This mosaic in Rio, Brazil is quite beautiful as it shows how even though all the pieces and steps are decorated differently, they still get you to where you need to go. They I just want to paint a senario for you. Just imagine if you can, that a 15 year is in the higher level tier of their maths class and then it comes to the exam and there is a problem. The person who is faced with this problem sees at least 7 ways that she can solve this. She begins to solve it one way but then feels the pressure of the clock and decides to solve it another way, and then again the other way. That student has just spent ten minutes on one problem that should have taken her two, however, because no one has see their ability to solve the problem in a multitudes of ways and value that diversity of solving that problem and instead they focus on speed over and above their ability to see a problem from a multitude of angles. Because of this, people think that she is slow and is in the wrong class. So this person learns out of force to cut off all that diverse of ways of solving problems and decides that they must conform and get quick in order to get ahead. As a result, they become one of the most narrowly focused people who pushes they`re way around and criticises everyone who tries to be diverse, open and interdisciplinary in their approach, just like she had been. This is the profile of many of the `successful` students that we are turning out today. As a result we have an elitist society where those who are successful are those that have conformed and left most of themselves behind and those that succeed in their place are those that conform again to their way of thinking. Do we really want our future to be like this.
Here is one of the students who I was told she wasn´t creative, but here we see her playing around with shadows and light whilst we were setting up the final presentation. She was unsupervised here.
This was a poster where I asked them to represent on here what they thought the project was about. You can see different things on there, the characters, the masks, adjectives, the circus tent. They interpreted what the project was in different ways. Within the group there was a debate about that. One of the girls made a point of saying “That`s not what the project was about, don`t put that there” so as facilitators we also have to be aware of the children themselves being judgmental and critical of each other, so vigilance is needed for this. Not only that we as teachers do not judge too much but also the students themselves do not judge each other and then there is forceful peer pressure.
Instead of Neutralising differences it`s important to express them
We can explore the diverse learning and teaching strategies that change with the context, content and participants. In this way we all become co-investigators in the creative learning process
We need to welcome our diverse ways of understanding ourselves and others whilst still sharing the same learning spaces. We need to be comfortable with risk taking in education and welcome the unexpected, even if it seems at first absurd and crazy and then allow an open process to work. Goethe said: “No one can control what is really creative, and everybody just has to let it go its own way” it is
This picture is entitled Childrens games, but are they just children playing? What do we see when we look a bit closer?
but what do we see when we look a bit closer
When someone loves you and shows you that the heart is real
During a recent meeting with another facilitator where we were discussing how to approach a making an animation in the ZOOM lab, learning environment in the Children`s museum in Vienna
creativity because it is emotional, because it touches our emotions and our heart it is an access point to our beliefs and highest values. The heart doesn`t discriminate and is open point of tolerance of each other`s diversity. Creativity is the expression of the heart, it`s manisfestations are as diverse as humanity as a whole. So we can find a common language and a common unity through our diverse creative expressions.
Maybe we need to welcome all our creative expressions to our Earth Tree, our tree of life. We can can find simultaneous unity within diversity.
