Inquiry into Creative and Innovative Processes: An Experiential, Whole-Person Approach to Teaching Creativity

Abstract

This article highlights the transformative nature of an online master’s level course titled, Inquiry into Creative and Innovative Processes. The authors emphasize the importance of whole-person, imaginative, and intuitive experiences in adult students’ unique, scholarly development. They describe their process of adapting intuitive inquiry, a transpersonal research method, as a supportive structure for this online course on creativity. A creative and innovative approach to teaching in itself, the course facilitated a flexible learning container, where students were guided toward integrating their academic learning and personal discovery in embodied and deeply conscious ways. Examples of students’ work and assessments demonstrated how they experienced meaningful and purposeful shifts in the ways they perceived and processed newly acquired knowledge. Students broadened and deepened their intuitive and rational ways of knowing in mindful, embodied, and creatively informed manner.

Delving into the role of mindfulness on the relationship among creativity, anxiety, and boredom of young EFL learners

“…This is particularly the case in China where there is a recent focus on whole-person curricula, of which creativity forms an essential part. Indeed, whole-person learning is defined as the procedure of practicing significant shifts in the ways students notice the recently learned knowledge and their own internal knowing, by developing and incorporating new consciousness on individual and transpersonal levels, which is mindful and creatively learned [ 97 ]. Hopefully, the results of this study make it easier for prospective researchers to carry out more comprehensive studies on the potential connection between creativity and mindfulness, which sequentially will result in the emergence of effective learning.…”

A Qualitative Inquiry in to the Impact of an Arts-Based, Self-Portrait Assignment on Third Year Child and Youth Care Students

“…The strength of education that is achieved through the use arts is grounded in the belief that creativity is central to human learning because a creative learner is better able to engage in alternative ways of knowing that include -the spirit, mind, body, and emotional components of learning‖ (Merriam, Caffarella, & Baumgartner, 2007). For example, Netzer and Mangano Rowe (2010) Creative learning through incorporation of the arts is more than simply conveying ontological -truths‖ through the transmission, retention, and reproduction of knowledge via established scientific evidence. In contrast, it includes an aesthetic and ethical dimension that embodies Plato's characterization of the three realms of the good, the true, and the beautiful; these highlight the value ofprocess of discovery as much as the unearthing process itself (Bellefeuille.. et al, 2014).…”

Art and Social Work: History and Collaborative Possibilities for Interdisciplinary Synergy

“…Perspectives on Related Disciplines in Education, Public Health, Psychology/Art Therapy, Art and Social Practice, Urban Planning, and Research/Evaluation Education. The arts and artistic expression are widely considered to be central to the process of receiving a meaningful education (Burnaford, 2007;Mishook & Kornhaber, 2006;Netzer & Rowe, 2010;Rinne, Gregory, Yarolinskya, & Hardiman, 2011). This is recognized in numerous veins of education literature showing (via a variety of loosely connected families of theory) that learning, discovery, connection-making, and the resultant transformational, generative, and creative thinking are accelerated and reinforced by arts-based methods in the classroom.…”