Creativity as the heart of modern education at Washington University in St. Louis

For this week’s episode, we sat down with Robert Mark Morgan, award-winning educator, designer, and creative advocate at Washington University in St. Louis, to explore why creativity belongs at the heart of modern education. From rethinking classroom spaces to breaking down the false divide between intelligence and creativity, Robert shares how he challenges traditional academic silos, helps students embrace failure, and nurtures creative intelligence as an essential skill for the future.

You can listen to the full interview in our podcast:

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Transcript

Madeline Arkins:

Welcome everyone to today’s Fireside Chat, Creativity as the Heart of Modern Education at Washington University.

My name is Madeline Arkins. I am a Project Officer at UIIN and have the pleasure of speaking to Robert Mark Morgan today on this very topic. For those who were able to join us at our conference earlier in June, they would have seen Rob and his presentation, which is also the topic of today’s chat, for which he won the award for best presentation in the Future of Universities’ category. I myself didn’t get to hear him speak, so that makes me all the more excited to dive into this topic today on the dichotomy, or the false dichotomy even, of intelligence and creativity.

For the uninitiated, Rob is a multidisciplinary Artist, Designer, Speaker and Professor at Washington University, where he has taught for over 14 years. He is also the author of The Art of Scenic Design, A Practical Guide to the Creative Process. He has designed across multiple disciplines, such as theater, film, museums, theme parks and stained glass, so I am told. And Rob’s Creativity Call has been presented globally, urging educators and students to elevate and celebrate creative intelligence.

Rob, thank you for joining me today.

Robert Mark Morgan:

It is a pleasure, and I am honoured to be joining you. This last conference was my first interaction with UIIN at all. I must say that that award over my shoulder, made me flagged by TSA on the way home.

Madeline Arkins:

No way.

Robert Mark Morgan:

They weren’t quite sure what it was. It was quite heavy and, yes, I am not sure. Maybe they thought it was something else.

Madeline Arkins:

Yeah. Also, I mean, the acronym UIIN also does garner a lot of questions, like U-I-I-N, win…, how to pronounce it. So, I am sure that also didn’t win you any favours.

To get us stuck in Rob, from even your short bio, it is very evident that your career spans quite a number of different creative sectors. How did that evolve, and could you tell us where the inspiration came to the shift of helping institutions rethink how to embed this kind of creativity in what they do?

Robert Mark Morgan:

Yes, it was all sort of serendipitous. As many innovations are, there is serendipitous sort of connections and catalysts for thinking about things in new ways. I have always been involved in theatre, although I started out as a carpenter. I went to undergraduate school for theatre, much to my mother’s dismay.

I went to undergraduate school, I got a drama degree, and I began teaching almost by accident when I was working at a theatre in Denver. From there, I have sort of fallen in love, for someone whose favourite movie is “Dead Poets Society”, I fell in love with teaching. I fell in love with trying to inspire students.

As I like to say, my philosophy for teaching is three words: make hope visible.

And I feel like that sort of says that I can’t take you with me, I can’t throw you on my back and take you to your destination, but I can try to get you there.

To be clear, I guess another bit of housekeeping, I was at the University of Washington in Seattle and then I switched the two words, said goodbye to the water, and moved to the Midwest. I am out now at Washington University in St. Louis. It can be confusing even for me, but I have been at what we call Wash U for short for about 15 years now.

And some time ago I happened to watch and was inspired by, you just never know where you might find inspiration, a documentary of all things by the late Sydney Pollock on Frank Gehry, one of my favourite architects. And in watching that I was like, “Wow, Frank Gehry has the same anxieties, fears, uncertainties, failures as anyone else. We just know him by this, you know, spectacular international reputation as an architect. And so, for me, that was sort of a catalyst to think about how and what creativity is.

That just happened to coincide around a time where we had this very forward-thinking provost here at Wash U named Holden Thorp, who has since gone on to be, and he is currently, the editor-in-chief of the Science Family of Journals. And Holden recognised as a provost here that we had a lot of silos, as many institutions do, and he wanted faculty to talk across silos and so he, more or less, funded proposals for what they were affectionately called BYOIs, or Bring Your Own Ideas.

I wrote a proposal simply wanting to know how my colleagues in these different divisions were creative. We have eight total divisions, we have a new one actually in public health coming up, so I wanted to know how they did that. My colleagues were creative in different areas: law, business, medicine, you name it. I just wanted to know how they leveraged creativity, which led to a very intimidating meeting around a very long, intimidating boardroom table. And it was fascinating, but I think one of the things that we came away thinking is we need to teach this, because we touched on all those things that the documentary touches on and more, and we thought our students need to know that, for example, failures are a part of any process, that if you can just hurry up and fail, then you will get to where you need to go.

And so those BYOIs were sort of what was later called the low-hanging fruit for a series of courses. There is a number of courses, I believe there is about a dozen now, that are called Beyond Boundaries courses, and they are first-year only courses that cut across all divisions and are taught by two or more faculties across two or more divisions.

One I have taught now for 10 years is called Designing Creativity, and I teach it with my good friend and colleague Bruce Lindsey from architecture, and it is all about the creative process. We have guests who come in and talk about how they are creative in medicine and law and comedians, and you name it. We have this wonderful comedian who talks about failure, about bombing on stage and how he gets past that.

Jackie Joyner-Kersee, an amazing Olympic gold medallist, we were audacious enough to ask her to talk about failure. And so that class really was one of the poster children, you might say, for a program that I then was tapped to run for about five years called the Beyond Boundaries Program.

It is still going strong, and these classes are, I think in the sort of truest sense, truly interdisciplinary. In fact, in many cases, I have had students say that they are the only classes that they take where they are sitting next to artists and business majors, and you name it, engineering students and that type of thing.

So, for me, that is kind of the evolution of what this work has been. Having the wonderful opportunity to teach a class on creativity, and then trying to define what does that mean, and the BYOIs is kind of what gave rise to it. So, that has been really my journey, my fascination you might say, with the creative process of other people, no matter what their area is.

The class has come to be not only popular, but has given students this, I think, interesting way to look at their own creative intelligences as a secret sauce to whatever they might do, later in life, and while they are still students.

Madeline Arkins:

I particularly loved when I heard about this designing creativity class that you give students a certificate of failure. Is this at the beginning of the class or at a later stage?

Robert Mark Morgan:

That is a great question. We do about five different sections. There is a section on design, on collaboration, on power, where you leverage your creative ideas and try to sell them to other students.

And one section is on failure, play and failure. In fact, we find there is a lot of play and failure and failure and play, and my failure lecture, I dare say, has been kind of famous over the years because I have a poll everywhere on the screen when students walk in that says, If Rob fails at the failure lecture, does that mean he succeeded?”, and the answers are yes, no, or others.

Either way, it is Bruce’s fault, my colleague’s fault. But yes, as they enter, I actually hand them a very silly little piece of paper that says, “A failure certificate”, that students have told me they paste that or tape that to their desk, and, when they are working and feeling overwhelmed, if they bombed a quiz, they look at that and it more or less reaffirms this idea that, “Hey, you are going to stumble, you are going to fall. You just have to get back up and keep going.” And so yes, they each get a failure certificate.

I talk about my own personal failures as part of the lecture, personal and professional failures. It is a great exercise, I actually look forward, interestingly enough, to doing the failure lecture every year.

Madeline Arkins:

It sounded like such a cool and personal way to bring everyone in on the topic.  We have got some questions already, but I first want to kind of get to the crux of this clarion, what you call the clarion call on creativity, a clarion call that challenges traditional educational norms.

What does that mean to you? Why do you feel that this is a clarion call and is so important for right now?

Robert Mark Morgan:

Credit where credit’s due, this is something Sir Ken Robinson, while he was alive and was really one of the more famous sort of testimonials on this topic. But I believe we are at an inflection point in history where AI is really quite all over, and we keep sort of debating how we use it as educators, how we might leverage it and how our students are using it. Is it cheating, is it not? Quite honestly, I am more interested in what AI cannot do.

In my presentation I talk quite a bit about a gentleman named Kai-Fu Lee, and for 30 years he has been studying AI, long before it was a catchphrase.

There are four things Kai-Fu Lee describes as things AI cannot replace: Dexterity, compassion, creativity and collaboration, and I would add to that empathy.

And so, there are things that I believe I would like to elevate and celebrate, as I like to say, in our students, which are their creative intelligences, things that may have been disregarded, maybe things that they thought was a dalliance, something that they did in high school that really isn’t part of their mission right now as a student.

As we all know, students come to college with lots of boxes to check and with a sort of tunnel vision. But I think it is important that students focus on the field and not the path. I often try to sort of phrase it in that sense because when you are focused more on the field, you are open to serendipitous connections, just like I said with our provost Holden Thorpe, and having these things happen to you and realising only in hindsight, “Wow, if I hadn’t met that person, then that wouldn’t have happened”.

So, for me, it is all the more important to really focus now on what AI cannot do and leverage that. One thing John Cleese actually is quite famous is for talking about creativity. And he talks about how any AI can generate patterns and millions and millions of different pairings, but it is only an intuition on the part of a human that can, as he says, “find things that taste interesting, that seem to sort of be interesting across two different things.” And that is where innovation occurs.

I would also like to tout the Beyond Boundaries program. I had a student who is now graduated named Logan, whose interests coming into Wash U were in designing prosthetic limbs for children. So, if you think about that, we often would say, ”We know that you have been told and asked what you want to do when you grow up. We want to know what problems you want to solve.” And Logan’s problem that he wanted to solve was helping kids who were amputees by designing prosthetic limbs.

So, if you think of that, at least at my university, that is child psychology, art and mechanical engineering, which are three different divisions. Those are the silos I was talking about. And so, if you think of it, we don’t make it very easy for someone like Logan to cut across those, and we aren’t on that journey, that sort of lateral thinking, divergent thinking journey for Logan to sort of say, “Hey, you might connect art and engineering here to make this prosthetic limb in that case.” And so, they have gone on to do amazing things, I am very proud of them. I think, at least as higher education, we are structured in silos and deep analytical specialisations, which is good, but we also need to focus on the horizontal part of the T.

You can tell I am Italian because I am talking with my hands a lot.

Madeline Arkins:

I love that this is an audio medium,

Robert Mark Morgan:

It is an audio medium, but exactly, I was going back and forth horizontally.

Anyway, it is just that I feel like we spend the rest of our lives specialising that we need to offer students this opportunity to just be students and just find their interests and taste all the ice cream, as I like to say, and find out what combinations are best. You know, my wife might think chocolate and peanut butter is a good combination, but I think that is disgusting. It is the kind of thing that I think everybody has their combination of interests and we are more than often than not generalists, I think, more than specialists in life.

Madeline Arkins:

I mean, so much of the siloing, if that is a word, of modern education has to do, and you have talked about this, with them being rooted in the industrial age, that the learning pathway is almost like a conveyor belt for students.

What do you think are the most damaging counterproductive assumptions that these current models make about students and learning today?

Robert Mark Morgan:

That is an excellent question. As I kind of grow as an educator, I try to find inspiration where I might least find it. I will come back to your question, but I have to tell you that, two years ago, my dad was diagnosed with prostate cancer, an aggressive form of it, to the point that he had a tumour that was growing on his spine, and he couldn’t walk.

He happens to be in Arizona, and I went there, and he was being treated at the Mayo Clinic. For those that don’t know, the Mayo Clinic, at least they saved his life, quite honestly, but they are also a non-traditional hospital. It is as if you sort of tore down a hospital and rebuilt it around a single patient

And so, any given day, I would be sitting in his room with my mom and specialists would come in, I mean occupational therapists, physical therapists, oncology palliative care, you name it, social workers, even a pastor would come. And so, these folks would come in and they were treating him, and they were talking to each other outside of his treatment about the best treatment for him.

At one point, a couple of social workers came in and I said, “Oh, he is sleeping right now. Could you come back later? And they were like, ”No, no, no, we are here for you.” And I was like, “What?” They said, “Well, his success is dependent on your success, is it not?” I was like, “Uh, yes.” So, I use that analogy because at that moment I thought, ‘What if higher education was this way?”

So, the sort of industrial age kind model of education separates students by what Sir Ken Robinson calls “date of manufacturer”. So, we put five-year-olds together in a class and ten-year-olds together in another class. Any of the listeners who have kids and who have crossed that threshold of a certain age, know that five-year old child A is different than five-year old child B, and that one might be their favourite. I am not going to get into that, but I feel like when we separate students like that and kind of cluster them, we also layer on these expectations and metrics that quite honestly aren’t really educating the whole student, in my opinion.

There are studies to prove that. There is a great study by a man named George Land that I bring up in my talk about a divergent thinking study he designed for NASA. And that divergent thinking study, thankfully, after administering it to NASA scientists revealed that 2% were what they call creative genius level. It was a simple enough divergent thinking test that he administered it to four- and five-year-olds, and 98% of them were creative geniuses.

And so, another theme of the creativity class is going back to our childhood, asking ourselves, “What was it about as kids that we truly enjoyed?” To quote Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, a Hungarian psychologist, “When were we in flow? When did we lose track of time and when did we forget to eat?” What were we doing when we were really just immersed in an activity?¨ and what he calls the flow channel

I don’t mean to get too into the weeds, but the industrial age model of education, while efficient, I think now that we have AI to help us, what if AI was the gatekeeper, you might say, that asked the student a series of questions and then we kind of tailored an education for students. If you think of it, students these days live in an on-demand world. They can listen to whatever podcast they want, including this one, hopefully. They can listen and watch anything they want, whenever they want. And this is a far cry from what I have experienced as a kid myself, as a young person.

And so, I feel like education needs to innovate to the point that we can really welcome the entire humanity of a student and see them as a whole, including creative and kinetic intelligences, and all these different types. We tend to focus more on the STEM fields, which are invaluable and important, but at the same time, I think there is a lot that we layer on top of a student to say, “Yes, I know you played piano in high school, but that really isn’t relevant here.” So, whether we explicitly say that or not, that is the message they’ are getting.

Madeline Arkins:

Yes, I found that divergent thinking study that you were talking about. I found that very emotional to hear that there is so much of this creative potential when you are younger and then it kind of fades away when you leave that phase of life.

Similarly, when you mentioned in this talk that the USA at least, and I am certain that this follows a similar pattern in other countries, spends twice as much on incarceration than education.

When you think of all that creative potential and opportunity for breaking these silos, that statistic is daunting.

Robert Mark Morgan:

Yes, and students are more medicated than they have ever been as well. One of my favourite sort of inspirational go-tos is Will.i.am of all people. I mean, he has some really profound things he has said. One of my favourite photographers is a guy named Norman Seeff, and he did some interviews of Will.i.am, in which he says, “If I had grown up in a different time, I would have been medicated” for what he calls a “cup”. He said, “I am a cup, and I am constantly taking in creative input and, unless I do something with it, I break myself, I break the cup.”

I think it is important for us to recognise that, sometimes, students are more audio listeners and learners. One of the things I offer in my creativity class is they can read something that I post, but they can also listen to me, read it in their ear holes if I record it as a podcast.

Madeline Arkins:

We are going to use the scientific term: ear holes.

Robert Mark Morgan:

Ear holes? Yes, yes. And so, in a way, I want to embrace that what is happening. If you don’t mind me taking another tangent, there’s a famous choreographer named Gillian Lynne, who when she was a child, was quite disruptive in school. Her mother was concerned and took her to a psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist sat down with the two of them and then asked if her mom could leave the room. They watched her from the window of the door and he said, “Mrs. Lynne, I have something to tell you. Your daughter is a dancer.” And from then on, her mother took her to gymnastics classes, dance classes, and she found her element.

Sir Ken Robinson describes or defines finding your element as “a combination of natural aptitude and personal passion.” And so, Gillian Lynne found her element. She would have me been medicated if it was 20 years later, but at the time, she became a world-famous choreographer for musicals. We were talking about musicals before we came on air. We are talking about a world-famous choreographer because, thankfully, she had a doctor that said, “Here is the deal. Your daughter is a dancer, and that isn’t something we should treat.”

Madeline Arkins:

No, and I think this is also the whole systems element of it that plays a role.

Robert Mark Morgan:

Absolutely.

Madeline Arkins:

I am conscious of time, and I want to answer or get to this one question that Keith has asked.

He says, “Bombing on stage, learning from failure. So, how do you scaffold learning for failure so that creativity sits at the heart of the search for solutions or new ways of thinking?”

Robert Mark Morgan:

That is a great question. Teaching failure can be quite interesting . Every section, including the failure play one, has a group project, and this is a class of 81 first-year students, and we have four undergraduate TAs, it is a massive class. And so, these students are clustered in groups of anywhere from three to eight. I believe it is a group of five, we put them in for the failure play section, and we have them videotape, I know that is a dated term now, we have them record Rube Goldberg machines.

So, they are tasked with a series of seven steps. The first step is the initial push of an object, and the seventh step has to water a plant or turn off a light or whatever it might be that they choose. And then, in that project, they get used to failure. We have had students say, “Yeah, we did run this thing 40 times before it actually did what it was supposed to do.” And so, we try to acclimate them in that particular section to getting used to failure. And in something like that, it is very iterative and has to be quick. They are like, “Okay, yeah. This time we turn the book 90 degrees than it was before and maybe that will work, you know, and the ping pong ball will bounce where it is supposed to.”

And I mean, getting them used to failure, I think that project kind of lends itself to exactly that. And then, hopefully, they take that into their other studies, into their rest of their three and a half years of college and beyond, to sort of say, “Okay, that didn’t work. No big deal. Let’s move on.”

Madeline Arkins:

Something about that also sounds very similar to turning away from the instant gratification that we have become so used to, building in delayed gratification in how we fail and continue to fail.

Robert Mark Morgan:

Yes, indeed, it is a remarkable class. In the lecture, I talk about my experience. I mean, we all have lots of professional failures that we are willing to share. I had a terrible review for a design I did for a theatre piece some years ago that I share with students, but I also share a personal one.

I won’t go into it now, but after I do it, I share with them a picture of kintsugi pottery, which is where you fill in the cracks with gold.

Look, we all have cracks, and I think we can learn from failure, if it is an effective one, and we fill in the crack that was that failure with gold. We make ourselves stronger, better and more resilient as we move forward.

Madeline Arkins:

“There is a crack in everything, that is how the light gets in”, for all the Leonard Cohen fans out there. That is what that reminds me of.

Robert Mark Morgan:

One of my favourite Leonard Cohen quotes goes, “If I knew where the good songs came from, I would go there more often.”

Madeline Arkins:

I like it. Rob, we have a few more minutes left. I see one more question from our lovely colleague, Déspina.

Robert Mark Morgan:

Hello, Déspina!

Madeline Arkins:

She says, “Thank you so much for this, Robert. So inspiring, leaning into your insights. I am curious to everything that STEM or that educators can take away and apply in their classroom, whether it is STEM or arts, although this split is artificial, as you mentioned.

So, the question is, if the classroom is a theatrical stage background and you, as the educator, are the designer, what would you place there to get the attention of the students or the audience in this example, to keep them engaged in the learning journey?

Robert Mark Morgan:

Wow, that is a great question. I once had a student group, and I promise to get your question, Déspina, I once had a student group propose to me and show me their typical circadian rhythms. They pointed at this low part of the circadian rhythm, and there was an arrow that said, “Your class”, as it is taught at one o’clock in the afternoon. And so, I find that at one o’clock in the afternoon, post lunch, students get a little sleepy and I have to engage them.

Going back to the failure lecture, I do a great little exercise called “The Wheel of Misfortune”. There is a famous game show called “The Wheel of Fortune”, and I share with them failures by famous people, and they have to guess who the famous person was.

I guess the underlying point is that we know Oprah, because she is freaking Oprah, but we don’t know that Oprah was told that she couldn’t be on television, that she was terrible at it, but now she’s Oprah. In a sense, I feel like that is how I try to teach, in a way that is engaging and that, much like design, is sort of bouncing between imagination and craft. I feel like during a lecture, it can’t be too long of a lecture, and then I have to do the craft part with them. And it is both practice and study, practice and study. It is almost like a pendulum swinging back and forth.

The other thing I wish I could do, if I could wave a magic wand, is offer an opportunity for every student when they come to college, no matter where they are going to college, to just be a student, just in the purest sense of the word, that they are not pre-identifying majors and minors, and they are not assigned to an undergraduate division in a certain area.

Wouldn’t it be great? I mean, that is the real, sort of crucible space that you need to taste all the ice cream and offer an opportunity for a student to just explore for exploration’s sake.

Déspina did a great presentation, by the way, at the conference. So, shout out to her.

Madeline Arkins:

Shout out to Déspina and STEM education.

Robert Mark Morgan:

I hope I answered Déspina’s question, and if I didn’t, now I am scared.

Madeline Arkins:

She is wrathful, as we all know.

Robert Mark Morgan:

Yes, of course.

Madeline Arkins:

Rob, I wonder if I could ask you one last question.

Robert Mark Morgan:

Of course. I am at your disposal.

Madeline Arkins:

Okay, fabulous. If there are any educators listening, what is one small step they could take tomorrow to make their classroom a more creative space? I feel like maybe you have touched on this already.

Robert Mark Morgan:

Yes, I mean, this is a great question. There is a guy named Tim Brown, who is a co-founder of IDEO here in the States. And he does this great lecture and talks about how when we were kids, when we were in kindergarten, we had all these wonderful creative materials, we had construction paper and crayons, and pipe cleaners and popsicle sticks, and those are gradually taken away from us as we get older, including in higher education. A post-it note is maybe the most creative thing we have in the room.

And so, IDEO employs this idea of prototyping carts; they are just a little rolling cart that has all those great things in it that you had when you were in kindergarten. Sometimes, you need to think with your hands, as many designers, as myself as a carpenter as well, kind of piecing things together to make them look like they are supposed to be what they are on stage, from 20 feet away. And having a prototyping cart and just rearranging what is available to play around with objects and kind of prototype an idea.

One of the things I ask students is how long it took for Google Glasses to be prototyped. And some people say weeks, days… It actually took 45 minutes to prototype Google Glasses. And so, we shouldn’t be removing these tools away from people.

I also would add to sort of my industry friends as well, and also academic friends, that even the space itself, myself as a designer, even the space itself, I mentioned the long intimidating table when we pitched BYOI, there is this long HUD circuit proxy length table, right? And it is intimidating, and it also presupposes that the person sitting at the end of the table has all the ideas and is the arbiter of good and bad ideas. If you think of it, just changing the table, is a game changer for a classroom. If you seat your students in a circle, as opposed to this hierarchical way, sort of speaking directly to them from a podium, it changes the dynamic.

So those are a couple of ideas of how you might just change your classroom to go back to when you were a kid. We could spend the rest of the day, but one of the things I do, and I didn’t do this in the presentation, was to have participants take an adult resignation, and that sets the table for them to think just crazy ideas, which sometimes can be innovative ones.

If you think about it, every innovative idea began as, potentially, a nutty and crazy one.

Madeline Arkins:

Rob, I have taken more of your time than I intended, but it has been a joy to have a little chat with you.

Robert Mark Morgan:

It has been a pleasure and an honour, quite honestly. Thank you.

Madeline Arkins:

I am glad, we love to hear it. For those tuning in, I believe my colleague Pablo will be putting a Menti link in the chat. Let us know what you thought, what you would like to hear more of.

And Rob, where can people find you, if they want to get in touch with you?

Robert Mark Morgan:

The best way, and I guess I have taken this to the point that I thought, “Well, I should make a website”. So, I have designed a website called Creativity Call. You can reach me in any number of ways, and I look forward to chatting more.

I love speaking either virtually or in person, not just to students, but to colleagues, professors…. I think it is an important clarion call to come full circle, that we really think about how we elevate and celebrate creative intelligences in our students.

Madeline Arkins:

Absolutely. And as someone who has just done some sleuthing on the website, I really encourage people to go check out Rob’s lectures and workshops because they are a feast for everything. They’re so enriching.

Robert Mark Morgan:

Thank you.

Madeline Arkins:

Thanks for your time, Rob. And thank you everyone else.

Robert Mark Morgan:

Thank you. It has been a pleasure.

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