Creative Education

To define is to limit. – Oscar Wilde

You are creatively inclined, click on the Srishti Manipal website and find yourself reading this text. Learning at school is ending, and you need to figure out what to do next.  “What do I want to do? Where’s the world heading? How do I prepare for the future and learn to  keep up with it?”      

Dear Learner, these questions are real and you have experienced massive change already. When the pandemic struck and everyday life was suspended, within a matter of days, you had to learn an entirely new way of learning. Classes moved online; your room became your classroom, studio, and lab, and working from home became the norm. For your parents, too, it was a time of uncertainty with the world of work within many industrial landscapes changing and professional profiles mutating. You have experienced this and know what learning the ‘new normal’ means.

Every aspect of life around you – past, present and future – is in persistent production and can be deconstructed, understood and learnt. The Creative Education program, while rooted in ideas of curriculum, pedagogy and teaching, takes learning outside the classroom and locates it in the emerging future. Learning is a core transferable skill that contributes to many aspects of our daily lives. The future is shaped by how teachers, designers, managers, and administrators learn and how institutions, organisations, corporations, and governments learn. At the Creative Education program, we employ strategies, systems and methods to design learning experiences that play a critical role in shaping how we engage with this new world and facilitate the engagement of others.

You may be getting impatient at this point. “But I’m interested in image making/ moving image/ graphic design/ product design/ accessory design/ furniture design. What does lifelong learning have to do with me, or my creative expression?”

Creative Education is built on a symbiotic relationship with all other disciplines at SMI. Learning is influenced by how a space is designed; it includes the furniture used in the space, the size of the space, where it is located and who it is for. Similarly, visual communication materials such as charts, textbooks, workbooks, and game boards facilitate learning. 21st century businesses require capacity building and instructional design learning designers, audio-visual designers, platform designers. As such, all disciplines at SMI contribute to Creative Education and vice versa. Learning is all pervasive, and we invite you to explore with us your forms of creative expression and collaborate with other programmes to grow in the many directions that you desire. Film, Public Art, Graphic Novels, Product Design – all this and more will connect your practice to the projects, publications and public events we undertake. With a Creative Education major, you will be actively engaged in the continuous reinvention of the world around you. The whirlwinds of change demand adaptability,  which is rooted in the skill of learning.