Dottie Akers-Pecht

EDIS 5401
Portfolio Preface: Statement on Creativity
Students should be given multiple opportunities to express their creativity throughout
instructional units. Creativity, alongside choice, promotes autonomy and individuality in the
classroom. As a result, students are more likely to gain an affective attachment to the topics and
concepts at hand within a curriculums unit. Additionally, students can thrive within a positive
learning climate that accepts their unique thoughts, ideas, and contributions to class discussions.
Incorporating creative options into assessments similarly allows students to express their
knowledge in the specific ways that reflect their individual learning profiles and understanding
of concepts. As such, students should have the choice to represent their knowledge using
mediums belonging to the arts, including through acting, illustrations, digital art, and creative
writing.
In the English and language arts curriculum, such modes of representation can be
incorporated into the teaching of texts in reading instruction. Through acting, students can adopt
the roles of characters and explore multiple ways to represent a single scene from literature.
Visual art, both traditional and digital, can allow students to interpret the themes, events, and
concepts presented in a text using a creative outlet while expanding upon a personal strength or
interest in art. Through writing instruction, creative writing allows students to form personal
connections to the text and to expand upon their own experiences with the concepts of a unit or
the themes of a work of literature. Such options allow students to choose how to reveal their own
understandings of literature and of language arts terms, providing them with unique experiences
through which they can make personal meaning out of their acquired knowledge.

In my portfolio, I have provided students with opportunities for creative thinking from
early on in the short text unit. In the second lesson of the introductory week, students work
together to create a zoom story in which they take inspiration from a series of photographs to
create a narrative that includes all of the provided pictures. Students must use their imaginations
to create relationships between photos of previously unrelated things, and they must collaborate
to harness their individual ideas into a single short tale. Additionally, in the following class
students must create word webs that signify their unique identities. In doing so, students can
become as creative as they wish by including hobbies, personality traits, and friends, or even by
expanding upon things that they imagine they will become in the future.
During the short text unit, students explore a variety of genres, including short story,
autobiographical nonfiction, essays, videos, songs, and poems in order to construct their own
understandings of the concepts of identity and identity crisis. Students will learn to annotate
short poems in order to apply their own interpretations of identity crisis to texts. They will also
work together to create their own found poems out of works of music in order to further shape
their understandings of the units concepts and present these understandings in a creative format.
In the final summative assessment, students will have to use their imaginations to recreate a
scene from their lives in the form of a personal narrative that shows the changes they underwent
in response to an identity crisis. The students will have to vividly present this event to their
readers using dialogue, actions, and character traits. Doing so will require their creativity in
representing these personal events in a precise and detailed way that can be visualized by their
peers.