“Process without creativity doesn’t work. Creativity without process doesn’t work. You need them both.” — Leon Pryor ’92 Senior Technical Program Manager for Amazon.com
Our guest speaker and Hawken Alum, Leon Pryor ‘92 reminds us that creativity is not a rare gift only granted to the lucky few. Creativity is a process that students can learn, it exists across multiple disciplines, and it requires specific habits of mind.
The question then is How do we bring the creativity conversation down to earth and support all students in developing this essential disposition?
Enter the Hawken Creative Process Intensive.
This three-week Intensive explores the topic of creativity from a variety of different perspectives. Throughout the experience, students begin to understand that creativity is a process that can be learned — and it extends far beyond the traditional spheres of the visual and performing arts.

Fig. 1 Student Documentation – Hawken Upper School students make their creative process and thinking visible with handmade accordion journals.
Students begin the course with a broad exploration—through hands-on making and design experiences—to consider the possibilities of creativity and to learn more about perspective taking, slow looking, systems thinking, collaboration, ambiguity, and discovery. Throughout the course, students apply time-tested processes and are given opportunities to engage in and refine their own individual creative processes through a variety of real-life situations and team based activities that involve problem solving, brainstorming, product creation, and meaningful reflection (see Fig. 1).
The rich and diverse curriculum helps students investigate, name, and understand their own creative process while dispelling the myths of talent and predestination.
During the three weeks, students zoomed out and looked closely at people, objects, and systems while exploring the following questions: What is creativity? What steps do people take when building ideas? Where do ideas start? Who or what contributes to the creative process?

Fig. 2 Moments from our Creative Process Guest Speaker Session
Over the course of the Intensive, they connected with 18 professionals from diverse backgrounds including David Shimotakahara from GroundWorks DanceTheater (see Fig. 2 top left), La Tonya Autry, Gund Curatorial Fellow MOCA Cleveland (see Fig. 2 top right), Karen Katz Children’s Museum Designer (see Fig. 2 bottom left), and Chef Doug Katz and Gallery Educator Jeremiah Myers at the Cleveland Museum of Art (see Fig. 2 bottom right). Conversations with community partners allowed students to explore multiple viewpoints and reinforced the idea that creativity is about finding and solving puzzles and problems in the world.
As students engaged with guest speakers, multiple course readings, selected videos, and documentaries, a common theme emerged: creative people engage in problem finding and solving. A group of dancers might puzzle over how to communicate an idea about relationships, a design firm tries to understand how to make the workplace environment more effective, a museum designer puzzles over how to provide age-appropriate risk taking for young people while maintaining a safe place for children to engage in play.
This inquiry led students to develop their own creative project — a team based inquiry connected to one of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
During collaborative project time, students shared responsibility for developing ideas, prototyping solutions, critiquing, responding to, and revising their own and others’ work. Similar to a concept called ‘Brian Trust’ used by Pixar, students took responsibility for critiquing class projects, giving and receiving feedback, and engaging with honesty and candor. Collaboration, taking risks, responding to feedback and sharing ideas were all a part of the process that resulted in the student projects.

Fig. 3 The Creative Process Gallery of Learning 2019- Hawken Upper School students make their creative process and thinking visible with artifacts, sticky notes, videos, and handmade accordion journals.
At the end of the three week course, students built a gallery of learning and shared a celebration of process and products with the Hawken community (see Fig. 3). Visitors interacted with student project groups that included topics such as gender equity in sports, the negative effects on our environment from the fashion industry, a picture book designed to teach young children about climate change, and encouraging open and honest discussions about issues and challenges in the world. All student projects were connected to and reinforced one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Audience members looked closely at multiple artifacts and design projects that were developed over the three week intensive course.
As we learned from Leon Pryor, process and creativity cannot be separated, we agree and we would include one other vital component: joy.
Over the three weeks of the intensive we moved through stages of excitement, frustration, curiosity, and confusion. During our final gallery, we also celebrated the joy that comes from engaging in the process and reflecting on all that we had created.
Can educators bring the creativity conversation down to earth and support all students in developing this essential disposition? Absolutely! And we’re doing just that in the Hawken Creative Process Intensive.