Book:
“Developing Creativity in Higher Education: An Imaginative Curriculum”
Editors: Norman jackson, Martin Oliver, Malcolm Shaw, and James Wisdom.
2006, Routledge, Oxon.
P 142 – 155
Essay : “Enhancing Students’ Creativity Through Creative-Thinking Techniques.” Caroling Baillie.
P. 143
“We held a three- day experimental workshop which incorporated many fun, interactive exercises as well as social gatherings and music-making. We knew that this would be a productive experience for the participants but what we hadn’t realised was the huge power of this experience to wake up individuals to their true selves. I have never before experienced knock-on effects like those of that residential workshop. For months afterwards I was hearing third-hand about participants having had ‘life-changing experiences’.”
Baillie has been using facilitated workshop techniques to teach which she remarks have deep effects for participants. She outlines the class preparation for the workshop sessions, which is very similiar to the preparations I intend for using Open Space as a space for learning.
P. 144
“The room needs to be set up… the most important elements are light, colour, flexibitly in the use of space, comfort, warmth, music if desired and a good supply of goodies and drinks. You will also need a range of materials to encourage the notion of idea generation – flip-charts, post-it notes, marker pens, Blue-Tack and coloured stickers.”
Book”Critical Pedagogy In Uncertain Times, Hope and Possibiility”
Editor Sheila L. Macrine, 2009, Palgrave Macmillan, New York.
Essay ” Teaching As Possibility; A Light In Dark times” Maxine Greene. P 137-149.
“Paying heed to the drumbeat of current concerns – for professional development, standard-setting, authentic assessment, an enriched knowledge base, technological expertise, – teachers cannot but occasionally ask themselves “to what end?” There are, of course, the official announcements and prescriptions. There are presumably obvious “goods” linked to each statement of an educational goal. Most often, we realise, the benefits of reform are linked to the nation’s welfare, or to market expansion, or to technological dominance in a competitive world. Suppose, however, we were to summon up an articulation of purpose suggested by Rich’s “possible happiness, collectivity, community, a loss of isolation.” The words imply a reaching out for individual fulfillment amongst others in (perhaps) the kind of community in the making that John Dewey called democracy. There are , to a degree, abstract and metaphorical; but, speaking indirectly as they do, they respond to some of the evident lacks in our society, to the spaces where people feel solitary and abandoned, to domains of felt powerlessness.”
Book
Thomas, Gary, Education and Theory, Strangers in Paradigms. Open University Press, Berkshire. 2007.
p.5
Thomas outlines how theory has been seen by Carr in education. He suggests that Carr described a linear formation of theory development – from the philosophical to the scientific to the personal. While Thomas questions Carr’s linear outline of fields of theory that have influenced education, I feel that this description has assist me to see the positioning of my own field of interest. I find myself drawn to philosophical thinking about education rather that social scientific theory, while I recognise its influence, I feel firmly that my approach to teaching is guided primarily by the complex ethical issues embedded in art education. I feel now that social scientific research around learning and teaching, while essential for effective learning, does not deal sufficiently with the ethical issues surrounding who learns, what we learn, how we learn and why organised learning exists.”
P139 -140
“Without a sense of agency, young people are unlikely to pose significant questions, the existentially rooted questions in which learning begins. Indeed, it is difficult to picture learned-centred classrooms if students’ lived situations are not brought alive, if dread and desire are not both given play.”
The qualities that Greene focuses on here are ones that have concerned me in my learning about learning and teaching. It is perhaps about the ultimate hidden curriculum – the fact that teaching is somehow only to be effective and not changing, and that criticality, or critical thinking is framed in edcucational contexts which are blindly uncritical. Effective teaching for employability is not, in my view, critical teaching, and the hidden curriculum in this education is that one should simply become a cog in a system. I believe that the most basic curriculum of education – if we want to call the foundation of organised learning and teaching the basic curriculum – is to give people their voice and ability to act in their interested field to improve their community, their own lives and society in general. To empower and to foster responsibility. Anything less than this might be seen as ultimately disempowering and displacing responsibility – tantamount to fascism at its worst, poor teaching at best.
Book
Jackson, Martin Oliver; Shaw, Malcolm; Wisom, James, eds. Developing Creativity In Higher Education. Routlege, London, 2006.
Essay: Dineen, Ruth. Views from the chalk face. Lecturers; and students’ perspectives on the development of creativity in art and design. p 109-117.
p.110
Dineen studied art and design students and teachers, questioning their understand of the role of creativity in learning.
“The development of learner creativity was considered by all of the lecturers to be the primary goal of art and design education. In the words of one of interviewee,’we must give [the students] the right conditions to find their oen self and their most exciting minds’.”
Creativity here is seen as something coming from the self.
p.111
On the UK admission procedure:
“In order to gain a place, students must demonstrate their creative potential through showing and discussing a portfolio of their work. To an extent, therefore, acceptance on to a course means that their creativity has been judged acceptable by the subject ‘gatekeepers’….this would provide students with an ‘agreed identity’ in relation to their creativity, claimed by them and affirmed by others.”
This is an interesting point for me, and I feel I see how the absence of this process – not the fact that one must submit a portfolio, but the fact that these art students perceive their creativity as acceptable by ‘gatekeepers’. This kind of acceptence of one’s own creativity is one I would like to emulate in community-based art education. As there is currently not a ritual entry procedure for my courses, I, as teacher, must create shifts in the students learning experiences through other means. Public exhibition is the one I am currently looking at.
However, I do not agree that there is an innate ownership over one’s own creativity in third-level learning. I feel that there are a great number of art students who have trouble finding the path towards their creative voice, for whom creativity is not entirely from the self but something that happens in relation to things outside oneself. For this reason I am looking at a module that provides a focus for students to concentrate on developing their own voices. This module idea is based around my own personal experiences at art college. I, personally, found the relationship between external influences and personal creativity quite problematic as a student, and I do not think that the course I went through dealt with specific problems such as this. I wish to create a course that explores an expanded notion of creativity, that create exercises that work with challenging students’ own notions of creativity, personal voice, ownership and authorship. I wish to begin each of my classes with personal experience and move onto theoretical or outside wold examples to clarify. I wish to bring learning a directed place of unqualified subjective experience into a shared debate and position of reflectivity. ( the mind map game). I am also interested in framing the module in ritualistic structures: challenges that pass you to another level, experiences that reconfigure personal identification as self etc…
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