Week 15 Reading

Cognition and Emotions in the Creative Process by Nicole M. Gnedza

After reading this article, I felt totally dejected. The educational system needs to be overhauled. Parents need to realize they are the primary educators of their children, and that schools are to help in the development of their kids - education needs to happen in the home and in the school.

Some of the developmental needs of kids can't be meet in the educational system as it now operates. It would be great if I, as an art teacher, could differentiate instruction to meet the needs of all students. The ideas in the article are awesome, but next to impossible to implement. Time for students to think, plan, allow for intense emotions, experience failure, and revision requires a different setting and culture that now exists.

Students need partners in their education, and it is hard for one person to meet the needs of 28, or in the case of an art teacher, the needs 100 - 600 students.

I was inspired to some practical applications as I read this article. Students could be lead in biography studies of certain artists to understand the thinking and emotions of the creative process. Even at the elementary level, there are artists that younger students can understand such motivating artists as Matisse and Calder that had problems to overcome. Teachers become coaches - this has been echoed in other class readings during the semester in which students are facilitators and give some ownership to the students.

This article describes the way some students behave during VTS sessions. I have seen it with my students and with our teacher peer group when we meet. Some ideas come easily; some people need longer to look and contemplate; silence or daydreaming can be signs of thinking and making associations, aha moments can cause people to raise their hands, jump around, and go, "Ooh, ooh, ooh, call on me!" The teacher or VTS facilitator has the job of understanding and coaching the different thought processes and phases so the students can make meaning on their own terms.