Project Title: What’s Outside The Box? Considering the Impact of Creativity on Student-Classroom Relationships
Project Description: It is widely accepted that thinking creatively is a healing process (Foregard, 2019), endearing to both the actor and beholder. Meanwhile, students remain dissatisfied with schooling’s lack of creative engagement (Moeller, et al., 2020). It’s worth asking: can emphasizing creative processing heal student relationships with their schooling institutions? Can doing so engender healthy student mindsets and committed classroom cultures? I intend to answer these questions by conducting a series of surveys and creative evaluations in order to discern student perceptions of creativity, realize student creative processing, and determine any persisting results on the thinker. “Transformational creativity” (Sternberg, 2024) describes that creativity designed to have a beneficial impact on others; I expect to find that both student perceptions of their creative ambitions and their relationships to their schooling institutions will correlate positively with being transformationally creative. Implications from this study may compel educational systems to further reevaluate the importance of individual student ambitions and develop creative strategies to manage student wellness.
Most important achievement: Doing what I can to give back to the communities by which I have been so blessed. That's right alongside training with a semi-professional soccer club in Ecuador.
Reflections on the College Scholar Program: The College Scholar Program presents an incredible opportunity to discover, pursue, and manifest those intellectual passions which inspire us. I’ve found it to be an encouraging community of students with interdisciplinary interests and exceptional curiosity. Learning to fumble through our projects together has been a vital step in conducting independent research, one of many unique lessons the program provides!