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About this blog
Brian Frick is the Associate for Camp and Conferences Ministries with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). He has been involved in camp and conference ministry since high school. For the past ten years, Brian has served as program director of Johnsonburg Center in New Jersey, Westminster Woods in California, and Heartland Center in Missouri.
Camp and conference ministry compliments and partners with other ministry aspects of our church to foster faith development and reflection. As our communities and our church changes, our ministries need to grow and adapt with creative and emergent programming and leadership to meet new realities.
These blogs entries, though varied, are intended to spur thought and conversation around the opportunities and challenges before us.
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Creativity deficiency
OK. So I've talked about a lot of needs in the world - nature deficit disorder, getting rid of silos, integration with other ministries, supporting your young adults etc.
But here is one that is so obvious when you think about it, but I've never had any factual back up for. Kids today are less creative then kids of yesterday. Even you!
Follow this link http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/10/the-creativity-crisis.html to a Newsweek article that shared data from a standardized creativity test (just like an IQ test in a way) that has been used for years to gauge creativity and has been very accurate in predicting future success of children who score high.
An interesting thing is that IQ scores have been going up as we are exposed to more knowledge, but creativity scores are declining. The article does not give a definitive answer but points to likely culprits such as less time outside, more time in front of the tv and video games (both sources of entertainment that someone else created and we just execute) and our scholastic focus on standardized tests which are pushing out time for "non-academic" classes.
Children from my school district who show an early aptitude are taken to a magnet school - Bridges - where they are engaged in learning, creating, hypothesizing, etc. My child says this is his favorite day of the week and that it just flys by. "Why?" I asked. "Because its fun and we're learning!" he replied. "Do you learn in your other class?" "Yes, but it's boring."
Is your camp and other programs engaging? How are we promoting opportunities for creativity? It's not just in arts and crafts! How are we engaging campers in the planning and executing stages of games/daily activities?
Camp and Conference centers are uniquely situated in our environment to be incubators of creativity. Richard Louve, author of "Last Child in the Woods" which talks about Nature Deficit Disorder which he describes as loss of engagement and creativity because of lack of free interaction with the world around us - states that camps are a great place for parents to safely engage children in the act of creating and engaging with nature!
Let's go folks! Here's one that is falling into our laps. We already do this. We need to shout it out loud and make sure that we are being the best incubators of creative thinking one can imagine.
- Posted at 2:15 a.m.
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