Improvise to improve well-being in a digital age
Welcome to Playing the Changes, a blog by Ferdi Serim, ASCEND founder. Here, we learn to improvise to overcome obstacles and achieve desired outcomes. Strengthen and deepen your creative problem-solving, critical thinking, and collaboration abilities by applying the improvisation strategies we as jazz musicians use every day. Musician or not, these skills are widely transferrable to almost any area of life!
Change is inevitable. Improvement is not. Can we use improvisation as a life-skill to advance in times of chaos? So far, results are encouraging and joyful!
Through Key Conversations, we broaden and deepen our support for well-being in a digital age, using a common framework that uses images to bridge languages and go beyond text to include the full range of creative expression.
Literaacies beyond words
- Life Skills literacies mean understanding what’s going on inside us (social/emotional literacy) and between us (interpersonal and intrapersonal literacies) and are foundational for all other literacies
- Cultural literacies include all the arts in all their forms, including and beyond words (written and spoken). This allows us to use the arts to build bridges of shared experience between cultures and generations.
- Digital literacies are two way – both creating and using digital content, including AI, privacy/cybersecurity, financial literacy and entrepreneurship
Well-Being has been transformed by digital environments. Problem-solving associated with increasing Well-Being is typically embedded in information-rich physical, social, and digital environments, making digital literacy essential! Today, competent problem solvers are expected to be able to deal with problem-solving situations that are digitally embedded.
I look forward to our conversations as this work officially launches in the near future, under the auspices of ASCEND-advance.org, our new non-profit.
Thanks so much!
Ferdi Serim