Volume 7 (2020): Issue 1 (January 2020)

The main purpose of the paper is to provide a concise account of the advantages and disadvantages of group work in the activity of professional artists cooperating in various creative teams. The analyzed data comes from three different sources: the authors’ own experience gained through their work as part of various focus groups, other authors’ research results found in the publications on creatology, and the authors’ own investigative work. The aspects of teamwork (group mind) as well as limitations and drawbacks of team work in groups (group thinking) are discussed in the first part of the paper. The second part describes select results of research conducted over the last few years among Polish female artists and film and theatre directors working on joint projects in creative teams. The study examined the determinants of the women’s creative careers. The final section includes a number of conclusions that aim to answer the question posed in the title of the paper.

The subject of the discussion in this paper is place in the sense of physical space and its role in creative activity. In the text, we emphasize that a physical place is implicitly defined as creative by the people who conduct or have conducted their creative activity there. We emphasize that it promotes a creative lifestyle and poses a challenge for education. We are looking for distinguishing features of creative places and spaces. In the paper, we also present a proposal to analyse creative places using Wilber’s (2007) integral theory and theory of affordance. Starting from the concepts of Florida (2010), Amabile (2019), Oldenburg (1989), and Palasma (2013), we list the conditions that a place should meet to promote creative activity. In the conclusions, we point to the role of creative affordances in education.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the possibilities of using Arts-Based Research (ABR) in creatology studies. This method, which is sometimes also called a paradigm, attracts an increasing attention of researchers from various disciplines. The author presents examples of studies on issues close to creatology conducted using ABR in Poland and abroad, which lead to the conclusion that the method is highly useful for creatology studies. The work analyzes properties of ABR, which are particularly valuable from the viewpoint of research interests of creatology, such as formulating new research problems, stimulating scientists’ motivation, bringing the roles of the researcher and the subjects closer, empowerment of subjects, relationship with art therapy, attractive communication of research results to the social environment, involvement in social issues, and possibility of generating social change. The paper also discusses changing relationships between science and art, because the fundamental property of ABR, from which all unique advantages of that method result but which, at the same time, raises doubts in scientists with a traditional approach, is the fact that it blurs the distinction between those two areas of human activity. Possible uses of ABR in specific research situations in creatology as well as possible related problems are analyzed. The author concludes that ABR may be an answer to the need of methodological search in creatology on condition that one adopts a courageous and unconventional research attitude and is ready to accept certain methodological risk.

This paper is an attempt to present selected classifications of models of teaching creativity, which may have been found in literature over the last years. Models of teaching creativity are understood by the authors as well-developed systems of statements, based on a specific theory of creativity and concerning strategies and methods of teaching creative thinking and action, conditions of education, the role of a teacher in that process, and evaluation of education results. The paper describes several classifications of such models, including the authors’ own proposal, and presents a more detailed description of the heuristic model of teaching creativity. In the conclusion, the authors propose a thesis that the issue of methods of teaching creativity is open and the answer to the question about the best teaching methods in that obligation, which is interesting from the pedagogical point of view, should, as in the whole didactics, be answered by teachers, using their knowledge about creativity and its development.

As there are obviously numerous understandings of what a “creativity training” is and what it entails in terms of applied curricula and methodologies, it seems worth to consider what type of creativity teaching would be best adjusted and most beneficial for different groups of recipients. Specifically, the paper is devoted to my personal experiences with running open “creativity workshops” (or semester-long “courses”) for a few groups of adults throughout the period of twelve months. The question is posed about the needs and motivations of people searching for such additional classes, which do not constitute any part of their job duties or recommended career-related trainings. Conclusions indicate that more than “teaching creativity,” the main task of an educator of adults, wanting to boost their creativity, would be to support the recipients with transforming their existing creative skills and potential into practice. The role of a trainer is figured out to be more of a “facilitator” or “coach” than a “teacher” identified with formal education and perceived in the classical sense of the term. The primary aim of the described project was not scientific, but because it was a mixture of original exercises with activities proposed in acclaimed creativity textbooks, as a researcher I consider it worthy to share my experience to a wider audience with hope and encouragement that some of the presented solutions or techniques might be applied further.

The main objective of this paper is to present the process of preparing and conducting my biographical research regarding creators’ middle-adulthood. My intention in this study is to direct attention towards such an approach to creators’ biographies that in the very process of biographical narrative reconstruction reveals not only the different viewpoints regarding life experiences, but also interpretation of events. First of all, my approach to biographical research did not focus on creators’ life stories, but allowed them to create different tales of their own lives and to show different aspects of their autobiographical experiences related to shaping their own lives. In this paper, I intend to discuss a methodological solution and by this, to show how my research methods developed during the preparation stage, but also during the stages of implementation and preparation of the concept of analysis. A particular challenge, which is the subject of this study, was the strategy that required some aspects of creativity in the process of data collecting. Within the frame of this strategy, the researcher prepared biographical tasks designed in consideration of the poosed research problems. The tasks took a form of diverse forms of activity (verbal, visual) and encouraged respondents to refer to their own life experiences (past), reflect on the present moment (present), consider plans and projects (future), as well as to inspire constructing different stories about life (Lasocińska, 2013; 2017). The result of that was a structure that divided a biographical interview into phases and stages that assume different uses of time periods and diverse biographical reflections. In the following text, I do not focus on the results of my research, which are still being formulated, but focus my attention on concepts and research experiences related to the search for adequate solutions for the chosen topic and to the initial assumptions of the research.

Objective: The main aim of paper is to present results from research concerning creative didactic work understood as consciously taken actions whose aim is to invent/implement and popularize new and valuable teaching strategies, methodical and organizational solutions. The paper presents an area of experiences that stimulate academic teachers to innovative didactic work.

Methods: In a qualitative research conducted with the use of a theoretical-methodological approach of Gruber (1989) titled The Evolving Systems Approach to Creative Work (ESA). In it, the author applied a case study and conducted an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to contents deriving from semistructured interviews carried out with 13 academic teachers-innovators that for at least 5 years invented/implemented new strategies/methods/techniques/programes/didactic aids in the process of teaching-learning with students.

Results: Such experiences of didactic work as: positive emotions accompanying the process of inventing and implementing creative didactic solutions, good feedback from students, reaching educational goals, and encouragement from: students, co-workers, and significant persons make up the “self-propelling mechanism” for creativity in didactic work.

Conclusions: Each stage of didactic work: from idea through implementation of the solution to its popularization is connected with pleasure and satisfaction taken by teachers. It makes them eager to continue their work in the form of various activities that create an internally related “weave of actions.” Thus, teaching in a creative way becomes a “self-propelling mechanism” thanks to which it is also subject to a process of continuous evolution of it.

The paper focuses on the issues of implementing visual methods in social sciences. The following discussion consists of three fundamental parts. The introduction contains a description of theoretical and methodological dilemmas characteristic of the implementation of visual data, namely primarily photographic material, in social studies. The subsequent part is a characterization of the author’s research strategy, oriented towards organizing the fieldwork of probation officers using the photographic walk method. The strategy was inspired by the tenets of visual grounded theory. In the final part, the authors present selected conclusions associated with the possibilities and limitations of the developed research strategy. Key issues included in the final section of the paper refer to questions connected with plasticity of narration and image, the role of the researcher as creator and interpreter of photographs, and the process of objectification of empirical material. Using the potential of the photographic walk to fulfil the objective, the authors implemented visual and mobile methods. Collected empirical data includes nine transcripts of long conversations, based on an informal disposition card, a set of 1,500 photographs taken during the walks, as well as field notes. The paper presents reflections, dilemmas, difficulties and observations connected with the implementation of the selected strategy, which showed multidimensionality of conducted studies at the stage of development, organization, analysis and construction of theoretical statements.

Assessment of performance of creative tasks is one of important issues discussed in psychology and pedagogy of creativity. There is no single approach to the best manner of assessment or the determination of explicit assessment criteria. So, how do jurors (judges) cope during competitions? What do they consider when assessing creative efforts? Those issues are discussed in this work. The author studies the Odyssey of the Mind, which is one of the biggest creativity development programmes in the world. The issues discussed in the present paper primarily concern the criteria and manner of assessing performance of creative tasks; they form an introduction to a further study and discussion on the issue of competent judges, assessment, and the function performed by the assessment in the Odyssey of the Mind.

The paper presents an analysis of diagnostic and exploratory the author’s studies carried out in various Polish cities, whose main purpose was to identify and analyze specific manifestations of wisdom (with creativity as its strong predictor) in older preschool children. Such research and analysis of collected research material would only be possible using mixed methods. Integration of quantitative and qualitative analyses enabled the analysis of collected research materials to be more in-depth and broader. Likewise, when drawing wider conclusions, the use of this approach allowed to generalize results. Combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis of the research material also allowed to compare research results against a number of studies and concepts supporting child development, especially in cognitive sphere.

Context. Teachers’ creative self-efficacy (CSE), or personal beliefs about one’s own abilities to recognize and produce creative outcomes, is believed to be one of the factors that support creativity in the classroom and is connected to general self-esteem.

Objectives and design. In the present paper, two studies were conducted to map Estonian teachers’ CSE and the factors, beliefs and attitudes towards creativity that are related to it, as well as how teachers transfer their CSE into their everyday activities in the classroom. In the first study, Estonian adaptation of Rubenstein et al. (2013) Teaching for Creativity Scales and Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (Pullmann & Allik, 2000) were used. The second study was based on a qualitative analysis, using in-service teachers’ self-reports focusing on their teaching practices.

Main outcomes. As a result of both studies, a framework for understanding teachers’ CSE is proposed, where self-esteem and perceived societal value of creativity are associated with the manifestation of CSE in the classroom, which in turn transfers into enhancing creativity through teaching for creativity and creative teaching.

Spontaneous creative activity among adolescents has been overlooked in creativity literature. This article overviews everyday creativity in adolescence, with a focus on medium-and -long term creative projects conducted in- and out-of-school. Almost one thousand Polish adolescents provided quite detailed descriptions of their creative projects conducted within the last year. These activities were classified, with a particular focus on multiple micro-domains. Students most often described creative behaviors performed outside of school as compared to school-related activities. Likelihood of engaging in creativity within different domains as well as the level of creativity were linked to participants’ creative self-concept, creative mindsets, and personality. Limitations and future directions are discussed.