Over my time as a teacher I have begun to see that teaching is more about facilitating learning rather than actually teaching information. It was a critical thinking process that inspired education, and allowed students to discover their own knowledge. They took on roles and personas they didn’t know and had fun while doing it. My Shalom students were able to take the idea of a burn and connect it scene by scene into a story. LTP makes room for creativity, whether it is through participation, pictures, or play it is a process that engages the creative process and successfully channels it directly into curriculum. It was through these lessons that I began to reevaluate my priorities as a teacher and see the importance of creativity. This experience has left me hopeless for the few seconds it takes me to recover and come up with a new way of posing the question so that the students will be more receptive. Sometimes we will begin a lesson, hand out photos, ask the students to invent a name for the person in the picture and then receive blank stares. One of the greatest challenges teaching here in Tanzania has been the uncertainty about whether the students will even respond. I was shocked, until I realized that I was shocked because the students had thought creatively and executed a collective idea without any interference. It was as if I stepped into a movie, and I did not have to do any prompting. Finally Eric, the ‘worst’ burn victim, was picked up by his fellow students and carried in the ambulance all the way to the classroom, wailing the entire time. Pulling yelping victims from the kitchen, they laid them out on the ground as the nurses (also students) tended to their wounds with toilet paper bandages, and all the while Collins snapped one excellent shot after another. First they were screaming from the fire, while firefighters (students) ran onto the scene. I handed the camera over to Collins, our designated Class 5 photographer, as the students burst into action. Instead, these students began jumping at the opportunity to be actors, volunteering the idea that the kitchen in the school had caught fire and several students were trapped perilously in the flames. When I gave these Shalom Primary School students the assignment of enacting the first aid procedure for a burn victim, I dreaded the idea of lecturing each step as the students acted out my words for the photos. I have loved this photo more for the experience it represents rather than the actual picture. That is where my creative renaissance began. Ideas, connections, those bits of tangential information I am renown for, they require critical and thus creative thinking. Our director Katie once said in discussion, “They say genius is the ability to take two totally unrelated things and connect them.” Over the hours toiling over work at my desk in America this was essential fact that I may have forgotten: critical thinking is inherently born out of creativity.
Throughout the program I have been pushed to find solutions where I thought they couldn’t be found, and push others to do the same. Over the past eight weeks, I have had a sort of creative renaissance.
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