest research, they don’t. And so they go back to that. Well, it worked for me.

Jason Blair:
So that’s what I want and that’s what I’m going to articulate. So I think one of the ways we start to do this is we start to really bring communities into this education sphere and talk about this revolution and say, look, we’re all on the same page, we’re all on the same team here. We know that, that, you know, that AI is going to have a huge impact. So we maybe shouldn’t necessarily focus on what the portrait of a graduate looks like or the final portrait portrait, but also instead, what does the journey of the graduate look like? What is the journey and how could that be more powerful as far as what are the, what are the things you’re doing on the day to day that’s going to help them cultivate those dispositions and then how do we make those visible? You know, I think one of the ways we do that is we start having more exhibitions of learning. You know, one of the things I’ve started a few years ago was this Agents of Change festival. And what it was, was, it was, is let’s find some teachers that are doing some really remarkable work and let’s give them a spotlight and let’s let them show the community what’s happening when you engage kids in deeper learning and how they’re able to share their creativity on a larger scale. And so what we see from that is at the start of the year, some parents maybe are saying, well, what about these standards? And these standards? But by the end of the year, when they have this Agents of Change exhibition, they’re blown away by the intellectual capacity of their child because they’re seeing firsthand what their child is capable of. And from a teacher standpoint, it highlights those teachers that are taking the risk.

Jason Blair:
The teachers who operate in the shadows typically are now coming out of the shadows, say, like, this is something we’re doing. And the other thing I’ve done with this is I’ve broken down the district boundaries. Like it’s no longer like this is, you know, District A has to share this, or district B. You have passionate teachers all across your community, regardless of the district they’re in. If we want to start changing the narrative, we have to get the parents and the community to understand what it looks, sounds and feels like to articulate that. And right now they don’t see that very much. What they see are, you know, social media posts that talk about the highest GPA in the class, that talk about the number of AP and IB classes they offer and those types of things. So we can’t be upset when they come back to us and say we want more of that when that’s all we fed them.

Jason Blair:
So I think one of the, you know, to get back to your point is having more exhibitions of learning where parents can see this to articulate that, but also start thinking about how do we then define what the journey is, what the journey is to graduate as opposed to what the final product looks like. And nobody knows that better than artists out there. They’re steeped in the journey more than the product. Anyways, Paul Gardner once said that a painting is never finished, just stops at interesting points. That’s the same way we should view education. No child is done learning. They just stop at interesting points and pick it back up.

Matthew Worwood:
You know, we are getting a little tight for time, so we do have to move on to our final question, but thank you so much for watching. I think is going to be incredible sound bites that Cindy and I can use on social media because that was, you know, some fantastic things that you just said, and I think you said them really well. And another thing that I just want to highlight before we go on to our final questions, how often you said looks like, sounds like and feels like. And I think I actually missed the feel the first time you said it because I was the one that focused more on the sounds like looks like. But you brought that feel, and I think that that certainly for me at least provides an opportunity for reflection. After this conversation, the Feel piece. Now for our final question, we ask all of our guests to think back to a memorable learning experience that they have when they were young. What made it memorable and why do they think it was successful?

Jason Blair:
Sure. So about two years ago, one of the things I was interested in was what it would look like to have different ages in the same class. So I asked my principal, I said, hey, would you mind if, if I had a class of half kindergarteners, so five, six year olds and half fifth graders. So, you know, 10, 11 year olds for the whole year and see what happens. And you know, I have a great relationship with my administrator and he said, sure, let’s try it. So we did. And it was this amazing experience where we, we saw so much growth in there. But I’ll in that just with how that inspired this experience that happened to me.

Jason Blair:
So when they did that, one of the things these kids did was they sort of investigated what it would be like to design for others. And so I decided I would have the kids design an art project where there was no actual final product. Instead it was, you have to design an immersive experience of joy for a class of kindergarteners. So I had all of my 5th grade classes Design a joyful experience for kindergarteners. So they went in and the first thing they did was they observed the kindergartners playing at recess. They asked them questions, they did empathy interviews for them. And then they came back and they started presenting formal presentations of what they thought the immersive experience should be. We looked at examples of other ones that have been out there and then we voted on one that was going to happen.

Jason Blair:
So what they did was after we voted on that, they designed, using all sorts of materials, an immersive experience. So every week they came into our class. I didn’t really say much. They came in, I said, okay guys, go ahead and get what you need and get started. And they just were completely independent. I could have stepped out for a week or two and nobody would have noticed because they were so engaged. Even to the point where the classroom teachers said to me, I’m not sure what’s going on in the art room, but these kids are talking about this non stop. I think there were a couple elements there.

Jason Blair:
When I saw, when, when the kindergartners came in, it was of course the best day of their lives, right? We had short example. The. The kids made one for one kindergarten class. They were entering into a video game. So they came in through the garage door and they had dinosaurs chasing them and they had, you know, waterfalls coming where kids were spraying water with them. And they had music and sound effects and lights and everything. It was just, it was amazing. I’ve got so many videos of.

Jason Blair:
It was great. But when I stepped back from it as an educator, I looked at it and I started looking around to see. I saw all of those dispositions we’re talking about. I saw time management, I saw empathy, I saw collaboration, Creativity was through the roof, even little things, you know, I saw at one Point a fifth grader standing next to a kindergartner. The kindergartner had bumped their head on the table and the fifth grader was right there consoling him and said, can I walk into, can I walk into the nurse? It’s those little things like enable to. We know as professionals that you have to adjust your dialogue and based on your who’s with you and your audience. They were practicing that in real time, right? It’s all these little things they were practicing. And so for me, that took this, took, took me back to realizing that kids right now are in this sort of, you know, engagement crisis.

Jason Blair:
But what I think they want is they want attention more than anything. And I think that they love this idea of service. They love this idea of service because if I can create something for somebody else, they realize after the fact that the intrinsic motivation they get from it is this tremendous amount of endorphins and rush that they get from giving some to somebody else and to see the face on the kids that they’re giving it to. But it also made me realize that there was this level of engagement I haven’t seen before. And it’s because they were constantly using their hands, they were constantly making, they were in charge, so to speak. I was there to facilitate different aspects of it, to help them and nudge them when they needed nudging. But for the most part it was this idea that they were sort of in charge and that they had a built in audience. They knew they were creating something for somebody else.

Jason Blair:
There was going to be. They had to share this with them. And for me, it was probably the most impactful experience in my career because I was able to see firsthand. I approach my space as that I’m an action based researcher. And I think that’s what led to that was we have to see our teachers, have to see themselves as you’re going to a classroom and you’re an action based researcher. So one of the questions I have up my wall is my wall is what happens when just to plant that seed of, I don’t know, let’s try it. And so that’s what I did with the immersive experience. And it turned out to be this amazingly impactful experience that has influenced me since that moment in every way, shape and form moving forward.

Cyndi Burnett:
Jason, thank you so much for sharing these stories and examples with us. It’s just so rich and I can’t wait to share this with our audience. So thank you so much for joining us on the show today and for those of you who are listening. If you enjoy this episode, check out the entire arts and creativity education collection we now have on our website@foldingcreativitypodcast.com My name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood:
And my name is Dr. Matthew Worwood

Cyndi Burnett:
This episode was produced by Cindy Burnett and Matthew Warwood. Our podcast assistant is Anne Fernando and our editor is Sheikh Ah.