Projects + Pilots
Articles and Research
Examining the education and careers of the creative workforce.
See our projects:
National Creative Campus
The idea of the Creative Campus is inspiring education reform and enlivening campus life at colleges and universities across the country. The Creative Campus first became part of a national dialogue when it was discussed by college presidents, provosts, deans and arts leaders in 2004 at an American Assembly meeting at Columbia University’s Arden House.
Vanderbilt University has been at the forefront of the national conversation and has recently launched its own Creative Campus initiative which seeks to place creativity at the center of campus life – integrating art, media, design and creative expression into the curriculum; transforming campus spaces through public art and performance; connecting faculty and students across disciplines, with a special emphasis on the links between artistic and scientific practice; and building community, both on and off campus, by using art and creativity to animate conversations, reach across cultures, and bring people together around heritage, public service and difficult dialogues.
Publications
Articles:
The Creative Campus: Time for a “C” Change, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Creative Campus: Time for a “C” Change Extended version 10-11-2010, Extended Version
The Creative Campus: Who’s No. 1? , The Chronicle of Higher Education
Meetings and Reports:
2004 Assembly Meeting Creative Campus Background Reading
2006 Meeting Report – The Creative Campus : Higher Education and the Arts
Creative Campus Caucus Sponsored By The Mellon Foundation May 28 And 29th, 2008 – Final Report
Double Majors and Creativity
“With respect to creativity and a liberal education, what is the value added of graduating with two majors?” The principal investigators of this project, sociologists Steven J. Tepper and Richard Pitt of Vanderbilt, contend that very little work has been done in recent years on the rising trend of double majors, and especially on its benefits and drawbacks. They will explore the choice and impact of different curricular pathways—with an emphasis on the differences among a variety of possible college major combinations—among undergraduate students at four comprehensive institutions and six liberal arts colleges.
Building on the work completed with a 2006 Teagle grant which focused on the question of assessing the “creative campus” (a vision of college campuses as creative environments that encourage collaboration, interdisciplinary exchange, risk-taking, and cultural vibrancy), this project will explore the relationship between creativity on campus and higher education’s increasing interest in interdisciplinarity, especially as it is manifested in double majoring. Guiding this study is this overarching concern: “With respect to creativity and a liberal education, what is the value added of graduating with two majors?” The principal investigators of this project, sociologists Steven J. Tepper and Richard Pitt of Vanderbilt, contend that very little work has been done in recent years on the rising trend of double majors, and especially on its benefits and drawbacks. They will explore the choice and impact of different curricular pathways—with an emphasis on the differences among a variety of possible college major combinations—among undergraduate students at four comprehensive institutions and six liberal arts colleges.
A web-based survey will be used as the principal tool for gathering information from approximately 700 undergraduate students. The survey will capture data on student demographics, academic choices, and an understanding of their creativity and innovation. It will be administrated to a stratified random sample of students, including those with a single major, those who are double majoring in two “non-creative” fields, and those who are double majoring in one “non-creative field” and one “creative” field. (A “creative” major is one that possesses a critical mass of creative attributes from a total group of fourteen.)
Data analysis will proceed in the following ways:
Examination
Examine information about majors in conjunction with self-reported transcript data to determine if different profiles are correlated with academic success, breadth of curricular choices, and depth of “professionalization” in courses.
Documentation
Document what types of students major in what types of fields and to what effect. Controlling for certain background characteristics (like family background, dispositions and interests), the study will seek to identify detectable differences in the college experience for those students who stretch themselves across different domains of knowledge.
Comparison
Study the effect of double majoring at a liberal arts college in relation to the effect of double majoring at a comprehensive institution.
Relate data on majors to the survey data on creativity to “determine correlations between the combinations of majors and students’ innovativeness both in and out of the classroom.”
Presentation
The investigators will follow up data analysis with group interviews, or small structured discussions. Project outcomes will be presented at meetings and conferences, published in journals of sociology and education, and presented in a white paper written for the foundation.
Strategic National Arts Alumni Project
SNAAP is an online survey system to collect, track, and disseminate national data about the artistic lives and careers of alumni who trained as visual, performing, or literary artists at both the high school and college levels. As an ongoing research system, it will allow education institutions, researchers and arts leaders to look at the systemic factors that help or hinder the career paths of alumni, whether they chose to work as artists or pursued other paths. SNAAP will be administered as an annual survey of alumni at specified junctures at 5, 10, 15 and 20 years following their institutionally-based arts training. Once fully operational, SNAAP findings will allow for national and other comparisons and can be disaggregated in various other ways so that institutions can better understand, for example, how students in different majors use their arts training in their careers and other aspects of their lives.
To launch SNAAP, in 2008 the Surdna Foundation provided a five-year $2,500,000 leadership grant to Indiana University in partnership with the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University. The Houston Endowment awarded $600,000 over three years, and the Cleveland Foundation granted $100,000 for two years. A foundation that wishes to remain anonymous gave $450,000 over three years. The National Endowment for the Arts committed $60,000 for 2007-2008 with an invitation to submit proposals for additional future funding.
Support from other organizations is anticipated to support the various phases of the project and insure widespread participation. SNAAP is expected to become self-sustaining by 2013 by institutional participation fees.