Creative Reflection, Creative Practice: Expressing the Inexpressible

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Creative Reflection, Creative Practice
Expressing the Inexpressible Shelley Tracey 30
March 2007
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Change New ideas Possibility
Reflective practice
Creative reflection
Enhancing engagement
creativity
processes
Individual collective verbal non-verbal process
product
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• Reflective teachers seek to probe beneath the
  veneer of a commonsense reading of experience.
  They investigate the hidden dimensions of their
  practice and become aware of the omnipresence of
  power. Brookfield 1988 7

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Holistic model of reflection 1. Modes

• Imagining
• Reverie
• Meditating
• Dreaming
• Visualising

• Thinking
• Critical reflection
• Discussion
• Writing
• Drawing

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Complexity of creative and reflective processes
It is a focusing of the attention in a special
way, so that the poet is aware of all the
implications and possible developments of his
idea, just as one might say that a plant was not
concentrating on developing mechanically in one
direction, but in many directions, towards the
warmth and the light with its leaves, and towards
the water with its roots, all at the same time.
Stephen Spender focusing the mind during
composition
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Teacher Creativity Propositions

• Teachers are creative but may not acknowledge
  their creativity
• Spaces to explore and enhance creativity

• Manifestations
• Responsiveness
• to individual needs, constraints time/ admin
  demands/ pressures of teaching
• Active
• Course design

Often ideas of great beauty come to us when we
are most constrained. Ben Okri
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Creative reflection

• Convergency and divergency
• Framework of creative methodologies for engaging
  teachers individually and collectively in
  identifying and expanding their creativity
  practices.

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1. Convergency and Divergency
Divergency Play Brainstorming Possibility
thinking
Convergency Bringing ideas together Problem
solving Synthesis
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2. Creative reflection framework

• Preparation
• 2. Play
• 3. Exploration
• 4. Synthesis

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Phase 1 Preparation

• Entering a creative space threshold activities
• liminal spaces uncertainty
• need for receptivity Negative Capability John
  Keats ,
• when a man is capable of being in
  uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any
  irritable reaching after fact and reason (Buxton
  Foreman, 1895).

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Threshold activities

• Selecting images and quotations on a relevant
  theme teaching, learning or creativity itself.
• Music

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Phase 2 Play
Creative thinking
idea storming
Mindmapping
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Idea storming uses for a packet of Post-its
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Creativity in Practice for Educators (M Ed)
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Phase 3 Exploration

• Using a Creative Problem-Solving Framework to
  explore assessment
• Based on Osborn-Parnes model and 4-phase
  framework
• Reflecting on images

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Very helpful. Made me think more deeply about
assessment and its ramifications.
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Exploring creative identities
Poet Storyteller Receiver Writer Biographer
Connector Artist Impresario Resonator Cre
ator Inventor Innovator Challenger Collabor
ator Engineer Architect Designer Weaver Danc
er Painter Deepsea diver
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Phase 4 Synthesis

• Reflecting on collaboration
• dialoguing with the image

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