“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
