N.B. teachers get collaborative and creative making life-size elephants

A small group of teachers from across New Brunswick have accomplished a mammoth task — building three life sized African elephants out of household items like newspaper and string.

The assignment is part of the Innovation through Creative Practice, Design Thinking and Inquiry course taught this week by University of Calgary Associate Professor Robert Kelly.

“One of the foundational strands, developmental strands, for creativity is learning to collaborate,” explained Kelly. “In order to do this in three and a half days you had to truly collaborate.

Tweet This Click to share quote on Twitter: "One of the foundational strands, developmental strands, for creativity is learning to collaborate," explained Kelly. "In order to do this in three and a half days you had to truly collaborate.

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Providing them with a task that no one thought would be doable, as well as one that no one had any prior experience in, meant without performing as a functioning team the challenge couldn’t be met.

“They had key questions they had to answer before they started so they had to come up with a collaborative plan,” Kelly said.

“The construction part’s easy, it’s the collaborative part that’s the hard part.”

Tweet This Click to share quote on Twitter: "The construction part's easy, it's the collaborative part that's the hard part."

Sarah MacKay was among those expecting the project to be too ambitious for the approximate eight hours of working time.

She attributes her group’s completion of the task to gelling as a team immediately.

“Right away we learned how to be a good collaborator and how to be a good team member,” she explained. “Sharing ideas and creating a code of understanding and how we’re going to work together successfully.”

Although the three groups finished their projects Thursday, when they returned Friday morning a little more work was required.

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“I guess humidity caused the elephants to droop down or sag some,” Dan McCarthy said of his team’s work. “This morning we came in and within 10 minutes we had them back in place and all together again.”

The teachers say the course, in particular the now completed project, helped them to understand what it means to work as a group as their students often do, and to think outside the box in their teaching.

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