LETTER 1

Dear Creativity Course Pioneers,

As I mentioned several times, this my first year teaching at ADA University, so I try to be most sensitive to your needs and expectations, as for me to work with the people possessing professional ambitions different from mine is quite a challenge. I have to learn more about/adjust to what captures your attention, what ignites your imagination, where your visions and interests are swirling around.

Certainly, all individuals are different, and 22 students, randomly gathered at the creativity classes, may or may not produce together common flow of joyful creativity. It means that my experience I’m gaining this year might not be repeated next time, with a different ad hoc group, however I’m gradually shaping out precise principles, which are being tested on your responses to the intellectual and spiritual calls I’m offering during the course, and thus the concept is constantly re-defined.

You apparently have noticed my invitation to express your opinion in the poll titled “Creativity in 100 days: 20 days counting down”. From the selection of possible answers (almost all of which are dealing with negative characteristics) some of you have concluded that I’m not confident enough in my ability to lead the course. My genuine intention however was to analyze together with you the reasons why your intrinsic motivation for more creativity is not high enough. I decided to do so by pointing to possible preconceptions you may have in regard the learning experience in our class. I guess it was a gentle way to build the trust between us, as I avoided to include questions accusing you in the lack of imagination or perseverance. Even more, you will be surprised to learn, that many of the points, included in the questionnaire, are not the problem points which I can’t cope with. In the contrary, these are the cornerstone elements of the non-conventional teaching method which I’m fine-tuning together with you these days. Some of these postulates are already familiar to you from the syllabus and our previous sessions, some others I’ll disclose below for the first time:

• I don’t pretend to teach you creativity, I could only offer you to get some way to finding this wonderful gift in yourself, so I could be helpful only to the extend you are actively involved
• Learning the creativity is a steady and laborious process, however it’s based on your internal motivation, ‘stick-and-carrot’ method doesn’t help much here. Deadlines, grades and definite tasks is the matrix we all are accustomed to, so I’m ready to use these instruments very carefully in order not to kill fragile sprouts of your creativity by imposing rigid frames. Try to do much more and beyond the minimal set of formal tasks you are getting from me!
• Theories, taxonomies and models of creativity are to be correlated for you with your own experience of enjoying creative discovery, that’s why I’m not blowing onto you any firm proposition which is ‘cast or engraved in metal’. The structured understanding could be shaped out in your mind closer to the end of the course, but, ultimately, our main goal still is not there.
• I’m convinced to think that the way of acquiring creativity is from personal to interpersonal to group: in our first steps I prefer to work with each of you one by one, and gradually move to more interaction between students and within entire group. As you may figure out, working with a loosely-bound team of 25 students as individuals means devoting only 3 minutes per student during the 75-minites session (in an ideal case!), but fortunately, there is a magic tool of blogging, so I could allocate through this kind of communication much more time and attention to observing your creative growth. Without active blogging this teaching method merely doesn’t work.
• Bombarding you with divergent and seemingly not related bunches of information is my deliberate position. I want you to immerse into the stream of various ideas, images, sounds and facts, as I believe into happy coincidences in our brains arising from haphazard encounters of different fragments of our sensual experiences and mental efforts. You don’t need to follow all opportunities at once, begin anywhere and with anything you have got around!
• For some of you it may look annoying that I’m constantly referring to the cases from my own professional practice. It’s also a sort of an encouragement, an invitation to join me in this attempt to try on the postulates and schemes to yourself. I’m already satisfied with observing first good cases of story-telling in your personal blogs, and I’m persuaded to think that we are on the right track with emancipating our imagination, memories and wit, as this process is becoming an enriching experience for myself.

Maybe by now you are not completely convinced about practical application of the state of mind and skills you are getting throughout the course under this blurred phantom notion of creativity, but you should at least note that for many people crowned with positive feeling of life and success it was possible. The magic of creativity is knocking at your door, don’t oversleep the moment!