Writing, Research, & Inquiry with Creativity/ Innovation

As a course that earns a third Hub unit in Creativity/Innovation, beyond Hub units for (1) Writing and (2) Research & Information Literacy, WR 153 will also give you an opportunity to design, research, and execute a sustained project or series of projects with an emphasis on the stages of design thinking. Through generating ideas, imagining an audience’s needs, developing strategies for implementation, offering feedback to your peers, redesigning in response to feedback and reflection, and risking productive failure, you will develop the skills and persistence to bring your project to fruition. You will also come to understand creativity as a learnable, iterative process that can be applied in any area of study.

Course Objectives

You will receive three Hub units for this class: Writing, Research, and Inquiry; Research and Information Literacy; and Creativity/Innovation.

You will develop your abilities to

  • Empathize: Students will practice empathy by demonstrating their awareness and understanding of the audience for whom they write or create. 
  • Define: Based on their observations and insights, students will articulate a problem or question that will motivate their work over the course of the semester. 
  • Ideate: Students will generate new ideas and possible solutions by challenging assumptions and engaging in a variety of creative activities. 
  • Prototype: Students will start to create solutions and implement their ideas into written, digital or other forms in order to capture ideas, but also redefine choices. 
  • Test: Students will share drafts with others in order to gain feedback and insight into improving final versions.
  • Assess/Reflect: Students will regularly reflect on and evaluate their peers’ and their own processes and final outcomes.

Instructional Format, Course Pedagogy, and Approach to Learning

Although they differ with regard to their subject content, all WR seminars share common goals and lead you through a sequence of assignments that emphasize a process of planning, drafting, and revising informed by feedback from your classmates and instructor. You will reflect on your approach to this process so that you can adapt it to future occasions. Seminar activities also give you opportunities to engage in focused scholarly inquiry and conversation.

In WR 153, you will learn about and practice design thinking as you undertake a sustained project or series of projects related to our course topic. Design thinking is a non-linear creative process that will help you develop the skills and persistence to bring your project to fruition and can be applied to practical and conceptual problems in other areas of study and life.