1. Describe how you were pedagogically creative? As an instructor how did you make your content socially conscious, culturally relevant, and critically focused for students on your instructional site? What did you do to reach out to the most reluctant students?
2. Describe how you had to adapt, recreate and transform your teaching specifically in terms of the following. You may want to consider the theories you discussed in your Philosophy section above and turn them into practice on your instructional site.
a. Incorporate 21st-century practices and inclusive practices
b. Include appropriate assessment plans
3. Be creative and describe your approach in detail using research-based ideas from your specific fields.
The concept of the creative economy gained popularity around the turning of the 21stcentury. News and business magazines around the world documented the impending shift from manufacturing economies to knowledge economies. More importantly, many experts noted the increasing role of creativity as the nature of work was changing in those new knowledge economies.
Creative work has been generally defined as work that involves the generation of meaningful new forms. Meaningful new forms may be new products, new services, new business models, new ideas, or even new policies and practices. Creative work fundamentally involves creating new and useful information or transforming existing information into something new and useful.
With the rise of new forms and the emergence of the innovation economy, social scientists began to categorize creative work and to connect creative work to economic growth and expansion. Conceptual metrics of creative work have been combined with workforce data to calculate the proportion of the creative workers in metro areas across the United States as well as most developed countries around the world.
In 2005, the proportion of the work conducted in the U.S. that was classified as involving creative work was estimated to be 23%. By 2012, that estimate rose to 30%, and today creative work in the U.S. economy is estimated at approximately 33%. In other words, one-in-three career fields demand proficiency in the development of meaningful new forms.
Creativity and innovation flourish in populations where the proportion of creative work is elevated. For instance, the following metro areas were ranked the highest on the High-Tech Innovation Index, a metric that calculates the generation of patents and the economic impact of creative work:
1) Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, Washington;
2) San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, California;
3) San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, California;
4) Portland-Vancouver-Beaverton, Oregon; and
5) Austin-Round Rock, Texas.
In addition to their top-ranking in high-tech innovation, those five metro areas each rank in the top 25 areas based on the proportion of the workforce in the creative class with San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara ranked at the top with approximately 80% of the workforce engaged in creative work. These areas of high-tech innovation are the foundation of the innovation economy, and they attract the most talented creative thinkers and problem solvers in our country and beyond.