Creative Thinking at Work: Critical and Creative Thinking
Courses
CCT Masters students, graduate students from other programs, advanced undergraduates, and special students are welcome to enroll in individual courses. (CCT Masters students need permission of their advisors to take on-line sections and may count no more than four on-line courses from UMass Boston towards their degree.)
Required courses:
- CRCRTH601 Critical Thinking
3 Lec Hrs, 3 Credits
This course explores issues about the nature and techniques of critical thought, viewed as a way to establish a reliable basis for our claims, beliefs, and attitudes about the world. We explore multiple perspectives, placing established facts, theories, and practices in tension with alternatives to see how things could be otherwise. Views about observation and interpretation, reasoning and inference, valuing and judging, and the production of knowledge in its social context are considered. Special attention is given to translating what is learned into strategies, materials, and interventions for use in students’ own educational and professional settings.
- CRCRTH602 Creative Thinking
3 Lec Hrs, 3 Credits
This course explores approaches to "How might we proceed when confronted by problems, situations too ambiguous, complex, or messy or impossible to be addressed directly through logical strategies?" It seeks to increase the participants’ understanding of creativity, to improve their creative problem-solving skills and to enhance their ability to promote these skills in others, in a variety of educational settings. Students participate in activities designed to help develop their own creativity, and discuss the creative process from various theoretical perspectives. Readings are on such topics as creative individuals, environments that tend to enhance creative functioning, and related educational issues. Discussions with artists, scientists and others particularly involved in the creative process focus on their techniques, and on ways in which creativity can be nurtured.
Electives:
- CRCRTH 611 Seminar in Critical Thinking (Problem-based learning focus)
3 Lec Hrs, 3 Credits
Topic changes from year to year.
Prerequisites: CRCRTH 601 or permission of instructor
- CRCRTH612 Seminar in Creativity
3 Lec Hrs, 3 Credits
Research on and discussion of important issues of current concern in the field of creativity. The seminar analyzes writings on the creative person, the creative process, and the development of creative performance in both art and science. It draws on materials from a variety of sources including biographies, intellectual histories, psychological studies and educational research. Topics include perspectives on the creative process; from logical extension to intuitive leap; distinguishing scientific and artistic creativity; the person; the role of insight; demythologizing creativity; social context and creative productivity; evaluating creativity; educating for creativity.
Prerequisites: CRCRTH 602 or permission of instructor.
- CRCRTH616 Dialogue Processes
3 Lec Hrs, 3 Credits
Genuine dialogue provides a creative space in which may emerge entirely new ways of thinking, acting, and relating to others. Holding respect for oneself, for one another, and for a commonly created pool of meaning is at the heart of such dialogue. Course participants learn and experience approaches to listening and dialogue, derived from Buber, Bohm, Isaacs, Jackins, Weissglass, and others, that allow us to become more aware of the underlying beliefs, assumptions, and emotions that limit our thinking and responding to the world. We explore applications of dialogue processes in educational, organizational, social and personal change.
- CRCRTH618 Creative Thinking, Collaboration and Organizational Change
3 Lec Hrs, 3 Credits
Through interactive, experiential sessions and structured assignments students learn critical and creative approaches to working in organizations. Skills addressed include: communication and team-building; facilitation of participation and collaboration in groups; promotion of learning from a diversity of perspectives; problem-finding and solving; and reflective practice. Students apply these skills to situations that arise in business, schools, social change groups, and other organizations with a view to taking initiative and generating constructive change.
- CRCRTH 630 Creativity in the Literature and Arts
3 Lec Hrs, 3 Credits
Expression and evaluation, freedom and discipline, creative production and the critical response to it — how do these dualities relate to visual and verbal imagination as they are demonstrated in literature and the arts? Specific strategies for eliciting imaginative work in these areas will be demonstrated, as will specific strategies for evaluating imaginative works. Finally, this course will focus on ways to help others (including children) develop critical and creative skills and on ways to effectively use strategies for eliciting and evaluating imaginative work.
Prerequisites: CRCRTH 601 and 602, or permission of instructor.
- CRCRTH 670 Thinking, Learning, and Computers
3 Lec Hrs, 3 Credits
This course considers the consequences of using computers to aid our thinking, learning, communication, and action in classrooms, organizations, and social interactions. Class activities acquaint students with specific computer-based tools, the ideas and research behind them, and themes for critical thinking about these ideas and tools.
