Abstract
There is a long history of conversations about integrating business and arts-based learning, but they are taking on more urgency today as technology-induced change and global interconnectivity are altering how humans learn, create, and construct new knowledge in unprecedented ways. However, there is much still to be learned about how the disciplines might be integrated and in what ways they can jointly serve the development not only of university students, but of how professional practice itself is defined. Over the past three years, faculty from the Theater and Dance Performance Studies, Art Practice, and Business disciplines at UC Berkeley have collaborated to create a course, Collaborative Innovation, that explores both collaboration and innovation at the intersection of these three fields. This paper presents a framework for a genuinely integrated interdisciplinary class that interweaves personal development and growth with problem framing and solving skills, and diverse-team participation and leadership. Quotes from student reflection papers bring alive the transformational experiences students went through in this course. The integration of socially engaged art, business, and theater/performance through collaborative teamwork tackling important and challenging social problems opens unexpected potential for student development as future contributors to society.
Highlights
Collaborative Innovation was first offered in Spring 2016 through the Big Ideas Courses program in the College of Letters and Science at UC Berkeley
The faculty who founded the course proposed three perspectives on innovation: (1) theater faculty described their contribution as a laboratory in developing and generating new performance works around shared life experiences through iterative writing and performance exercises; (2) business faculty focused on using human centered design techniques to leverage technology in creating better customer, user and stakeholder experiences that lead to better business outcomes; and (3) art practice faculty aimed to have students define the unspoken rules and norms of public space and utilitarian objects and create dynamic, physical, and social explorations that challenge boundaries
Starting with the Art Practice project, students took on meaty and challenging issues such as drug abuse, sexual assault and loneliness that forced them, through research and discussions with others in and outside of the class, to examine the dynamics identifying the enablers and inhibitors of change in thosevarious systems, that allowed them to bring the of the systems surrounding these issues
Summary
“To drop the tools of rationality is to gain access to lightness in the form of intuitions, feelings, stories, improvisation, experience, imagination, active listening, awareness in the moment, novel words, and empathy. Literacy in the arts can prepare students to work collaboratively within a collected intelligence, participate in social networks, negotiate cultural differences, critique existing paradigms, and navigate contradictory data [6,7] It is not the focus of this paper, there is discussion of the value of business learning to the arts. As traditional constructs that support concrete boundaries between disciplines and professions shift and change, arts discourse offers an expanded perspective on the complex systems that structure contemporary experience, creating space in which to offer critique, alternatives, and perspective on their impact This in turn can allow students to consider their own effectiveness in relation to cultural change, and how they can act most wisely, sensitively, and courageously within their fields. The description of the course and associated frameworks provided in this paper aim to help create common language, identify key skills and capacities of creativity and how they can be developed across disciplines, and show how faculty from different disciplines can work together to create an integrated learning experience that is transformational for students [15]
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