The Importance of Creative Learning in Professional Training

The Maker Movement has had a decisive influence on the triggering of the new global economic cycle which, with effort, seems to be heading towards a clear phase of expansion.

As has happened in the past in the software sector, open source paradigms have lowered costs and made technologies such as Robotics and Artificial Intelligence accessible.

Fourth Industrial Revolution and Industry 4.0 are the most overused terms to indicate the set of phenomena characterising the manufacturing sector.

If on one hand the new technological scenarios will cause inevitable losses of jobs in lower-qualification sectors, on the other they already offer new job opportunities — provided one acquires the skills required by a rapidly transforming market.

Higher Professional Training, as it is organised and conceived in Italy — but also in most industrialised countries — is not adequate to face the new challenges.

But in this sector too, important lessons can be learned from the Maker Movement.

Prof. Mitchel Resnick, education scientist and Director of the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the M.I.T. Media Lab in Boston, quotes in one of his latest books a part of the 2009 inaugural speech of the new United States President Barack Obama, drawing some important conclusions:

“Those who dare, who act, who make things. These are the X students, the creative thinkers. They have been the engine of economic, technological, political and cultural change throughout history. Today, everyone needs to be bold, to step up, to be builders — not necessarily to bend the course of history, but to be the architects of their own lives. By using the phrase ‘makers of things’, Obama was implicitly referring to a movement that was just beginning to spread in our culture: the Maker Movement.”

For Resnick, the Creative Process is an important and fundamental step in the field of learning. The exploration of the world through the manipulation of objects and experimentation, the building of things, are the ways in which pre-school children learn and develop knowledge of the fundamental laws that govern the environment in which they live.

Once the use of language and written form is acquired, one enters a path based on the transmission and transfer of information, where notions take precedence over experimentation.

Although the entire school system is based on this model — which sees in the frontal lesson the most important moment of the didactic process — it is the conviction of the scientists of the Lifelong Kindergarten Group, and of all of us who come from the maker culture, that this risks limiting the effectiveness of training.

Creative Thinking is on the contrary a tool that should be cultivated and exercised throughout life, not only in nursery school, constituting the main engine of the learning process.

In our direct experience, learn by doing — or better still learn by making — turns out to be an extremely effective model for developing new skills and abilities in all the STEAM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics); knowledge is acquired naturally and often much faster than through the traditional process of verbal transfer from teacher to learner typical of frontal lessons.

Spazio Chirale is a laboratory model, organised according to the Fab Lab standard, designed to facilitate the Creative Process and learning paths developed following what Resnick calls the Creative Spiral and a training standard based on the four-P paradigm: Projects, Passions, Peers and Play.

The annual programme of the Higher Professional Training Courses run in the laboratories that follow the Spazio Chirale model covers all the emerging technologies in the Industry 4.0 landscape and in the Arts of the 21st century, and is articulated around experimental paths that aim at fostering group work, individual creativity and the fun that comes from the direct experimentation of processes, materials and new products.

This type of programme has been active for over two years and has seen the enthusiastic participation of more than a thousand students of all ages and professional backgrounds. The results to date have even exceeded expectations and certainly constitute excellent evidence of the principles enunciated by the famous M.I.T. Lifelong Kindergarten centre.