Abstract:

The team of authors represents the team that is leading the Creative Cultural Schools Initiative in Nicaragua, an idea that was developed in 2021. From the time we are two years old, humans begin to lose our creativity especially as we move into the school system and later in life jobs etc. The idea behind Creative Cultural Schools is to foster and maintain creativity by holding classes in creative spaces. In Nicaragua, teachers are given discretion with 30% of the curriculum, and authors hope this can be directed to make use of a different school building structure. Most importantly, the schools are to be designed by the community, for the community. Thus, the outside authors are simply facilitating the process for the local community.
After 10 workshops across cultures and interest groups, this author group was seeing little forward movement on Creative Cultural Schools. A decision was made to gather for dinner and try to figure out using techniques from design thinking to move forward. The process used is often called affinity. In this process the group ideates, writing as many ideas as they can in a limited amount of time. The ideas are then are grouped by selected people and each theme given a name. This method allows actors to use movable data in several ways. Grouping according to different criteria provides different perspectives.
The team’s ideation was successful, many ideas were generated; the whiteboard was filled with more than 70 ideas for steps to take in building a creative school. As per usual, some were redundant, and some were crazy, but most of them were legitimate steps that should be considered. Ideas were written from our different perspectives: Education, Anthropology, Communications, government agency (Ministry of Education), and Marketing and Finance.
The two people grouping were an educator with the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua, Managua (UNAN-Managua) and who teaches preschool and is very involved in the rural communities surrounding the city of Estelí. The second person is from the Ministry of Education (MINED). This is an important perspective as the school being worked on is owned by MINED, and it is vital that all steps be conducted according to policy and best practice.
The ideas were first grouped by order of steps and labeled according to the categories that emerged. These were labeled budget, future, community, research and workshops, institutional requirements, and organizations.
Second, they were grouped in a matrix that separated ideas by the groups which these steps concerned: MINED, UNAN-Managua, mayor’s office (in reference to the municipality which is much bigger that the city), teachers in the future classroom, community, the in-country commission, and finally, the team from the United States.
From this point, the authors hope to develop a timeline. While a list of steps is important to establishing the project’s trajectory—especially in accordance with MINED’s structures—an order with dates attached must be assigned to make these steps reality.
The paper will show what the authors did and how it was done. It is a process that others in education could use to move forwards when there are many players and many rules.

Keywords:

Creative Cultural Schools, Creativity, Culture, Design Thinking, Affinity.