PEDU 9210: Developing Creative Learners

This course, designed for the educator who wants to encourage creative learning in their classroom, provides the opportunity to earn graduate-level credit while utilizing personal travel experiences to develop creative learners. When one travels, one is the out-of-place person, which gives you greater understanding as you develop classroom guidelines to create a safe, accepting, compassionate environment where students feel comfortable taking risks—a necessity for building student trust and willingness to make mistakes while trying new things. Sharing with students your educational journey and any personal projects you are working on as you incorporate your travels into the curriculum models creative learning in an authentic way. In this course, you can develop multiple activities or projects based on your travel learnings, so students can choose the ones they want to work on. Ideally, projects will be open-ended enough to allow students the creativity of deciding how they will complete the project or activity. You might even provide students with the required learning objectives and allow them to help you develop ways to use your travel experiences to better teach the objectives. Your shared experiences will also show your students that creativity requires hard work, and is not something most people can just do thanks to some epiphany (though, of course, this does happen for a fortunate few!). Whether you choose to create projects and activities that allow students to be creative while learning or bring students in on the creative development of projects and activities based on your experiences—and theirs—you can implement them in your classroom and submit a slide presentation demonstrating the professional outcomes of your travel experience, along with your travel journal and an explanatory write-up, for evaluation.

About University of the Pacific

University of the Pacific, established in 1851, is California’s oldest private chartered university and is fully accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC).

The credits offered are post-baccalaureate, graded, graduate-level semester units of credit, provided directly through University of the Pacific, Benerd College. They are specifically designed to meet the needs of educators for Salary Advancement and Recertification.  The credits/units are acceptable where local districts approve and applicable to state licensing where authorized. We always encourage you to check with your employer for acceptability of these credits/units. Course participants are responsible to determine acceptability of these credits for their intended use. Each graduate-level semester credit is equivalent to 15 hours of academic involvement.