Chapters 1, 2, and the reading assignment (Enhance personal creativity) provides basic ideas about why we should listen to our intuition and try to understand what it is telling us. I have personally thought that arts and other physical activities at school was mainly for showing the students various aspects of learning or exclusively for students trying to achieve success as career choices. Therefore, those who do not have these objectives need not obtain this type of education. However, the author argues that being faithful to the individual’s intuition and trying to express their own feelings by arts, writings or performances is the nature of the human’s thinking tools. These thinking tools make aware of the individual’s original creativity by continuous disciplined training so that people can have the vision to yield innovative results. That’s why the thinking tool concept is especially important in the education filed. The arts, writings, and performances are the expression of someone’s thinking tools and intuitions. Thus, students not only analyze the arts but also imitate them as part of the real learning process to make an invention which goes beyond that.
For example, art or creativity comes from the everyday life. Even when we see something mundane as falling leaves from trees, observing and feeling this ordinary phenomenon by intuition leads to totally different results. For the same reasons, the first zoom-in project provided me a chance to look at or to observe something carefully which I see in everyday life. Observing things from different angles result in different feelings, and the same object that I look at in passing everyday looks totally different. Also, I had a hard time to guessing what my colleges’ objects were. I realized that they have different visions and different thoughts regarding those objects.
To learn another’s achievements, we must understand it rather than just know and see them. This also should be a very important part of the learning process in education. Now I understand we cannot ignore arts, writings, science and any other kinds of fields in education. All these fields can be combined towards one goal. From my personal experience during my school years, I was very good at memorizing, categorizing information to acquire the knowledge. Also I was supposed to have been very familiar with famous art work but had less experience with really observing and imitating them. Now, as an adult, I sometimes feel limited when I am confronted with new subjects. It is not easy for me to transfer my knowledge to my real life.
To bring on a better future in our education, as educators, we have to focus on teaching liberal ways to understand the knowledge (not just knowing), communicate with others and express them with creativity thinking by using thinking tools. Then, students can connect their nature intuition and performance together to be creative and ultimately good thinkers.
I agree that art and creativity surround us, whether we realize it or not. Art can be found in everyday objects and we all think differently and express different emotions when we come in contact with something that strikes us as creative. I really like that you touched on the fact that the arts, writing, and performances are thinking tools in education. When it is hard for students to express emotions or words, it becomes helpful to turn to the arts. I had a student last year with high anxiety. When he was having one of his episodes, he would make grunting noises. Instead of trying to get him to focus on verbally telling me what was wrong, he would draw pictures to get out his emotions and feeling, in which he could then communicate his picture to me. I think you make a solid point when you say that intuition and performance help students to become good thinkers and to be more creative. Children and adults know what they're feeling inside and how to express it to themselves, but to others, it may be harder, and that's where creativity can come into play.
ReplyDelete