Valuing the creative process

Sarah Combes, Curriculum Leader The Arts

The famous quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson “It’s the not the destination, it’s the journey” or T.S Eliot “The journey, not the destination matters…” can be applied to multiple contexts, including the journey of the artist.

The first half of the academic year sees our students begin their artistic journey and undertake the creative process, where they will practise the highest order thinking skills, learn what it takes to encounter the unknown, persevere through challenges and continually reflect and apply feedback in a dynamic ongoing process. For many, to regularly engage in the creative process can become a source of life-long satisfaction.

While creativity can be viewed subjectively, it is a teachable skill which is most effectively harnessed and developed through the Arts. The cognitive and physical actions articulated through the creative process allow students to imagine, innovate and experiment, essential skills needed to thrive in the 21st Century. However, in a world which continues to measure success based on the end result or product, the process undertaken to realise this achievement is often overlooked.

In Middle School, students are explicitly taught the stages of the creative process and how to document these in their Process Journal, an essential tool for the development of creative thinking behaviours. MYP Arts places an emphasis on all phases of the creative process, enabling students to acquire a range of skills shown through the development of their artworks. The creative process can manifest in different ways between disciplines, from providing a record of rehearsals and experiments to investigations into genre and exploration of technique. This journal of creativity provides students with a personal record of their process and materializes the strategies employed to produce their final performance or artwork.

At this point in the year, our Senior School students are at the most exciting stage of their creative process, known as the illumination phase, where spontaneous new connections are formed. This will now mean moving onto the next phase of testing and evaluating their concept by putting in the hard work to bring the idea, whether that be a design, character, screenplay, or composition, to life and share it with the Scotch Community at exhibitions, recitals, and productions. While the benefits of the creative process have been championed in this article, nothing will diminish the significance of the end point of the journey for our students, for it is here where all their time and effort, blood, sweat (and the occasional tear!) are recognised and rewarded by an audience. However, this is far from being the only outcome. Sharing more insight into what goes on behind-the-scenes in the Arts highlights the importance of regarding education as a journey not a destination.