July 9 – 13, 2012!
The 3RDspace Summer Leadership Institute in Creativity & Innovation is like no other learning space you’ll ever know! Through a partnership between the CoLab, Piasa Bluffs Writing Project and the Saint Louis Art Museum, in the 3RDspace, site leaders will learn to harness the human-centered wisdom in the ResponsiveDesign™ model to explore,
envision & enact innovative approaches tostrengthen and/or transform their site work. With this design-thinking approach, leaders will playfully build and confidently test prototypes for site leadership, programs and cross-site collaboration.
The highly experiential and theoretically grounded institute has two mutually informing goals. One is focused on how we come to think about innovative and creative leadership as a passionate focus of study. The second goal focuses on how innovative and creative leadership can come to create and support learning cultures of creativity and innovation. More importantly, these goals are situated within the nexus where formal and semi-formal learning settings overlap: namely schools and Writing Projects interacting with and learning from museums and library settings. From this overlapping ‘cultures’ perspective, we are conceiving of our institute as being the “third space,” where right-brain insights are unleashed that push left-brain ways of knowing to revise and innovate.
To realize these goals, first, accomplished leaders from diverse National Writing Project sites and museums will bring all they know, and, in particular identify local challenges they wish to overcome. By making their local insights globally accessible within the 3RDspace, all participants will have opportunities to refine their solutions in light of the ’1/2′ ideas that diverse colleagues bring to share.
Second, the processes and practices, what we typically call “technologies,” that we use across the 5 days are transportable back home to be harnessed and used to unleash creative confidence in participant’s local culture.
We will culminate the institute with participants articulating the prototypes of innovative leadership models they will test out back home. To support continuity of these future locally tested prototypes, sites and museums will have have an opportunity to develop an affinity group with an identity that prospectively can seek funding to support mutually-occurring project development between their formal and semi-formal learning settings.