Digital Creativity Is Not Optional
Digital creativity is a fundamental literacy that deserves to be singularly reckoned with. Rather than being collapsed into the broader and ever-expanding umbrella of digital literacy or dismissed as a broad career competency that one slowly develops as they progress through their degree program, digital creativity now requires its own theoretical and practical space. Digital creativity can no longer be placed on the learning outcomes back burner, as something that may naturally “be experienced,” based on students’ use of various digital tools as they compose artifacts over the semester.
To teach writing in an increasingly automated and AI-mediated world and to justify the general education requirements upon which many of us base our livelihoods, we need to cultivate digital creativity in our students in ways that are explicit to all stakeholders: institutional leaders, parents, students, and the larger communities we inhabit. But if we are to make this leap, we must acknowledge that digital creativity is more than a career competency or an amorphous criterion we struggle to assess equitably and transparently. Digital creativity encompasses the skills and confidence required to create, communicate, remediate, and interrogate with digital tools and platforms. But it is also a part of something greater. What happens, then, when we think of this type of creative activity as a fundamental human right*?
Something I think about often is how we might adopt a more intentional, future-focused orientation as we explore the challenges and opportunities for cultivating digital creativity at both the individual and institutional levels. For instructors, digital creativity is what will continue to transform not only the multimodal genres and practices themselves but also how we teach them. To genuinely empower students’ creativity, students require more than access to a suite of tools, no matter how seemingly accessible or popular they may be. They deserve educators who walk the walk: teachers who visibly exhibit creative confidence and whose pedagogy is legibly informed by their own creative practices and professional use of particular digital tools and genres. But this faculty development does not happen overnight: instructors in my disciplinary context (especially in their earliest years) are often directed to teach multimodal composition units or entire courses with little training. And more challenges arise as the disconnect grows between the leaders making enterprise-level decisions and the faculty expected to use the tools.
This blog post doesn’t offer solutions. This entire blog could be devoted to teasing out possible pathways for taking digital creativity more seriously. But the longer I teach— and the more I bring in tools like Adobe Express, Audition, and Canva into the classroom— I wonder how we move past teaching the nuances of a particular tool and into teaching digital creativity as a life skill that requires just as much problem solving, adaptability, and self-monitoring as it does innovation. After all, in a perfect world, digital creativity is tool-agnostic. But in practice, we must make intentional choices about which tools to use and why. That means curating a suite of platforms with a clear pedagogical rationale—and being transparent about those choices with students.
As I continue thinking through these questions, I’d love to hear from you. What does digital creativity look like in your classroom or workplace? How do you navigate the tension between tool-specific instruction and fostering creative confidence?
*For more, see Kraehe, Amelia M. 2017. “‘For All Without Distinction’: Creative Activity as a Human Right.” Art Education 70 (4): 4–7. doi:10.1080/00043125.2017.1317545.
As always, thanks for reading. If you have questions about any of my content or have ideas for collaboration, please contact me at gabrielle@gabriellestecher.com.
