William Carey Creative Exploration 2010 

The Creativity Exploration takes place each July and includes participants from second grade through high school. Teachers, parents, students, and peers nominate candidates for the three-day workshop using a variety of indicators. A high school staff, chosen to oversee the publication for the year, writes about topics of interest to their group and also presents highlights of modules for the elementary section. The publication experience comes through as very powerful for staffers, as attested by editorials and artistic work archived in the Voice newspaper and various literary compilations. Younger students love their high energy studies of arts, sciences, and humanities. As Dr. Trudy Abel, co-founder of the program, explained in 2003, “the Creativity Workshop is a multi-purpose program…[where] students really explore their multi-talents and experience different avenues of interest.”

The workshop teachers come from a variety of subject areas, and the workshop activity reflects this diversity. They work in teams, designing rich programming around the interests and talents of participants in the program. Students often participate year after year, literally growing up with the program. Students from the earliest workshops have gone to college, many on to graduate school, and embarked on professional lives.