Within the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, students learn how to use critical and creative thinking skills that allow them to stretch their thinking abilities in a multitude of new ways. For myself, throughout the various courses within the School of IAS, I developed these skills from the several challenges that were faced through projects and collaborations. Specifically, the works of “Writing Assignment 2: Film Critic Diners” and “350 Eastside: Final Archive” both helped me to grow as a critical and creative thinker. I was faced with challenges that I learned to work through by developing a new understanding of academic writing and research.  

​

At the beginning of my studies within the School of IAS, I was well versed in writing academic, research-based, and scholarly essays that were fairly straight forward. This being said, I was not as familiar with creative writing and academic essays that would engage aspects of analysis other than the simple five or so paragraph essay. This was the case until I took Interdisciplinary Inquiry, where I learned the concept of creative writing and was able to utilize  tools to stretch my thinking, which further offered a multitude of new perspectives. The purpose of “Writing Assignment 2: Film Critic Diners”, from BIS 300: Interdisciplinary Inquiry, was to find a way to use the scholarly ideas of writers such as Paulo Freire, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Andrew Lam. However, instead of writing an essay, students were meant to write a creative dialogue between themselves and the scholars themselves by using our own thoughts to decipher what we thought these scholars would say in a present day setting. Since I had no previous experience of creative writing, I was pretty stuck on how to even begin this assignment. But, with the help of insightful ideas from my professor, gaining some perspectives from other classmates and works of creative writing, I was able to expand my writing skills in order to complete the assignment. After the assignment was completed, I felt much more comfortable writing in new styles and was able to retain the idea from the scholarly writers because they coincided with my own thoughts in a creative manner. Through the voice of a wide array of perspectives, I was able to analyze the course content in a diverse way. This assignment was truly the beginning of the development of my creative and critical thinking skills in IAS.

​

About a year or so later, I had the privilege to take a Gender, Women, and Sexuality course, BISGWS 302: Histories and Movements of Gender and Sexuality, that would allow me to collaboratively create an archive of documents and artifacts that would speak to the missions of a specific nonprofit organization called 350 Eastside. Previous to this course, I had never collaborated with an outside organization in order to create a collective of works for different assignments throughout the quarter. Since this course was centered around an understanding of feminist approaches and experiences of gender and sexuality, I was unsure how to connect these studies an approaches to an organization that mainly focused on climate justice. So, I began to research the various ways that climate change affects people of different identities in order to better understand how to find common ground. Skills learned through critical thinking were an important aspect to combating these challenges. I was able to use new perspectives in order to analyze and interpret the mission of the 350 Eastside organization through the specific feminist lens.

​

These skills of creative and critical thinking can be hard to apply within various projects and collaborations. However, once learned, these skills have helped me to gain new perspectives, understandings, problem solving skills, and interpretations of scholarly and non-scholarly works. Without these skills, I would not have been able to gain the necessary knowledge and apply it to other areas of school and/or life endeavors.