When I look at the world my students are graduating into, I am both awed and alarmed. They face accelerating technologies, a political environment that feels brittle and an information landscape that demands constant vigilance. Yet what I see most clearly in my classroom is something quieter: the profound need for spaces where people can process their experience, make meaning and remember what it feels like to be human.
Last year, in a graduate seminar on communication and creativity, I asked my students to do something that seemed, to many of them, impossible: commit two to three hours each week to a creative practice of their choice. Anything. Painting. Singing. Woodworking. Writing poems that no one would read. The only requirement was that the practice be regular, embodied and done with the understanding that it was part of their education – not an add-on.
The initial reaction was predictable. “I don’t have time.” “This feels indulgent.” “How is this related to my research?” Their early journal entries were full of apology, as if creativity were a guilty pleasure they needed to justify.
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But within weeks, their tone shifted. A doctoral student who began beading – something she had not done since childhood – found that repetitive handwork gave her a way to metabolise complex research questions. Another student returned to the piano for the first time in a decade; she wrote about how the physicality of playing restored her equilibrium after long days surrounded by screens and data. A student who started sketching during lunch breaks said he felt “mentally refreshed in a way coffee doesn’t touch”.
Across the class, journals filled with reflections that surprised even the students who wrote them: these small acts of creativity were not escapes from their work but avenues into deeper thinking. They offered clarity when analysis felt muddled. They revealed emotions students hadn’t realised they were carrying. They brought a sense of steadiness in a time of relentless uncertainty.
What were they processing?
In their writing, students named burnout, fear about the job market, grief for the state of the world, exhaustion from the political climate, and anxiety about the rapid encroachment of artificial intelligence on their fields. Some were sorting out conflicts with advisers; others were trying to understand what they wanted their lives to look like beyond their degrees. Many were carrying the quiet, cumulative strain of feeling perpetually behind – a feeling that is nearly universal among young adults today.
The creative practices gave shape to feelings that were otherwise amorphous. When students drew, stitched, sculpted or played, they could hold their experience at arm’s length long enough to examine it. They could ask: “Why does this feel heavy?” or: “What is the pattern beneath my stress?” That emotional and cognitive processing is essential – not decorative – to learning and to well-being.
Why does this matter for educators?
It matters because no amount of digital literacy or critical thinking instruction can help a student who is too overwhelmed to notice what they’re feeling, too depleted to be curious or too anxious to reflect. In an era defined by acceleration, the arts and humanities offer something irreplaceable: deliberate practices that cultivate attention, perspective and resilience.
Educators can make space for this kind of practice without overhauling curricula. Three strategies emerged clearly from my seminar:
- Build creative practice into coursework – not as extra credit but as part of the learning goals. Students took the assignment seriously because it counted. When creativity is framed as central rather than peripheral, students stop dismissing it as a luxury.
- Tie creative practice to reflection. Weekly journals were the engine of the class. Students didn’t just make things, they wrote about the making. This is where insights surfaced: moments of calm, new connections or realisations about habits of mind.
- Model vulnerability. I practised alongside them. I shared my own frustrations when my creative work felt stalled and my discoveries when it illuminated something. Students trust the process when they see an instructor trusting it, too.
How do we convince students of arts‘ and humanities‘ value?
You don’t persuade them with abstractions; you let the experience convince them. Many of my students entered reluctantly and emerged protective of their new routines. They described feeling more grounded, more capable of deep focus and more connected to their peers. One student wrote: “This practice helped me think like a human again.” That felt like a revelation.
We might not be able to measure this like a standardised test measures recall. But we can measure changes in engagement, attendance and emotional articulation. We can measure whether students return to the practice after the course ends – which many did. And we can measure the quality of their analytical work, which often became more nuanced as their creative practices matured.
Some outcomes are subtler but no less real: steadier breathing, better sleep, improved concentration. Students reported these without prompting. They noticed that time spent creating made them more patient with themselves and with others. These are not soft outcomes. They are the very capacities – reflection, adaptability, imaginative problem-solving – that the future demands.
If we want graduates who can withstand disinformation, polarisation and the pressures of AI-driven work, we need to cultivate not only their intellects but their interior lives. Arts and humanities education does that not through slogans about empathy or critical thinking but through sustained human practices: making, observing, storytelling, questioning, listening.
Creativity is how we stay human in a world that feels increasingly inhuman. In my classroom, I watch students discover that truth for themselves – and once discovered, it is hard to forget.
Patricia Raun is alumni distinguished professor of theatre arts at Virginia Tech and founding director of the Center for Communicating Science.
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