Episode 16: Mickey Jurewicz & Tim Brunelle

In this episode of Creativity on Tap, we explore how creativity can help us navigate the dizzying pace of technological change. Host Frank Sentwali is joined by two inspiring guests: Tim Brunelle, a strategist, creative leader, and educator at the intersection of AI and human imagination, and Mickey Jurewicz, a high school advisor and licensed visual arts teacher at Avalon School in Saint Paul.

Together, they unpack how students are adapting, imagining, and expressing themselves in an AI-driven world. From fostering curiosity and courage in the classroom to building the skills needed for creative problem-solving in uncertain times, this conversation is full of insight, humor, and hope for the future.

Whether you’re an educator, artist, technologist, or simply curious about where creativity is headed, this episode offers practical ideas and inspiring perspectives on how we can all stay resilient, and even thrive, in the age of AI.

About COMPAS
COMPAS (compas.org) is a nonprofit with 50 years of experience delivering creative experiences to millions of Minnesotans of all ages and abilities, particularly those from historically marginalized communities. COMPAS connects professional teaching artists with students, older adults, and other community members to inspire creativity and empower voices.

About Creativity on Tap
Creativity on Tap is produced by COMPAS. In each episode, Creativity on Tap brings together educators, entrepreneurs, elected officials, parents, and other community leaders to discuss creativity and answer the question: What is creativity, and how can it solve the unique challenges facing today's world?

Creativity On Tap is part of Creativity Saves the World, an initiative led by COMPAS to explore, celebrate, and emphasize the pivotal role creativity can and must play in shaping a world that prioritizes equity, justice, and inclusivity.

Theme music (played at the end of the episode), "Krank It," was produced by COMPAS Teaching Artist Bionik.

Transcript

Creativity on Tap Podcast - Tim & Mickey

Welcome to Creativity on Tap. Creativity on Tap is a series of conversations produced by Compass about the value and importance of creativity. For more information about Compass and how creativity saves the world, visit C-O-M-P-A-S.org. I am your host, Frank Santwally, and I hope you enjoy this episode of Creativity on Tap.

Today's conversation is all about creative resilience. What it means to adapt, imagine, and express yourself in a world that's changing faster than ever. As artificial intelligence or AI, as it's more commonly known, becomes more integrated into daily life, one of the most important skills young people can develop is the ability to think creatively, ask big questions, and stay connected to their own voice.

To explore this, we've invited two incredible guests from very different creative arenas. First, Miki Jurowicz, a high school advisor and licensed visual arts teacher at Avalon School in St. Paul. Miki works every day with students who are navigating school, identity, and self-expression in the age of TikTok, ChatGPT, and everything in between.

And joining her is Tim Brunel, a strategist, educator, and creative leader who, among other things, teaches a course called Generatively Better on how to use AI tools in thoughtful, imaginative ways. Tim has decades of experience working at the intersection of technology, marketing, and creativity, and he also has a degree in jazz studies, which should tell you a lot. Together, we'll talk about the future of learning, how students are already adapting to AI, and why creativity might just be the most powerful survival skill we have.

Well, welcome, you guys, to the show. We're so happy to have you. You are in my wheelhouse as a spoken word arts educator and someone who is consistently asking children to write creatively and not use AI and then trying to catch them when they do.

So I'm excited to have today's conversation. And my first question for you both is, when you hear the phrase creative resilience, what does it mean to you and where do you see it showing up in your own work? And we'll start with Tim. Frank, it's a huge pleasure being on the show with you.

And I love this topic. Just as a quick background, I have in my house right now an eight-year-old, I have an 18-year-old and a 19-year-old. And so the whole wealth and range of AI and creativity is kind of at the forefront.

I'm in the midst of finishing up a curriculum I'm gonna be teaching this fall at MCAT, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, on AI for artists and entrepreneurs. So this is a topic I know well and love. And so when I think about creative resilience, I think that's essential to human expression, right? Like I think it's in many ways, you know, if you read the history of humans, it's our ability to tell stories, right? Which separates us from, you know, Homo sapiens from all of the other versions of humans that rose up.

We weren't necessarily the strongest. You know, when you look at the bones that they've dug up from wherever, there were physically stronger tribes of humans, but the Homo sapien approach, the fact that we could tell stories with each other meant that we could organize, meant that we could create mythology, that meant that we could essentially scare our opponents because we could make them think we were bigger or nastier than we actually were. So, you know, the resilience of human beings to not only develop culture, but develop a consistent idea of what we all think law might be or a nation might be.

Those are the hallmarks of what makes us who we are. And so, you know, I would just say creative resilience is central to how human beings have always thrived and how we will continue to thrive. Wow, man, you took it all the way back to the dawn of early man.

And that's so true though, like without creative resilience, how do we evolve to where we're at today? Exactly, yep. Miki, your thoughts on creative resilience. Wow, well, first of all, I'm really happy to be here too.

This is my first podcast ever, so this is kind of exciting. Welcome, yes. Thank you, thank you.

And not your last. Maybe, it depends. So for me, starting my 27th year of teaching, the amount of change, you know, I got into teaching and everybody's like, oh, the longer you do it, the easier it gets.

And it's like, oh no, that's like literally the exact opposite of what I've kind of discovered. And as we move through technology, what I feel like personally, as we move through the technological advances and things like that, what it ends up doing to my students, I find is that they always think there's a right or wrong answer. There's only one way to do it, or it's very black and white.

And so for them, they get really scared to start anything because they're afraid to be wrong. Whereas the creative process is all, I mean, it is the process. It's the experimentation, it's the discovery.

And it's really, I'm finding it extra challenging these days to get them to really be super curious, to like, I'm always asking them like, I don't know, what did you try? I don't know, what did you think? I don't know, how did you do that? What did you try so far? And they'll be like, well, nothing, I didn't try anything. And it's like, yeah, so let's figure some things out. And so for me, getting from the start to the final piece, like all of that stuff in the middle is what is the hardest.

The kids just want to finish it. They just want to be done with it. Yeah.

Even when they are totally in love with art, even when they're totally, like art is everything to them, they just want that finished project for some reason. And they don't really want to dig in deep into the process piece. And so that has just sort of been my consistent push for them and the challenge for them is to just keep trying, keep digging, let's find a different way.

Let's use a different material. Let's find a different canvas to use or whatever. And I also started to find about probably, I don't know, a few years ago at this point, it was like, now that it's a social media piece and all that is so prevalent, it's like, why don't you text message that Instagram person that has all their artwork online or whatever? And they're like, oh my God, why would I do that? And I was like, why do you think they're on Instagram? They want to show their work.

They want people to tell them that they're doing a great job. They want to communicate with the people that are enjoying their work. Like that is why they're out there.

And my kids, it's just like, oh my God, I can never just like send a message to somebody. And I was like, well, let's do it together. And so then I, and so starting to get these kids to talk to people outside, not just me, of course, I don't know if this happens for you, Tim, but like kids act a certain way around moms and dads at home or whatever.

And then when they're at school, it's kind of the same, like they'll only do certain things for me. But then as soon as I invited outside artists to come in or whatever, all of a sudden they're just like, oh, that sounds like such a great idea. And I was like, I've been saying that to you for three weeks or whatever, you know.

You're not loved in your own classroom for your genius. You know, Frank, let's connect this. We can connect this to basketball.

So we've got a culture, a world that celebrates outcomes and looks really only at the end result. And in our culture, whether we want you to graduate and get a job, it isn't about like what you did to get to that point or the final thing that's on Instagram or that we won the game. No, no, no.

The thing that's actually valuable to you is all of the effort that went into winning the game or making the thing. And unfortunately, a lot of our capitalist systems and society is very skewed towards outcome only and doesn't look at the system in which the work has to occur. And so you talk about creative resilience, like you didn't say creative outcome.

Resilience is about the journey. It is about the process you go through. And I can see why it's difficult for a young person today to take risks.

It's difficult for them to understand that they can enjoy dribbling practice, painting practice, writing practice, enjoy confronting the blank page over and over and over again. That's a hard thing for them. They don't see examples of the struggle out in the world.

They just see outcomes. Yeah, and that actually leads into what I was gonna ask next, because being in the classroom, that is something that I've noticed and I've tried to talk with other educators about that we live in this society where there's this kind of strange juxtaposition between end result, right? Because now everything that's on display is the end result. Like you said, talking about basketball, it's like kids don't watch the game anymore.

They just go to ESPN and get the highlights and they get the final score, right? And then, or they look at how a player is great but they don't even think about the hours put in behind the scenes for a player to get great. And I think even in the classroom, nowadays you're looking at, okay, I want this poem to be great. I want attention for doing a great poem.

That's kind of where the social media aspect comes in is, oh, everybody give me attention, look at me. I did this great thing. And they don't really see process.

And so I think this is my question then is, as AI moves into the fold and young people are in their minds using it as a tool to circumvent process, right? Get straight to the end result. I didn't even have to do the work. All I had to do was, you know, talk into a microphone on my computer or type in some letters.

And all of a sudden this amazing thing that I can take credit for was created. So everybody give me attention and look at me for taking credit for this amazing thing that I'm going to tell you that I created. Like for me, it went from plagiarism was the big issue to what I call creative plagiarism, which is I'm going to go on the internet and I'm going to look up 20 poems and I'm going to take two lines from 20 poems and spice them together and call it my own poem to now just straight AI where like, I'm not even going to try.

I'm just going to let AI create a poem. So how do you all see AI changing the creative process? And then to piggyback on that, and I'll start with you, Tim, and then go back to Mickey, not only how do you see AI changing the creative process, but changing how young people respond to their own outcomes? Like how do they respond to this thing that AI has created for them to build kind of self-pride? Talk a little bit about that. How many hours do we have? I know, right? This is, this is, this is a- Let's just kind of level set a little bit in the sense of defining AI as from an artistic perspective, from a creative perspective, it's software that has consumed everything.

Every law written, every case study ever written, most books, everything on the internet. So it's got this vast library of raw material, and essentially it can recognize patterns. So when you write a prompt in Midjourney or in ChatGPT or wherever, it's merely looking at the words that you wrote as a pattern and attempting to link them to this, you know, its advantage is that it has more in its quote unquote brain than you or I could ever carry around.

Okay, so there's, so as an artist, there's an advantage there, right? So it's part of it is about recognizing when you talk about plagiarism, it makes it really easy, it makes it really easy to be lazy. So, but, and this is the same argument we had with calculators. It's the same argument, frankly, they had when the camera was invented, like, oh, they're not gonna have to learn how to draw a nose or an eye accurately, they can just take a picture of it, right? Well, but then you realize, well, the camera can create an image in a different way than a pencil or a paintbrush.

We have yet, and we will discover ways in which AI is going to unlock a type of creativity that was impossible before. We're starting to see that. I have friends who are musicians who are quote unquote improvising with AI, and which is allowing an outcome again, that was not possible before.

So there are, but in the vast middle, you have a culture that says, go to the outcome as fast as you can, ignore the struggle. You want adoration for your outcome. And here's AI saying, brother, sisters, I can give that to you in a heartbeat.

So this, to me, the issue is literacy. And I think it boils down to, can you as a student, a parent, a teacher, an advisor or whatever, recognize that we live in a world where image manipulation, image creation exists the way it does because of AI. And so we have to have a discernment that, hey, just because there's an outcome here, like how did it arrive? So we have to start asking questions about process and provenance for things, and kind of being much more curious about, you know, it's that line about like, I don't wanna see how you solve the math problem.

I wanna see your process for solving the math problem. Like, I don't wanna see your finished poem. I wanna see the piece of paper where you wrote and crossed out and boxed in and struggled.

I wanna see the struggle. And I think that's a part that, again, we have to retrain the way that we evaluate students and the way that parents think about school to point a spotlight more on the process and the struggle than the outcome. Because right now, if it's just the AI challenges, it allows circumvention of all of that.

And I think that we're too focused on, well, it's cheating. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They were doing that with the internet.

You know? They were doing that passing notes in class. Like you're never, cheating is a distraction from the real issue, which is getting people to recognize that the creative struggle of the process is the more valuable outcome. Yes, yes, man.

It's funny listening to you say that just gave me an idea for maybe some experiments that I'm gonna do on my spoken word residencies this year, as opposed to maybe telling them that they can't use AI. Maybe what I'll do is tell them, create a poem using AI and then print that and bring it in. Now, I want you to revise that poem and personalize it to you from the AI template.

Yes. Might be a more successful approach than trying to figure out, did this student use AI to write this or not? Or we know this student doesn't have the vocabulary or the literacy to create what they just turned in. And then therefore they can actually use the AI to help them with literacy, as opposed to looking at it as a pejorative.

So you just gave me an idea to become a better teaching artist just in that conversation. Here's another way to do it. All of the students are required to use AI.

They have to write the poem. Then don't put your names on them. They turn them in, mix them up, you hand them back out.

So I don't know whose poem I got. I have to read it out loud. So this thing, and then we have to have, basically the question is, what was the prompt that you think the student wrote to get to this point? So now we're discerning, now we're pulling apart, what's good about this poem? What's bad about this poem? So again, the calculator helps you add things up, fine.

Or the AI helps, if your grammar's not your strong suit or you don't have as much language in your brain, fine. You're enabled a little bit, but it really is about the questioning that occurs around it that's much more valuable. Mickey, what grade do you teach? I teach six through 12.

Oh, my favorite, well, almost favorite people. Fifth graders are my spirit animal. My favorite people in the whole world are fifth graders.

But I don't mind six through 12 if we could skip seventh, but we won't. Actually, I spend most of my time working with seventh graders, and sometimes that's a war of attrition. But most of my work is with five through 12.

And I wanna ask you, how do you see AI showing up in the classroom? And how does it differentiate from maybe sixth and seventh and eighth grade versus high school, nine through 12? How is it showing up differently depending on the age grouping and obviously the subject matter? Yeah. Well, my initial gut reaction is just computers. You're like, I don't do any digital artwork.

I don't, I have to have a paintbrush and paint or a pencil and paper or clay in my hands. This idea of, you know, I have so many students now who are like, oh, I've never mixed paint before. I only ever do it on the computer.

And I'm just, I can't like, it's my brain just like, feels like it's boiling over, you know. But I think the concept of social media becoming so big before this AI stuff has sort of helped me train my brain to use it as a tool to know that it's not going anywhere. Computers are going to be part of our lives forever.

How much of that is what I want to try to help the kids sort of navigate. And some kids are just very naturally attracted to it much more. And I actually have lots of students at Avalon who are vehemently opposed to creating artwork through AI.

And so it's been a great tool for things such as asking AI to give me 10 prompts for a sketchbook ideas. Or I need to create some artworks based on emotion. So can you help me, you know, like sort of navigating their thoughts through their computer because that's the way they think anyway.

And for me, I don't think that way. So it's harder for me sometimes to help them figure out those prompts or navigate their thoughts because they want to see it on a screen or whatever. And to just sit and have a conversation with them as much as I would rather they would do that.

It's not always helpful. So I will sit with them as they're looking through some sort of AI, whatever. And I really, I hope that, my goal is always to hope that I just help them use it as a tool and not to be their end all be all for the work that they're doing.

That's particularly with the high school, with the middle schoolers, they're always like, can I use my phone for an inspiration picture? And I'm like, no, your brain is your inspiration. Well, I don't know what a dog looks like. I was like, there's a million types of dogs.

And if you're drawing a dog and it looks like an elephant, I'm gonna say you're probably not doing the right thing. But like draw a dog, you can draw a dog. You can draw a chicken.

You can draw a shoe that looks like a shoe. It may not be the shoe that you want it to look like, but it's a start. And that's where you have to begin.

And so with the middle schoolers, I'm a little bit more adamant about, get away from the computer. I don't want, you don't get to use images. You don't get to use an inspiration picture and all those kinds of things.

And boy, they get mad at me. They get real mad at me. But at Avalon, we're a project-based school.

And so the whole concept of how they're getting from ninth grade to graduation is curiosity, experimentation, discovery. They have to work on these projects. And so I do spend a lot of my day just like asking lots and lots and lots of questions.

Who did you talk to? Where did you find that information? And all that kind of stuff. And so grade-wise, I do think it matters. The middle schoolers, I don't want them using that computer as much as minimally as possible.

And with the high schoolers, I really try to just focus on this idea of it's a tool. Sounds like a great tool. This looks like another great tool for us to use.

This is awesome, you guys. Let's figure out how we can use it to better ourselves as creative people. But remembering that if you're giving up your decision to make these choices, it's not yours anymore.

It's some wired piece of equipment. And then you shouldn't even put your name on it, honestly. But those conversations could go on forever, of course.

But I guess that's my thing. I always really just try to focus on this idea that it's a tool. It's another tool that we have.

And yeah. So would you say- Frank, let me connect this. So same with college students.

When I first taught an AI class two years ago at MCAD, a third of the students were signed up for an AI class and adamant that AI was wrong and it shouldn't be allowed. And it was very interesting to see them navigate the course and the materials. And some of them were like, well, okay, fine.

I can see reasons why it makes sense, but I'm still like, as an artist, it's like fantastic. But at least they're coming from an informed decision, an informed standpoint. And it is one of those things where it's like saying, I don't want anyone to have electricity.

Well, it's kind of there and it helps everybody. And we all kind of benefit in interesting ways. The other area I think that's interesting is in terms of enabling people who are disadvantaged or disabled or come from backgrounds where... So as an example, a friend of mine teaches in San Francisco at the college level.

Probably half his class are international students coming from Asia. They don't speak English. They do not understand American culture.

What has AI helped them do? Get up to speed on English and American culture really, really quickly from a translation standpoint. That's really interesting. Or I have an eight-year-old who's a special needs kid.

I'm looking forward to the way in which he's gonna be able to leverage AI to communicate simply because physically he can't. Right. And so that's an aspect to it that I also think is worth encouraging.

Yeah. Yeah, I was gonna ask, where do you guys... And I'll go back to Mickey with this because I was thinking about her work in the classroom. Where do you make the differentiation between using AI or engaging with the young people through AI for critical engagement versus creative engagement? That's a good question.

I don't know that I have relied on much AI for that piece so far. My main focus at this point has just been how can we use it as a tool for the creative piece to do the preliminary work, to do prompts and things like that. The critical piece, I actually wrote down that idea that Tim had about having a tool poem written by AI and turning it in and all that kind of stuff.

I was thinking about kind of doing the same thing with imagery. Like if we're talking about a theme of protests, for example, or whatever, it's like, ask AI to create a protest art about whatever and then bring it in and we can talk about what that means. And then how can we then change that up to make it more personal or personalized or whatever? I think that's kind of a cool idea.

But one of the other things that I have tried to help with this technological piece, whether it's AI or whatever, just getting the kids to talk to each other is really a challenge. This concept of self-diagnosed social anxiety piece has really created a challenge for students to interact in general, let alone at lunchtime, let alone talk about anything major or whatever. We try to have a lot of Socratic seminar type classes in our school to try to help with that piece.

But so one of the things that I do and also to encourage this idea of the preliminary work is to have these class critiques mid project, as opposed to just like doing the critique at the end and having the kids talk about their final project. We're talking about the process in between. And sometimes it's a group critique and sometimes it's just smaller one-on-one.

And they're like, oh, well, Sam here said that I should probably try blue instead of purple or whatever, and like have these conversations so that the kids are interacting with each other, talking to each other. But also then like what they're finding is like, oh, that was such a good idea. I never even thought of doing that for my own thing.

And that has also helped in kind of getting away from that computer piece, which has been helpful. I did wanna kind of go back to this idea that many years ago, I taught photography and about the third year of me teaching this, all of a sudden we got all these computers with Adobe photo illustrator or whatever in it. And I was teaching black and white develop enlarger, all this stuff.

And then I was like, digital photography, what? I don't, what? And the backlash that I got from the kids because it was like, okay, we could take digital photographs, put it in this computer and then change the color and all this kind of stuff. And I'm like, well, it's not even my computer. It's not even my photograph anymore.

Yeah, right. This is too, this is so dumb, but like, so it's, I just kind of thought of this, but it's like, that's kind of what's happening all the time. It's all of a sudden, it's not my artwork anywhere.

Oh, but now it's gonna become my artwork because I'm gonna figure out how to do it or whatever. So I don't, I'm rambling, but it's typical. You have to, if you work with young people.

I know, so, but I was so worried that I was gonna just be like, yeah, okay. Every time someone invents a new type of paintbrush or a new artistic approach or, hey, let's take it into sports, like we're gonna change the rules for, to make the game more exciting or whatever. Yeah.

There's a lot of like a backlash in those areas, but again, it's like, how can the tools expand some of your thinking? So another thing you could try making in your classroom. So if people have made a piece of art, upload the art to ChatGPT and the prompt is, what is this? Or I have a friend of mine who's a, he's a very good fine artist, does that kind of in a Norman Rockwell style. Like he could do Norman Rockwell knockoffs and you'd be, you wouldn't know.

So he's got this incredible skill and he'll use AI to help him kind of compose essentially on his screen. He did a lot of cutting and pasting to kind of create a montage of like, okay, now I'm gonna paint what's on my screen as his reference. So he uses AI to kind of assemble because they're kind of fantastical things.

And then he'll do a painting that's, it's eight feet by five feet kind of a thing. And then he'll take a picture of the final painting, give it to ChatGPT and say, you are now an editor at Artforum Magazine, please write a review of this painting. And then he publishes a book of all of the stuff that went into the prompts that helped him make the thing, the sort of Photoshop assembly, pictures of the painting.

And then he publishes the review from Artforum of the whole thing. And that goes with the painting. So when you buy the painting, you get a book about how it was made.

But it leads to this like, kind of, again, the other thing you can do is what if AI was another student in your class? So you create a persona that gets to interrogate the artwork or the poems that the student wrote, right? So everyone's poems get uploaded into this, you create a persona, kids can co-create a persona that they've trained in AI to act a certain way, you are decisive, you are hopeful, you are whatever. And now we feed the poems and say, what do you think about these poems? And so the AI can react to them live in the class, which is sort of like, well, now I wanna see how my poem is received by the AI as we work together. And sometimes that can help someone kind of open up or, again, we see this in the business world where people are acknowledging that like, hey, I used to struggle or I struggle with this coworker or, and so I will create a persona for that coworker in Chachi P.T. And then I will rehearse conversations with that persona so that when I see them in real life, I've had a chance to kind of adjust myself to have a more effective conversation with that person.

And that's another area where like, hey, we can use the AI's strength to kind of train ourselves how to interact with other human beings. You guys are amazing, I want you to know that. Because as I'm sitting here listening to you all, one, I'm thinking, Tim, I need to take your class.

And I'm sitting up here thinking, Mickey, my daughter, who's an amazing young artist, she's 12 years old and she's prodigious in her paintings, drawings, I mean, she's, I've received so many emails home from her teachers at school that talk about her artwork as advanced for her age. And then I'm looking at, you know, kind of the questions that I wanna ask you all in advance and you all keep answering the next question before I even get to it. So I'm wondering if AI hasn't somehow shipped a copy because literally the next question I was gonna ask Tim was you help creative professionals navigate AI and how does that compare to what students are facing? And you just laid it out so eloquently, at least one example, but I'm gonna ask you for another one.

Give me some more example as to, you know, how, you know, training professionals to navigate AI compares to what students are facing. So the big questions in the corporate world around AI and creativity, honestly, it kind of will set a trademark and copyright. So there was a big kerfuffle around, well, can you copyright a piece of art that you created in mid-journey or whatever? And initially the answers were no, and now they're kind of yes.

But when you look at advertising agencies and you look at the ones that are global and owned by, you know, large public corporations, in those instances, there are very firm rules about you are not, you're not using these tools, or you're gonna use a sandbox of tools that we have created because we need to know provenance. We need to know who owns what. So that's an interesting space now about, but of course, you know, what are the art directors and designers and writers doing while they're going home, using their own stuff to like, to iterate on things.

In the, again, in like the design and advertising space that I've seen, what it's helped individuals do is expand capacity. So if I'm a writer and I'm under the gun to deliver, you know, I have to show, a client wants to see three versions of something or another example, let's say we're running a billboard campaign and we're gonna have 10 billboards in Minneapolis. Well, we want 10 different messages.

In order for Frank, the client to say, those are the 10 messages I'm gonna approve. I need to show Frank, the client at least 20, right? So you can kill, you have some stuff to kill. In order for me to get permission to show Frank 20, I probably have to show my creative director boss, like 40 or maybe more.

Well, all of a sudden, like go and write a hundred headlines. That's an assignment I used to have for students. They'd always, oh my God, I can't write, can't write a hundred headlines, it's too much.

Well, now you have AI to kind of help you navigate that and think through themes and organize yourself. So the throughput, you know, you are the editor, but now you have a partner, you have a coach, a consultant that can, unfortunately we need to sleep, we need to eat, we have multiple assignments at the same time. AI is definitely helping creative professionals navigate the workload.

The other thing that is really interesting that I've seen is I have bias in a variety of ways, just from where I grew up and the kind of clients I've worked on and the people I've worked with. And so I might walk into a project and it's like, I have no knowledge of, you know, like a specific, like the way that a Japanese art director would solve a problem. I've never lived in Japan, right? But now AI can say, hey, you know, Tim, here's an approach to solving something that might be of interest to you, right? Or, you know, I mean, I have a jazz degree and one of the things we used to do in the jazz program is go listen to music that you hate or you think you hate, or you don't understand.

And now at the next rehearsal, play based on that style, right? Or take on the persona of a writer that you admire and now produce everything in that style. AI is enabling us to kind of try out the clothing and the costumes of, and the practices of, of things that we're unfamiliar with. Again, to just kind of unlock variety.

With the recognition, the clear recognition that as the artist, as the creative person, I'm responsible. I'm in control about what I ultimately show you. But that's the space that people are navigating right now in terms of like, huh, I can kind of get out of my ruts.

I can try things. I can, all advertising, all marketing is meant to change the behavior of another human being. So, well, who is that human? So now I can ask questions about, hey, we're trying to get women who have kids at home, who like these kinds of TV shows.

And when they go to the retailer to buy our product, I can get, maybe use AI to help me understand, well, what are the barriers for that person? What are they thinking about? Like what podcasts do they listen to? Obviously this one, you know, like who are they so that when I'm developing ideas, I have much greater empathy. Otherwise might've been impossible, you know? So there's a lot of interesting stuff there about empathy and learning. If you take it that way, that AI is unlocking in the professional space.

Very interesting. You bring up empathy and I also would connect that to identity, especially for young people. And I'd like to ask Mickey, do you think students are more or less confident in their creative identities right now? And do you think AI is playing a role one way or the other in helping students or inhibiting students from being confident in their identities? You know, I work with like the most difficult age group in who are trying to decide who they are, right? I mean, middle schoolers.

No, I'm just kidding. Middle schoolers, I mean, aren't even human, right? Let's be clear. And so just trying to find humanity in that, with each other in that age group, as much as I love them, it is, I very often find myself just kind of sitting back in the corner and just kind of like, oh gosh, I can't wait till I figure it out.

I can't wait till I figure it out. And so for the middle schoolers, what I do find a lot is really just concentrating again, more so just on being curious on the process. I try not to focus, I mean, I try to help them bring in like personal experiences because that's what they know the best, even though they think they know the most about Star Wars or the NBA, you know, whatever it is, they know all of this stuff, but really what they know the best is what they've lived through and experienced.

But yeah, I'm sorry, but isn't that also what they're most guarded on? Well, that's what I was gonna say. So then, but then when I say, okay, start bringing in these things, then they're just like, oh, I'm not gonna talk about that. I don't know anything about that.

I can't even, and they can't fathom turning a life experience into something, you know, how do you turn, that's too abstract for a middle schooler to think about, right? So I do, as we talk a lot again at Avalon about this idea that, you know, we honor you first as a human. So however you show up today, that's who I'm gonna honor. And then I'm gonna help you work today as you are.

And tomorrow you might be somebody else because of all of the things that happen, right? I find myself very often that way. So with the middle schoolers, it really is about process and experimentation and curiosity. And I kind of try to keep picking and sneaking in all these little things about, you know, their emotions or their feelings or things like that.

With the high schoolers, as they progress in their years at high school, and some of them, of course, right away coming into ninth grade, I know who I am. I am this person and I, whatever. But they tend to have a little bit better grasp of who they are, or at least in the direction they wanna be going.

And so for the high schoolers, again, it's still the process, it's still the discovery and all that. But I find that when I'm able to help them find a theme or a course to go based on their experiences, then it does seem to make their artwork a lot more valuable to them. As opposed to like, oh, it's just a checklist.

I gotta graduate. I wanna get out of here and I need to make a painting or I need to make a pot on the pottery wheel or, you know, whatever. It's like, I want them to actually feel like they're a part of the thing that they're making.

So I don't find that AI does much in that regard because the conversations that we have with each other and the conversations that they have together, finding connections, personal connections with each other in the classroom is what has, to me, made the creative process a lot more valuable. I've had kids walking out of a classroom and I'd be like, God, I had no idea I had so much in common with that kid or I had no idea that, you know, and I talk a lot about too, you cannot, when you're in an art classroom, you can't hide. You know, you're in a portrait, you can hide your writing or you can close your laptop.

You're painting in a classroom with all these other people and they're gonna walk by and they're gonna critique you either in their head or out loud and you just have to like, you gotta live it. And it takes a lot of courage to be out there like that and it's terrifying to so many of them. But AI, I don't know, like I just, maybe I'm just lucky in my school that the kids are, no thanks.

They're not really using it to, they're not really using it to find ways to be more creative other than, like I said before, like with the sketchbook prompts or things like that. But I do like this idea of like putting some work in and then having AI respond to it. I think that's kind of cool.

You know, as I'm listening, I'm thinking, I go back to in 1984 and the movie Beach Street, the title track by Grandmaster Flash and Mellie Mel in the Furious Five, Mellie Mel says, we gotta learn from the past and work for the future and don't be a slave to no computer. Now he said that in 1984, right? And then obviously as technology moved forward, the computer as a tool, right? The advancement from typewriter to computer word processing to like having, you know, buying Whiteout by the dozen to nobody ever even knowing what Whiteout is anymore. And then of course, you know, COVID comes along and now we're all forced to be slaves to computers, right? That's literally our social lifeline, especially if you're not in a household or a family that really promotes social interaction.

Like I was super blessed. Both of my parents were educators. My dad was a professor at the U, you know, and both my parents were psychologists.

So like communication was non-negotiable in my household. I'm very rare in that sense. And I understand that.

And then, so now we kind of come out of COVID where all of these young people for the better part of a year and a half have been programmed to be in their own space, in their own room, because no kid wants to be stuck with their parents 24 hours a day. And their only social interaction is the computer, right? Is social media. And then right on the heels of that, this AI thing blows up, you know? And so now we have so many young people, you talked about, you know, self-describing social anxiety disorder, and you have this crisis.

Oh, and by the way, blended in all of that, you know, we can go all the way back to the Jacob Wetterling abduction, parenting just changed. So now social interaction used to be, well, I'm three miles from home on my bike with my friends going to some other friends, right? And so then everything got spatially condensed for young people, and now they can create their own world through this artificial intelligence thing. And you guys are being asked to navigate that world as, you know, K-12 educators and then post-secondary educators.

And what I'm hearing is like, you know, at Avalon you have all these kids that are hands-on, they wanna work with their hands, they wanna use hands-on tools, and there's a little bit of a resistance to AI creation, but then by the time they get to Tim, they're like, okay, I have these wonderful skills, but now the world of developing a, you know, financial living, everybody's using this AI tool that I've kind of shun, where do we meet in the middle? And then how do we communicate that meeting of the middle to students before they get to Tim, you know, but not sapping that desire to put their fingers in the dirt and grow a garden, to put their fingers on a paintbrush and paint an easel, like, where do we find that balance? And that's kind of a question to both of you just from an opinion perspective. Yeah, whoever wants to go first. I mean, this is where we're at in society, right? Right, right.

In the timeline. Yeah, I think for me, it is, it's a, for me it's hard because I, again, like, I was almost late to this meeting because I couldn't figure out how to turn on my microphone, right? Like, I don't like computers. I don't like them.

I understand, it's like a car. I hate cars, but man, if I don't have a car, I can't visit my mom. I can't go visit my daughter.

You know, like, I understand the value of them. I don't like them. And so AI, it's kind of the same thing.

I mean, I have found AI to be a great tool to write these recommendation letters for my students for their college applications and things like that. Like, they've been fabulous. And, but the better I've gotten with my prompts, the more personalized these letters have been.

Cause I've, my first one was like, write a college recommendation for Sally, who's going to U of M. She wants to study nursing. And it was like, and it was so not, there was nothing about Sally in that letter. And so I figured out, like, I had to add hardworking and I had to add friendly and you know, all these other things.

And now these letters are great. And they would be something that I probably would have written had I had more time or whatever. So like that piece has been great.

I just think helping my kids understand the tool and how it can work, but being open to the idea, like it's ever changing as well. And I think they understand that piece pretty well as they live basically on computers as much as they do. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I'm going to call a time out cause Tim's got to jump to a 2 p.m. So I'm going to let him go ahead and pontificate his thought on that question. And then we're going to say goodbye to Tim. And I got one more for you.

You've got time for one more question, Mickey. I do, I do. We'll close up the conversation.

So thank you for being patient. Go right ahead. No worries.

Frank, thank you so much. And Mickey, great to meet you. You too.

It's such a, aren't we lucky? Yeah. Aren't we lucky that we get to live in a world where, you know, by and large, we're all going to live to a decent age, you know, generally speaking, and that we have access to this incredible technology, right? That each of us in our own areas, you know, has access to a car, right? But also to a technology that's like profoundly enabling, you know, and yet, and it's so early, it's so early. How could we know? How could we know exactly what this means and what it's going to reveal in all of us? So I'm a glass half full and maybe even fuller, kind of like, where could this go? I'm curious about what it might unlock for students as teachers and educators kind of see where it fits and doesn't fit into our curriculums and into our lives.

So yeah, I'm just, I think part of the, going back to creative resilience is asking like, what could it be and to continue to kind of confront and interrogate AI in this realm. And we get to see where it leads. Man, amazing.

Thank you, Tim, for joining us. That's Tim Brunel, strategist and educator and creative leader. He teaches a course called Generatively Better, and it's about how to use AI tools in thoughtful, imaginative ways.

Tim, I need to reach out to you and figure out how to take your course because I'm told. And as a spoken word artist and writer, I think I need it. Yes, sir.

So thank you for joining us, Tim. I know you got to run, so I'm gonna let you go, but so appreciate you taking time out to be with us on Creativity on Tap. Thanks, Frank.

Nice to meet you, Mickey. All right. Sorry about that, Mickey.

He had posted that he needed to run, but I wanted to go back to that thought because you were talking about having students kind of use AI to help them send a college letter or a formal business letter, or maybe, I don't know, maybe it's even a proposal for an agency or something like that. So it sounds like even though you kind of have this aversion to like, ah, I'm strapped to this technology, you are also still understanding its value and how you can use it, even if it's not necessarily for, well, you are using it for helping with creative process, but you're also using it to help young people understand that this can be that link between creative process and making a living out in the world. Yeah, I mean, I do try.

Actually, I just noticed that there's an AI companion now at the bottom of Zoom. What's that? What's that for? Anyway. That's how we record these and turn them into, yeah, we return these podcasts into blogs and save time by having it transcribed to the AI companion or else Sam will be spending all her time typing up blogs.

And so that's how we utilize AI here at Compass as a tool to say, okay, how can we condense this conversation that we've had for an hour long, right, with these wonderful human beings into something that we can post a synopsis of for our online readers? That's fantastic. Yeah, who'd have thunk it, right? So I guess I would say that our kids are, I know that our kids are using AI in their language arts classes to write their essays and papers and things like that. And I know that some of my colleagues are struggling a little bit with helping them, helping the students in their classes use it more as a tool as opposed to a cheat sheet or whatever.

And so I do know that there has been some discussion, particularly in the last couple of years on using AI and how to do that correctly. Because again, it's a tool that it can, I mean, we very often have these conversations just about the cell phone alone. Your cell phone, it needs to be put away.

However, it can be used as a tool. And cameras or the calculator or the flashlight, all these things are really important, but it's not, the tool is not sitting and scrolling on Instagram while you're in class. That's that we don't appreciate.

So as much as we try to work on the phone usage as well, it is super music, right? Music has to be played all the time. And so it is really hard to make sure that the kids don't have the phone with them. But I think the more I find, I help myself understand how it works because again, like, okay, so the computer thing, right? I wrote my first paper on the computer when I was a sophomore in college and it got erased because my floppy disk, after I got it done, I took out my floppy disk and I went outside and I was talking to my friend, hanging out in the sun and the sun burned up my, and so we went to go print it, of course, it was at a totally different location.

There was nothing there. And I was like, wait, what happened? And right, as I tell the kids, it was the orange blinking light and you had to push so hard and my hands were so tired. All these things, I know what life was like before computers.

And so that also for me is really hard to be in that empathetic space because these kids don't know what it's like to have a life without a computer or a phone or a iPad or whatever. And so my admission of constantly telling them, don't forget the last video game I played was Donkey Kong when it came out in 1974 or whatever it was. And letting them know like, I'm willing to work with you on this, but I want you to use it as a tool and not as your end all be all.

And there's no way around it. I don't think we can get away from it, so. No, they've been conditioned to use it.

And again, going back to the COVID years, the new drug for lack of a better term became escapism. I have to escape into this world of the internet, this world of social media, this world of being engaged in other people's creative worlds to escape from my own. And obviously music is for eons, man's biggest escapism.

But also I think going into, when you're young, you wanna be reinforced for what you already feel. And so being able to go into YouTube and listen to people do, whether it be podcasts or watching people on Twitch or these video gaming platforms and listening to people have side conversation while they're demonstrating playing this video game about how formal education is so wasteful and how all they do is sit in the classroom and be bored. These messages reinforcing to young people what they already feel and then they gotta go back to this classroom and those messages are implanted already.

And so I do think that we're battling a lot of programmed forces like you talked about at the beginning of the podcast that told you that the longer you teach, the easier it gets. Well, they hadn't considered what happens when we have a pandemic and the constantly evolving nature of young people in this high speed technologically advanced era. I know we got to get going.

So I wanna ask you one more question, a simple one. Now I'm really gonna throw you a softball. What advice would you give to educators, creatives or parents who are trying to help young people thrive in this fast ever-changing world? As an educator, what would you say to educators and parents and creative minds as an arts educator? Yeah, well, that's not a softball.

That's not. I honestly, I mean, with the kids, but I also do tell this to the parents. I tell them that they should carry like a little pocket journal thing with them everywhere they go and just to write stuff down.

And it's, I almost got hit by a car today because maybe that'll help you with your creative writing prompt that you have to do later. Or I saw this cool sculpture and like draw a little sketch of it or something. And then maybe you can be inspired by that when you come to art class.

The biggest thing I really, really encourage both for parents and for my students, though, however, is just really being observant in the world around you, paying attention to things that are going on and really talking to each other. Like the whole, it sounds so whatever, but like having the dinners with your families and, or even just a sandwich, and then having a conversation, but not in silence. And like no phones at the table and all those types of things.

And I just think the personal connection and being an observer of the world is just really crucial to finding the best joy, the most joy, and just kind of really living in the moment and not in what's going on around you and not the moment of this little device that's in front of your face. I mean, the parents are just as guilty of it as the kids are these days. And yeah, I guess that's really, it's being curious, being observant of the world around you, and then just talk to people, just talk to each other.

They, you hit a home run. I agree a hundred percent. I also encourage my students to journal, keep a diary, something of that ilk.

One of my favorite books just in theme alone is Ross Gay's, The Book of Delights. And Ross basically did an experiment where he tried to write down, and sometimes there are many essays, sometimes they're haikus, like they could be two pages or one page, but he wrote, his goal was to write down something that he delighted in every day for 365 days. And so, they vary in length, but I try to bring that book up to my students because that I think is the key, is being observant.

And we're always inundated with what's wrong in the world or what's going wrong in our lives that sometimes we forget that even on our worst day, something delightful probably happened, even if it was somebody's response to the worst thing that happened to you, right? And so, and I think when we find things that we delight in, those are the things we wanna share. That promotes that human interaction, that social connectivity, those conversations. But if we don't take a moment to observe things that we delight in, then we never wanna share the negative stuff, so then we hold everything in.

And so, I agree with that. I think that's great advice and you don't have to be a creative by profession to follow that advice because we are all creatives. So, thank you for that.

Mickey, we're gonna wind down. I just wanna say thank you for joining us. Wonderful conversation.

I think I could have talked to you and Tim for hours. It feels like an hour wasn't enough because this is such a broad topic and they were coming at it, blending it with education, which that in and of itself is a really broad topic. Today, we're a long ways away from the horse-drawn carriage and buggy and one-room schoolhouses.

So, there's lots to talk about. So, thank you for taking your time out and joining us here on Creativity on Tap. I hope this will not be your last podcast.

I hope you had a little fun with it. It was fun. Yeah, I really appreciate it.

It was great. I got lots of notes. I took lots of notes.

That's great. I think we're both gonna be better teachers after this one. I think so.

I hope so. I hope so. Nikki Jurowicz, ladies and gentlemen, high school advisor, visual arts teacher at Avalon School in St. Paul.

Again, appreciate you. You have been listening to Creativity on Tap. On behalf of Compass, I am Frank Santwally.

Thank you. Catch us next time. Peace.

Bye. Thank you, Compass. You're the best.