UW-Green Bay announces 2012-13 Common Theme
UW-Green Bay will continue to celebrate its current Common Theme — “Celebrating Differences, Creating Community” — as the campus prepares for the newly announced theme for next year.
The 2012-13 Common Theme is “Creativity, Innovation and Vision,” Common Theme co-chairs Brenda Amenson-Hill and Donna Ritch announced this week. Begun in 2008, the UW-Green Bay Common Theme is a yearlong program designed to engage the campus and community in the ideals of a liberal arts education and the UW-Green Bay interdisciplinary mission. It is designed to encourage faculty, staff, students and community members to focus on a general theme from multiple perspectives and have a shared experience with open discussion and critical thinking.
Faculty members Adam Gaines, Craig Hanke, Derek Jeffreys, Michelle McQuade Dewhirst, Ellen Rosewall and Chuck Rybak submitted the “Creativity, Innovation and Vision” proposal. Ideas in their proposal include the following:
“The recent passing of Steve Jobs prompted many to mourn the loss of a ‘visionary’ while celebrating the Apple co-founder’s profound impact on both the function and design of modern technology. Jobs’ revolutionary ideas about design have a fascinating origin point: he took a college calligraphy class because he found typography to be ‘beautiful, historical [and] artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture.’ This seemingly impractical interest manifested itself years later in Jobs’ inclusion of expressive typefaces in early Macintosh computers. Such expressiveness became an intrinsic part of Apple’s identity and did nothing less than revolutionize the relationship between modern technology and its users. The message is clear: transformative ideas can come from unexpected places.
“We believe that higher education has a vital role to play in the formation of the next generation of creative innovators and visionaries. We must give students the opportunity to form interdisciplinary connections necessary to challenge conventional frameworks and invent new ones. We must recognize that a student’s pursuit of a personal passion has the potential to lead them to new collaborative partners and groundbreaking entrepreneurial ideas. We propose to spend the 2012-2013 academic year examining creativity and innovation and inviting the campus community to reap the benefits of inspiration from surprising sources.”
If you have ideas related to the Common Theme, please contact Common Theme Brenda Amenson or Donna Ritch, Common Theme co-chairs. The committee will continue to implement the current Common Theme, “Celebrating Differences Creating Community” and work to plan for 2012-13. To learn more, visit the Common Theme website.
