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Teaching Creativity Creatively

Everyone has huge creative capacities. The challenge is to develop them. A culture of creativity has to involve everybody, not just a select few.”
Sir Ken Robinson

 

Happy Spring everyone! This week’s blog is dedicated to every person who recognizes the importance of nurturing, inspiring, and encouraging creativity.  Our 10-week journey into unlocking creative potential and the expressive path to personal growth ends – officially – with the next post.  The time has come for me to gather feedback.  Over the past two months I’ve shared my creative process so that you could follow along.  Now it’s time for you to grade my efforts.  Have these posts inspired you?  Did I encourage you to believe in your creative potential? Did I nurture your confidence to try? Did you follow any prompts?  Did you try something new?   Did you connect with an old or new joy?  Please e-mail your evaluation of my effectiveness to: magicalmarta@aol.com Thanks for your help!

Cricket Creativity

 “In today’s rapidly changing world, people must continually come up with creative solutions to unexpected problems. Success is based not only on what you know or how much we know, but on your ability to think and act creatively. In short, we are now living in the Creative Society.”
Mitchel Resnick, MIT

 Something I found very amazing about publicly sharing my creative process and products is how much acceptance I felt. It turns out the world IS a safe place to share our creative experiments.  I have also noticed each topic I feel inspired to research, shows up in my in-box five minutes later.  Is this intention, intuition, or just magic?  Whatever it is, this morning, right after thinking I wanted to find a scholarly study on creative ideas and inspiration, I discovered the work of Mitchel Resnick, Research Group Leader at the MIT Media Lab.  Google “Sowing Seeds for a More Creative Society” and print out a PDF copy for free. You can also access the work through Learning and Leading with Technology, 2007, http://www.media.mit.edu/ . This article introduces a ‘creative thinking spiral’ which tracks the process in a beautifully simple way. First – people imagine what they would like to do, next – they create a project based on their ideas, then they play with their creations and share their ideas and creations with others.  In the final step they reflect on their experiences and then imagining starts the process over again.  This process works well with children and adults. The report also cites exciting examples of creative learning inspired by Cricket and Scratch technology.  Sound interesting?  Explore the possibilities!

TLC: Cool 'Creators' School

My next discovery was a blog from 2008 about Teaching Creativity with TLC.  TLC stands for The Learning Connection, a school for creators (no matter what road they take in life) located in Wellington, New Zealand.  I so love the idea of “a school for creators” – aren’t we ALL creators?  Of course we are!  This school is the creation of Jonathan Milne. His wife, Alice Wilson Milne, is the school’s administrative genius.  Together they’ve built a school which teaches art in a way which grows entrepreneurs who have learned creative strategies through their art which can serve them in other life endeavors. They reach out to individuals beyond the arts with an interest in enhancing their inventive and entrepreneurial know-how and use a pioneering approach to teaching which puts self-choice learning in the driver’s seat. I just purchased Milne’s book: Go! The Art of Change. Visit The Learning Connection’s website: http://www.tlc.ac.nz/  to read about the miracle ‘success stories’ this school has stimulated.  I am in awe of the many creative gifts of communication, collaboration, and connection offered by the internet. I feel so blessed to be sharing this information within seconds of discovering it. We truly live in an amazing creative age.

 

Last week talked about our creative brains and started HOW ARE YOU CREATIVE? conversations with people as part of World Creativity and Innovation Week.  Did you make any interesting (creative) discoveries or take part in any creative events?  I participated in a Creativity Week dance party in Dr. Cyndi Burnett’s office (disco ball and all!).  Dr. Burnett set things up so that people she’d invited from all over the world could dance along with us via Skype.  A great time was had by all!  Dr. Burnett has been mentioned in previous posts. She is one of a handful of professors who have made my experience at ICSC (International Center for Studies in Creativity) at Buffalo State College extraordinary! 

 

Showing off our Creativity Week collages!

I’m happy to share photos from the World Creativity Week Grad House Collage Party Open House, Wednesday, April 20th.  Our visitors included a visiting professor from Taiwan, students from Colombia, Italy, Korea, China, India, and an assortment of creatives from the United States.  If you decide to have your own collage party – all you need is magazines, glue sticks, scissors, poster board or scrapbook sheets to use as backings.  Let people know collages are optional.  It’s more about exploring your interests and taking time for creative play.

 

My parting gift to you today is an inspiring collection of 100 Creativity & Teaching quotes.  Just scroll past the end of this blog and you’ll come to it.  If you feel this information is valuable – please share it via Twitter, Facebook, or e-mail. I really appreciate it!

 

New links in the Grad House creativity chain.

Create a beautiful week! 

Marta Davidovich Ockuly

100 Creativity & Teaching Quotes

“Creativity, which is the expression of our originality, helps us stay mindful that what we bring to the world is completely original and cannot be compared.”
Brene Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection

“The job of an educator is to teach students to see the vitality in themselves.”
Joseph Campbell

“If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds most grow.”
Rachel Carson

“We are all creative. Creativity is the hallmark human capacity that has allowed us to survive thus far. Our brains are wired to be creative, and the only thing stopping you from expressing the creativity that is your birthright is your belief that there are creative people and uncreative people and that you fall in that second category.”
Shelley Carson, Your Creative Brain

“You are in possession of one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, one that has virtually unlimited potential not only to change your life, but also to change your world.”
Shelley Carson, Your Creative Brain

“Silence is the great teacher, and to learn its lessons you must pay attention to it. There is no substitute for the creative inspiration, knowledge, and stability that comes from knowing how to contact your core of inner silence.”
Deepak Chopra

 “All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions.”
Leonardo da Vinci

“I do not teach children. I give them joy.”
Isadora Duncan

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
Albert Einstein

“Information is not knowledge.”
Albert Einstein

“It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.”
Albert Einstein

“Most people see what is, and never see what can be.”
Albert Einstein

“Not everything important is measurable and not everything measurable is important.”
Eliott Eisner

“My chief want in life is for someone who shall make me do what I can.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I call the age we are entering the creative age because the key factor propelling us forward is the rise of creativity as the primary mover of our economy.”
Richard Florida, The Flight of the Creative Class

“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young.”
Henry Ford

“Awaken people’s curiosity. It is enough to open minds, do not overload them. Put there just a spark.”
Anatole France

“Nine-tenths of education is encouragement.”
Anatole France

 “Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.”
Anna Freud

 “Your ability to act on your imagination is going to be so decisive in driving your future and the standard of living in your country. So the school, the state, the country that empowers, nurtures, enables imagination among its students and citizens, that’s who’s going to be the winner.”
Thomas L. Friedman

 “I am not a teacher, but an awakener.”
Robert Frost

“You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself.”
Galielo Galilei

“The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.”
Khalil Gibran

“A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle.”
Kahlil Gibran

“Every act of creating is an act of power, an act of hope.”
Pam Grout

 “Ability and increased potential grow hand in hand. As we grow, as we move, as we learn, the cells of our nervous systems connect in highly complex patterns of neural pathways.”
Carla Hannaford, Smart Moves: Why Learning is Not All in Your Head

“It is our movements that not only express knowledge and facilitate greater cognitive function, they actually grow the brain as they increase in complexity.”
Carla Hannaford, Smart Moves: Why Learning is Not All in Your Head

“My college students have commented that just having clay available to manipulate during a lecture allowed them to more easily take in information. Whenever touch is combined with the other senses, much more of the brain is activated, thus building more complex nerve networks and tapping into more learning potential.”
Carla Hannaford, Smart Moves: Why Learning is Not All in Your Head

“Neural connections can be altered and grown only if there is full attention, focused interest on what we do. In three weeks we can get ten times more proficient at anything if we are emotionally engaged with focused interest.”
Carla Hannaford, Smart Moves: Why Learning is Not All in Your Head

“No matter how abstract our thinking may appear to be, it can only be manifested through the use of the muscles in our bodies – speaking, writing, making music, computing, and so on. Our bodies do the talking, focus our eyes on the page, hold the pencil, play the music.”
Carla Hannaford, Smart Moves: Why Learning is Not All in Your Head

“Research in the neurosciences is helping to explain how and why rich emotional development is essential for understanding relationships, rational thought, imagination, creativity and even the  health of the body.”
Carla Hannaford, Smart Moves: Why Learning is Not All in Your Head

“Self-initiated movement, exploration, interaction and physical experience for the joy and challenge of it, facilitates neurogenesis (nerve growth) for a lifetime.”
Carla Hannaford, Smart Moves: Why Learning is Not All in Your Head

“The human urge to create comes from the play impulse.”
Carla Hannaford, Smart Moves: Why Learning is Not All in Your Head

“Thinking and learning are not all in our head. On the contrary, the body plays an integral part in all our intellectual processes from our earliest moments in utero right through old age. It is our body’s senses that feed the brain environmental information with which to form an understanding of the world and from which to draw when creating new possibilities.”
Carla Hannaford, Smart Moves: Why Learning is Not All in Your Head

“Thought, creativity and learning arise from experience.”
Carla Hannaford, Smart Moves: Why Learning is Not All in Your Head

“Touch is a strong anchor in behavior and learning. If children are gently touched on the shoulder while they are reading, the brain connects the encouraging touch with the reading and helps to anchor the positive experience.”
Carla Hannaford, Smart Moves: Why Learning is Not All in Your Head

 “Creative teaching requires moving from a focus on imparting knowledge to knowledge acquisition, providing opportunities for the learner to engage in deep thought and productive action.”
Susan Keller-Mathers, Encyclopedia of Giftedness, Creativity, and Talent

“Educators must ask themselves, ‘To what degree do I deliberately promote creativity?”
Susan Keller-Mathers, Building Passion and Potential for Creative Learning in Higher Education

“To fully nurture the creative potential of others requires modeling the behaviors, attitudes and actions consistent with a creative learner. Development of one’s creative expression is therefore first.”
Susan Keller-Mathers, Building Passion and Potential for Creative Learning in Higher Education

“Creative activity is not a superimposed, extraneous task against which the body, or brain protests, but an orchestration of … joyful doing.”
Gyorgy Kepes

“I affirm to grow as a teacher, I must remain an alert learner.”
Eric Maisel

 “Creativity seems to emerge from multiple experiences, coupled with a well-supported development of personal resources, including a sense of freedom to venture beyond the known.”
Loris Malaguzzi

 “What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?”
Rollo May

“The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be ignited.”  
Plutarch

“True joy is that which gives us more energy and makes us feel more alive.”
Robert Puryear

“Creativity is for us all – it’s about you, me, and about everyday life. It is about the abundant originality we manifest, and our flexible improvisations, whether teaching a class, raising our kids, fixing the car, helping a client, landscaping the yard, planning a benefit, or trying to figure out why we’re on earth.”
Ruth Richards

“Our ‘originality of everyday life’ as is manifested in new products – including concrete creative outcomes, behaviors, or ideas – need only involve two criteria, after Frank Barron (1969): originality and meaningfulness to others.”
Ruth Richards, Everyday Creativity

“Our everyday creativity is not only good for us, it’s also one of the most powerful capacities we have, bringing us alive in each moment, affecting our health and well-being, offering richness and alternatives in what we do, and helping move us further in our creative and personal development.”
Ruth Richards, Everyday Creativity

“The construct of everyday creativity is defined in terms of human originality at work and leisure across the diverse activities of everyday life.  It is seen as central to human survival, and, to some extent, it is (and must be) found in everyone.  Because everyday creativity is not just about what one does, but also how, creative process as well as product are observed.”
Ruth Richards, The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity

“We humans are not creatures of instinct who all build our nests the same way. Throughout our day, whether at home or at work, we humans adapt and innovate, improvise fleibly, at times acting from our ‘gut feelings,’ at times from options we imagine and systematically try out, one after the other.  Our creativity may involve anything from making breakfast to solving a major conflict with one’s boss.”
Ruth Richards, The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity

“All of our existing ideas have creative possibilities.”
Sir Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative

 “Being in your element is not only about aptitude, it’s about passion: it is about loving what you do…tapping into your natural energy and your most authentic self.”
Sir Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative

 “Creativity involves putting your imagination to work. In a sense, creativity is applied imagination.”
Sir Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative

 “Creativity is as important in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status.”
Sir Ken Robinson

 “Creativity is the greatest gift of human intelligence.”
Sir Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative

 “Creativity is a process more often than it is an event.”
Sir Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative

 “Creativity is a multi-faceted process. It involves many ordinary abilities and some specialized skills and techniques; it can be fostered by many different ways of thinking, and it draws on critical judgment as well as imagination, intuition and often gut feelings.”
Sir Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative

 “Each of us is a unique moment in history: a distinctive blend of our genetic inheritance, of our experiences and of the thoughts and feelings that have woven through them and that constitute our unique consciousness.”
Sir Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative

 “Education and training are the keys to the future. A key can be turned in two directions. Turn it one way and you lock resources away; turn it other way and you realize resources and give people back to themselves.”
Sir Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative

 “Everyone has huge creative capacities. The challenge is to develop them. A culture of creativity has to involve everybody, not just a select few.”
Sir Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative

“Finding the medium that excites your imagination, that you love to play with and work in, is an important step to freeing your creative energies.”
Sir Ken Robinson, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

 “Helping people to connect with their personal creative capacities, is the surest way to release the best they have to offer.”
Sir Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative

“Human consciousness is shaped by the ideas, beliefs and values that we derive from our experiences and through the meaning which we derive from them. Our ideas can liberate or imprison us.”
Sir Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative

 “Human intelligence is much richer than we have been led to believe by industrial/academic education. Appreciating the full range and potential of human intelligence is vital for understanding the real nature of creativity.”
Sir Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative

 “I define creativity as the process of having original ideas that have value.”
Sir Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative

 “Imagination is the source of our creativity, but imagination and creativity are not the same thing.”
Sir Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative

 “Imagination is the primary gift of human consciousness.”
Sir Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative

 “In all creative processes we are pushing the boundaries of what we know now, to explore new possibilities; we are drawing on the skills we have now, often stretching and evolving them as the work demands.”
Sir Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative

 “In a world where lifelong employment in the same job is a thing of the past, creativity is not a luxury. It is essential for personal security and fulfillment.”
Sir Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative

 “Identifying people’s creative abilities includes helping them to find their creative strengths: to be in their element.”
Sir Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative

“Innovation is applied creativity. By definition, innovation is always about introducing something new, or improved, or both and it is usually assumed to be a positive thing.”
Sir Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative

 “Life is not linear. When you follow your own true north you create new opportunities, meet different people, have different experiences and create a different life.”
Sir Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative

 “Private imaginings may have no outcomes in the world at all. Creativity does. Being creative involves doing something.”
Sir Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative

 “Teaching for creativity involves asking open-ended questions where there may be multiple solutions; working in groups on collaborative projects, using imagination to explore possibilities; making connections between different ways of seeing; and exploring the ambiguities and tensions that may lie between them.”
Sir Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative

 “Teaching for creativity aims to encourage self-confidence, independence of mind, and the capacity to think for oneself.”
Sir Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative

 “Teaching for creativity involves teaching creatively. There are three related tasks in teaching for creativity: encouraging, identifying and fostering.”
Sir Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative

“The first task in teaching for creativity in any field is to encourage people to believe in their creative potential and to nurture the confidence to try.’
Sir Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative

“The imagination liberates us from our immediate circumstances and holds the constant possibility of transforming the present.”
Sir Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative

  “The only way to raise overall standards is to engage the energies and imaginations of every student in the system.”
Sir Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative

“The rate and scale of change engulfing the world is creating a tidal shift in how people live and earn their living. We now need to be equally radical in how we think of education. Raising academic standards alone will not solve the problems we face: it may compound them. To move forward we need fresh understanding of intelligence, of ability, and of the nature of creativity.”
Sir Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative

 “There is a difference between teaching through creativity and teaching for creativity. Good teachers know that their role is to engage and inspire their students. This is a creative process in itself.”
Sir Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative

 “To realize our true creative potential – in our organizations, in our schools and in our communities – we need to think differently about ourselves towards each other. We must learn to be creative.”
Sir Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative

“We have imaginations. As a result we have unlimited powers of creativity.”
Sir Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative

When people say to me that they are not creative, I assume they just haven’t yet learnt what is involved.”
Sir Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative

 “Whether in the public or the independent sector, in schools or at home, being creative in providing education and promoting creativity are not dispensable luxuries. They are essential to enable us all to make lives that are worth living in.”
Sir Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative

 “The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change.”
Carl Rogers

 “Knowing a lot…is a springboard to creativity.”
Charlie Rose

“…mere critical thinking without creative and intuitive insights, without the search for new patterns is sterile and doomed.”
Carl Sagan

“It’s interesting to reflect, that if all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within fifty years all other forms of life would end. But, if all human beings were to disappear from the earth, within fifty years all other forms of life would flourish.”
Jonas Salk

 “To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe.”
Marilyn vos Savant

 “Necessity is the mother of invention, it is true, but its father is creativity, and knowledge is the midwife.”
Jonathan Schattke

 “All truth passes through three stages:  First, it is ridiculed.  Second, it is violently opposed.  Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”
Arthur Schopenhauer

“If you want to change the world, who do you begin with, yourself or others?  I believe if we begin with ourselves and do the things that we need to do and become the best person we can be, we have a much better chance of changing the world for the better.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

 “I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.”
John Steinbeck

“He who knows others is wise; he who knows himself is enlightened.”
Lau Tzu

 “The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.”
William A. Ward

“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”
H.G. Wells

“We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow.”
Oscar Wilde

“Come forth into the light of things, let nature be your teacher.”
William Wordsworth

“Education is not filling a bucket but lighting a fire.”
William Butler Yeats

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© 2011 Marta Davidovich Ockuly