Website Searches related to Creative Teaching and Learning

Courtesy of Caroline Pakel-Dunlop, a student in CRS 594 Creative Teaching & Learning Course:

The choice of sites is pretty eclectic and mostly reflects my belief that we need to learn about creativity and our creative self from all possible fronts - not just academia!

Wilderdom – to support any creative endeavour
http://wilderdom.com
Theme: experiential creative learning
This is the first and main website I would take with me on a new planet for creative learning... Its main focus is experiential learning and it offers an amazing range of resources to do exactly that. There are links, books, games, tools and techniques that cover most creative learning situations and audiences. I recommend you make this link part of your creative toolkit!

The School of Lost Borders – for our creative soul
http://schooloflostborders.org/
Theme: creativity as part of spirituality
Please forgive me for providing a very personal view of this site: this is a site offering a series of ‘programmes’ that invite people to retreat, reflect and re-connect with their authentic (and creative) self. The programmes are conducted in wild nature areas and use old, traditional and wise approaches from a variety of ethnic origins. The main goal is to allow the individual to grow in terms of awareness, intuitive understanding and connections with nature, himself/herself and others.

Alicia Arnold’s blog on creativity
http://alicia-arnold.com/tag/education/
Theme: daily creativity teaching for children
Alicia is one of the recent alumni from the Master programme and has recently started blogging on creativity with steady frequency. I read and see many blogs on ‘creativity’ and this one stands out in my mind for several reasons: first, it is simple, to the point and well-written; second, it is always insightful and meaningful as essentially anchored in Alicia’s experience of teaching creativity to her two young boys; and finally is it a source of useful links and references for further learning. It is, to my mind, a very empowering site when it comes to creative learning.

Another link to a UK University master programme on creativity and change leadership
http://creativity.city.ac.uk/
Theme: There is always a university teaching creativity near where you live in the UK.
As the list of links and references provided by Sue reflect, teaching creativity and learning about how to teach it best are popular themes in UK academia these days and increasingly so. The reality is now that there is always a university not too far away with some king of offering. This is one more for Jo Yudess’s list also!
This particular programme is run by one of the former directors of Synectics’ training section in the UK – now close as Synectics mostly focus their activity on consulting today.

Creatively Fit with Whitney Ferre
http://www.creativelyfit.com/
Theme: we are all creative and can access our creative self through artistic self-expression
Last summer, we organised our first creativity encounter/creative friends gathering in our home in Michigan. Whitney popped over on the last day and ran one of her workshops making us all paint what ended up a collective painting. I have recommended her site to a number of people since. Mostly to those who wish to explore their creative self through the arts. I like the fact that Whitney has no formal qualifications in the arts and that Creatively Fit emerged out of her own quest for her creative self, out of her own creative passion. I also like the fact that most of her programmes have a collective facet and take individual contributions to the level of collective creation. A different way to learn about creativity, don’t you think?