Facilitating creative activities: A new type of undergraduate liberal arts course

In a modern society in which people need to acquire diverse bodies of knowledge actively and use them in innovative ways, cultivating creative people is regarded as one of the most important tasks of education. However, liberal arts education in Japan has rarely provided students with opportunities to experience authentic creative activity. The present study reports the development of an undergraduate course through which the students were able to collaborate with an artist in order to experience authentic artistic creative processes. Participants, 11 undergraduates, were interviewed about 1 1/2 years after the end of the course, in order to evaluate the educational effects of the course. The results of an analysis of the interviews suggested that the students had changed their perception of artistic creation, and that their motivation for creative activity had increased. Moreover, some of the students had even made use of the course experience when they chose their career path or research topic. The present findings suggest that experiencing authentic creative activities is meaningful not only for students in professional art training courses, but also for liberal arts undergraduates who are not planning to become artists.