Unlocked and unhinged doors
Last week, as monsoons bore down, I taught my Creativity and Problem Awareness classes online.
The course begins with discussions on encouraging and nurturing creative thinking. It’s fun to teach onsite: we have rapid-fire exchanges on originality, safe spaces, and the role of education in creativity; then the students design and brainstorm.
It is tiring to teach online when I have to work with nearly 70 students across three sections. We make do with Zoom, a chat box for brainstorming, and the occasional brave soul unmuting themselves to announce their ideas to the class.
It’s the start of the semester, so I didn’t expect quick brainstorming, especially not from students who, by their own admission, were used to the idea that they had to produce something with measurable skills to earn a high grade.
I nevertheless threw in activities designed to connect the idea of everyday strategy, or diskarte, to creativity. “Give me five things. If you had only these things, how would you survive on a desert island? Escape a locked room? Make a gift for a friend? Give me five foods; now, make me a menu.”
Some people came up with the usual “start a fire with the pencil,” “pick the lock with the spoon,” or “tonkatsu sisig.” It was the limits, I knew, that were holding the students back. This is no surprise, because they began the semester by defining creative freedom as zero rules, all the best tools, all the time to just sit and make.
Creativity, however, also means working inside constraints, and being willing to play. That last word is contentious: fun is rarely equated with learning, and focusing on thinking processes is hard to reconcile with the much-vaunted learning outcomes approach. And, sadly, some people understand play as gamifying learning: scores on a race of ranks, points assigned to the greatest number of right answers.
The result: gamification of an already metrics-heavy, standards-driven system, where students compete to be on top, create for points, and eventually define themselves using grades.
Creative play, however, is closer to a sandbox, where anything can be built without penalties; unstructured conversations, where anything can arise without interruption; or even a mission to an unknown and faraway land, where life has to be built around the tightest of constraints.
I remembered all these as I sat at the last Mass of Fr. Francis Teo of the Missionary Community of St. Paul the Apostle, before his deployment to an island in Indonesia. In his homily, he spoke about how he had come to the Philippines in 2012, with no house waiting, so little money, and only a rapidly growing circle of local friends to help his mission grow. But with strategy and grace, their order grew large enough to work with partner communities and assist priests in their education.
“I have learned this,” Father Teo said, “When God closes a door, He wants you to enter another. My old impulse was to break the door down!”
Father Teo’s words were a nuanced expression of the oft-repeated adage. It was not merely about doors doing things, but the human need to surrender. The surrender could be to Divine Providence, but also to whatever was available and freely given—and to be unafraid to still try, despite the constraints.
Perhaps that, too, needs to be mentioned, as we criticize family dynamics, scrutinize the education system, and analyze the students who rush to break down doors instead of first discerning, talking, listening. Some schools might have focused too hard on outcomes but not the thinking process. Others might have overregulated class offerings so that students do not get the chance to explore other fields of knowledge, learn how to make mistakes, and accept criticism gracefully. Some students have bound their identities so closely to rankings that they’ve forgotten the joy of simply learning.
Maybe we’ve thrown too many things at them, when all they need is space. They’ve forgotten how to just play.
My questions will one day become “use only these five words to make a radio jingle about lollipops” or “with only these story elements, make an inspirational short film.” For now, my class operates on hypotheticals that will close doors and set limits. I will watch the students struggle, but I will also witness them grow.
Last week, one class listed random food on chat: bubblegum, beef Wellington, matcha, sisig, dinuguan.
The menu proposals were conventional—until one student typed: dinuguang bubblegum.
I choked on my tea and laughed harder as the chat box exploded. Matcha coated everything. Everything was hacked and fried into sisig. There were impossible smoothies and a beef Wellington decorated with bubblegum. One student’s brave answer had unlocked an unhinged class.
I only wish I had seen all the fun in person, as I saw the students begin to trust themselves and their abilities, as they allowed themselves to be pushed toward open doors even when so many had closed. On that afternoon, in the confines of a Zoom room, they were alive. They were free.
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iponcedeleon@ateneo.edu
