If our aim is to include large dollops of creativity on our courses we need to get into the creative zone!
I now encourage you to try and remember teachers or mentors who used creative methods of getting you to learn something – rather than the time-honoured force-feed and regurgitate method. Your memory might come from a formal (classroom) or an informal learning situation, in a school, a club, or even in your family.
Whatever you learned stayed with you – if it didn’t you wouldn’t be remembering it now. The reason that you remember it is that you experienced it.
Imagine if the majority of your education, training and instruction was filled with creative, imaginative and artistic/musical experiences and you were allowed be creative in pursuit of what you were truly interested in to the point that you (and not your parents or teachers) would be disappointed if you didn’t achieve the standard that you expected of yourself.
Imagine if the location/environment for your education was relaxed, colourful and comfortable where movement, variety, cooperation and interaction were encouraged and diversity and change was honoured, to the point that you and your classmates enjoyed your learning, collaborating rather than competing.
Maybe your education was all of the above – and you were lucky, but I’m pretty sure if it was you are part of a very small minority.
The vast majority of us have been force-fed facts under different forms of duress and then forced to regurgitate them in a pressurised environment to be assessed as to whether or not we will be successful in life.
Modern research on the brain has shown, finally, that the environment that I have just described (relaxed, colourful etc.) greatly assists not only learning itself, but also encourages pro-social behaviour, generosity and compassion. [1]
(Aaah, I hear you say, but that’s not the real world. Yes, I agree, the real world is different – and, looking at the news every night, our world has all the signs of it).
There is probably no great chance that mainstream schools and colleges will suddenly change from the force-fed – regurgitation model to what I have described above.
But for organisations who aspire to provide training to practitioners to support families in our Focus Group we have a kind of blank canvass. That is, we have the freedom to design and deliver education and training that includes all the above elements.
And we have the freedom to explore the two-way knowledge flow paradigm in a way that will be practical, workable and yield positive results – and assessed not by some external anonymous person but by the people who do the training themselves and ultimately the recipients of the service offered by the practitioner.
[1]. Once again I refer to the book Why Love Matters by Sue Gerhardt (2004).