Using Creative Activities in Criminology Workshops: A Reflection

By Angus Li

PhD Student and Graduate Teaching Assistant

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This is it – my first year of teaching at the University of Leicester is over. To be honest, it’s been an invaluable experience and it makes me start to believe that I indeed enjoy teaching. Teaching Criminology can be challenging, especially when it comes to engaging students and fostering critical thinking skills. Traditional lecture-based instruction may not always be effective in capturing students’ attention and helping them understand complex concepts. That’s where creative activities come in. Reflecting on the Criminology workshops I ran in the last academic year, in this post, I would like to share how incorporating creative activities in Criminology module workshops could be an effective method for involving students and fostering critical thinking skills.

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Short story writing is a potent tool to engage students in the criminological imagination. It allows them to step into the shoes of a criminal, victim or practitioner of a criminal justice agency and explore the complexities of their motivations, behaviours and experiences. For instance, when I was teaching Strain Theory, I invited students to work in groups and create a short story with one of Robert Merton’s modes of adaptation to strain. And then, in the second part of the activity, I asked them to identify the negative and positive stimuli (from Robert Agnew’s general strain theory) in their stories. Students created interesting stories and they demonstrated how they understood these concepts. As some of their stories were a bit complex with quite a few twists, they figured out the complexities while using these criminological theories to understand people’s behaviours and decision-making processes. More importantly, they were able to find how these theories we had been teaching them throughout the module could be applied to our everyday life (although I suppose all their stories are fictional).

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Drawing activity is another creative way to involve students in my workshops. Through drawing, students can visually depict criminological concepts and theories in a manner that is both engaging and accessible. What I did when I was teaching youth justice was that I asked my students to get into groups and draw a ‘youth offender’. The reason was that I wanted them to understand how to adopt the social constructivist paradigm to deconstruct the notion of ‘youth offending’. They produced some amazing drawings (aesthetically speaking of course). It was a powerful activity as they found out the commonalities shared by different groups’ drawings. They reflected on how stereotypes were shaped, how a ‘social construct’ could vary across time and space (e.g., I got asked what a ‘typical youth offender’ looks like in Hong Kong, where I was born and raised) and the consequences of having those stereotypical portrayals.

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Although certain students may feel hesitant or intimidated at first, providing examples, guidance and feedback during the activities would be helpful to ensure students that they are on the right track. Many students discover that creative activities aid them in exploring criminological concepts in a more captivating and unforgettable manner. Besides, students who may encounter difficulties with traditional lecture-based instruction could flourish in an interactive and creative learning environment. More importantly, students develop a sense of ownership in the learning process compared to other activities such as case studies as they create their own stories and drawings which could be understood with criminological theories.

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Incorporating short story writing and drawing activities can be highly effective tools in enriching Criminology workshops. These activities offer students an innovative, safe and fun learning space. As a workshop leader, these activities provide me with an opportunity to learn how students from different cultural backgrounds understand crime and criminality differently. Learning with creative activities can be a stress-free and joyful experience for both the students and the instructor.

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In conclusion, creative activities can be a fun and effective way to help students understand complex theories and concepts, encourage them to think creatively and develop a deeper sense of ownership in their learning experience. So, why not give it a try? Ciao!

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