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My Learning Reflection on Creativity - TLT 401

Updated: Oct 12, 2020

The videos and articles this week are interesting indeed. My friends and I often judge someone is creative by simply believing that he or she was born creative. We never asked how they came up with such a creative idea that we even did not think about at that moment. Sometimes, my friends were impressed of my ideas or works, no matter how simple it was, and said I am a creative person. Most of the time, they did not ask how I came up with the idea, and when someone asked me, it could be explained in many ways. One of the ways can be by telling them my sources of inspirations, which had never been only one. So, here is my learning reflection about creativity.

As a 90s kid, I grew up with friends who had no such today’s technological devices like mobile phones, Smartphones with high quality camera, laptops, and so forth. We played in our natural environment, using any kinds of natural resources like woods, leaves, sands, anything that we wanted to play with. Even when I am now enjoying advanced technology, my childhood story remains an unforgettable experience of learning creativities. I remembered when my sisters, cousins and I played in a forest nearby our houses, we built houses using fallen branches of coconut trees or cutting from cocoa and coffee trees and created a neighborhood where we interacted with each other as a seller and a buyer, a student and a teacher, and so on. We made clothes from leaves and built something like a shop. We went to the river nearby and caught some tiny fishes to cook with a used milk can. It was a play and we enjoyed it very much. As we grow adults, it became a memory and it is just embarrassing to do such things anymore. But I would like to say that now I deeply realize and feel that it was a learning process for me, which somehow is still affecting my ideas today. Besides working as a teacher, I was actually doing business too, selling things to people for money and it reminds me of my childhood play. The ideas of Brown (2008) that are inspired by kids in playing are totally creative as well. Quoting Robinson (2006) who said “We do not grow into creativity; we grow out of it”, I would like to say that my childhood play approved the message.

Schools can promote creativity since they have environments that can always be customized in accordance with their purpose. The analysis by Shirky (2012) on creativity based on students’ attitude in doing their projects clearly support the ideas of Brown and Robinson about creativity as something original that has been available early in our childhood. It also means that creativity can be taught and fostered since in kindergarten. Schools simply have to be more open to children’s interests and build the school environments that facilitate children’s willingness to play with their friends and experience a process of learning where they grow up out of their very own creativities. At the same time, teachers can be more innovative through a serious and careful observation and thoughtful analysis on children development over time.

The article by Baer (2013) and the TED talk of Johnson (2010) brilliantly explain how creativity is a combination of seemingly two contradictory things like seriousness and playfulness, concentration and distraction. A creative person must be serious as well as playful at the same time like I always think when seeing a boy who spends lots of time playing with his bike to make it looks more masculine or attractive. I also see the same thing in my sister when playing seriously with ingredients to cook a more delicious food. A creative person must have a concentration as well as willing to be distracted by anything that can be combined simply to produce a new idea. When stuck in a realm where I need a new more brilliant idea to solve a problem, I always find that listening to someone else’s ideas as important as eating something to escape from the pain of feeling hungry. Even if my sole purpose of listening to them is just to distract my attention from unpleasant things that hurt. Bronson and Merryman (2010) are right when they said that “highly creative adults frequently grew up with hardships.” When I was doing my Bachelor degree, I once joined a community with young people as most of its members. The community offered new ideas, which were uncommon in our current society and consequently not a few of the young people in the community who were just students and economically fully relied on their parents, had to struggle to survive in terms of social as well as economical. I believe I found those who survived in such condition were highly creative as they could eventually create their own source of income and could enjoy the life as the way they wanted it to be despite all the hardships they underwent.

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