About the Program

Source: https://americancultures.berkeley.edu/cdf/about Parent: https://americancultures.berkeley.edu/

Creative Discovery Fellows at UC Berkeley

Launched in 2018, the UC Berkeley Creative Discovery Fellows Program (formerly Adobe Fellows) began as a collaboration between the American Cultures (AC) Center and the Academic Innovation Studio, with strong support from Digital Learning Services, Educational Technology Services, the Library, and Arts+Design. Since then, the program has evolved into a peer-centered model where students gain critical and creative support from Creative Discovery Fellows.

The Creative Discovery Fellows (CDF) Program helps instructors incorporate creative assignments into UC Berkeley’s undergraduate social justice graduation curriculum - the American Cultures (AC) requirement. The CDF program has been built to respond to a core question of anti-racism and social justice education. "How do we design supports for faculty and students in ways that are adaptive, equity-oriented, and foster anti-racism?" This question is fueled by assertions that anti-racism and social justice pedagogy lies along an arc of efforts, which merely begin with considering the "content" of a course:

Anti-racist pedagogy is not about simply incorporating racial content into courses, curriculum, and discipline. It is also about how one teaches, even in courses where race is not the subject matter.

–Kyoko Kishimoto, Race, Ethnicity and Education v21 n4 2018:540

Incubated in the AC curriculum, where creative projects are central to "lifting" the analytical work of the classroom into broader circulation, the CDF program demonstrates that digital tools integrated within anti-racism and social justice pedagogy, provide a nexus for socially, personally, and politically meaningful scholarship, community engagement, and public-facing works. The CDF program serves to highlight the critical productivity and interconnectedness of this work.

The program has five main goals:

To support critical engagement with digital tools and support pedagogical innovation by helping faculty develop course assignments that leverage creative tools to deepen and enhance student learning.
To assist students, particularly from historically marginalized and underrepresented groups: to become ‘empowered producers and storytellers’; to shape, co-construct and influence knowledge; and to see themselves as effective change-makers.
To create a diverse set of cross-disciplinary practices and a learning community, providing space for reflection and improvisation at the intersection of antiracism social justice pedagogy and digital tools.
To research and understand conditions for equity-oriented student learning within the context of creativity and social justice.
To make visible powerful, human, and more communal examples of instruction and learning.

The program partners with faculty to implement these assignments, providing students with immediate technical and design support though The Creative Discovery Student Hubas well as in-class demonstrations, tutorials, and other resources to ensure that novices and experts alike are supported and encouraged to utilize the full range of their creativity.

We invite you to explore the rest of this website to learn more about the resources and impacts of the program.

Our society is at a crossroads. We have on the one hand, storytellers and designers who tell beautiful, compelling — but often trivial (or even false) narratives. And on the other we have brilliant academics doing important research who don't seem able to make their findings accessible to a general audience...The Creative Discovery Fellows program is a big step forward to help students and faculty create accessible, compelling stories that capture peoples' attention and imagination.

Bill Allison, Chief Technology Officer, UC Berkeley

More about the Program

Faculty Spotlights

Case Studies

Student Work

Research & Evaluation

Get Involved

The Creative Discovery Fellows program fills a critical gap on our campus, by helping instructors incorporate digital tools into the curriculum and supporting students to use them effectively, in ways that are personally meaningful and also serve the public good.

Jenn Stringer, Former Associate Vice Chancellor for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer, UC Berkeley

Funding

Funding for this program has been generously provided by Adobe, Incorporated and by the Berkeley Student Tech Fund.

More About the Program

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Program Model](#)

Program Model

Our model is a multi-pronged approach that involves working closely with faculty cohorts and providing near-peer support for students. Learn more.

On the faculty side, this includes hands-on training, monthly pedagogy discussions, one-on-one consultations, co-developing resources around related needs (such as grading rubrics, copyright, accessibility, creative process), and topic-driven workshops that serve both the cohort and the larger campus. Teacher scholars provide an additional layer of course support for instructors who have completed the program and want to build on or continue their work.

On the student side, our Adobe peer consultants provide support for individual courses and the campus at large by hosting workshops, facilitated feedback sessions, one-one-one consultations, and in-class trainings. Our hope is to create a pipeline for students in AC courses to develop and grow their creative, technical, and instructional skills by participating in our various support offerings.

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Research & Evaluation](#)

Research & Evaluation

In addition to evaluating the effectiveness of our program, we are engaged in research to understand and describe powerful examples of faculty/student learning and the types of activities and support that foster identity development, knowledge production, skills acquisition, and social impact within AC courses.

Through our holistic program approach, we hope to foster local expertise at multiple levels, develop a model of responsive support for the campus around purpose-driven creative activity, and provide critical infrastructure and ground-tested resources to animate campus-wide initiatives such as the Discovery Experience and Digital Learning.

Learn more.

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Case Studies](#)

Case Studies

Our first cohort of 13 instructors was drawn from a range of departments across campus, representing different class sizes, levels of comfort/familiarity with technology, teaching styles, and types of assignments. Learn more.

Our 2019-2020 cohort includes faculty from History, Ethnic Studies, Chicano Studies, Labor Studies, Integrative Biology, Global Studies, Comparative Literature, as well as Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies. Applications for the next round of Creative Discovery Fellows will be available end of the Spring 2020 academic semester.

Learn about our Faculty through our Faculty Spotlights.