Accounting. Marketing. Leadership. Lego?

In spring of 2022, we asked our teaching faculty to tell us who among them were offering innovative learning experiences, environments, and/or introducing new ways of overcoming barriers in their classes. This is part one in a six-part series recognizing teaching faculty at UBC.

Picture a typical MBA course, and you’re likely to envision students engrossed in classes on topics such as Organizational Behaviour, Economics, Management and Business Ethics. Enter Dr. Kari Marken’s Creativity course classroom, however, and you’d be in for a surprise. After all, playing with Lego bricks or drawing on papered walls aren’t exactly the activities taking place in most offices or boardrooms—but speak with Kari long enough and you’ll start to believe they probably should be.

“To create is to bring something into existence,” the lecturer shares, “and if we look at it that way, that's what we're all doing all the time in our work—we’re creating things. If you're leaving a business school with an MBA or a Master's, there's a degree to which you should have some fluency in how to lead others through a creative process to generate better solutions.”

Creativity, which has been a requirement for completion in Masters of Management and Full-Time MBA programs for many years, is one of a number of courses taught by Kari since September 2020, when she joined the UBC Sauder School of Business. Rather than giving lengthy lectures, Kari prefers to catalyze students’ creativity by drawing on her diverse background in teaching and the arts. Her résumé includes, among other things, an early career as a high-school Drama teacher; a Master’s and PhD in Curriculum and Pedagogy; six years as an Educational Designer with the UBC Centre for Student Involvement & Careers; and, finally, her most recent position as a full-time lecturer in the UBC Sauder School of Business. 

Kari acknowledges that, at first, some students require a little more coaxing to embrace the course. After all, these are students who are highly motivated to succeed in the business and managerial worlds, rather than on the stage or in the design studio.

“Many students will walk in and ask me directly, ‘What? Why are we here? What is this?’” she admits. But she notes that those attitudes often come from students’ worries about how to succeed, and their preconceived notions about who is, and is not, creative. It doesn’t take long, however, before their walls come down.

“In the first class, I do a couple of activities that get them looking around the room and realizing that everybody's creative,” Kari explains. “I tell them I have little patience for the idea that some of them are not.” She takes them through some fast exercises to “get them out of their head as quickly as possible in terms of determining who is and is not creative,” before approaching creativity as a learned process, explaining how it comes into play when leading teams. “Then the resistance is mostly gone. And then we have a great time and the students produce phenomenal work together.”