Connected Creativity

Connected Creativity — How the Arts Can Develop Your Creative Skills, written with visual artist Maritha van Amerom and edited by Belle Jansen. Developed through a Comenius Senior Fellowship from the NRO at the Creative Business department of Inholland University of Applied Sciences in The Hague. The project covers the framework, the classroom programme, the book, and the materials that go with them.

The ARTFUL framework

The book sets out ARTFUL, a six-phase arts-based method for teaching creative skills to students who do not think of themselves as artists. Its argument is that cognitive and embodied work have to advance together: each phase pairs a way of thinking with a way of doing, rather than treating reflection as something that happens after the making. Working through the phases in sequence is not the same as working through them as pairs, and the pairing is where the learning sits.

Twelve skills are organised across three domains.

Self — mind wandering, creative flow, intuition, resilience, curiosity, and the inner critic.

Other — collaborative creativity, entrepreneurship, creative courage, creative vision.

World — dealing with uncertainty, creativity and technology.

Each chapter carries facilitator scripts, exercises that can be run in a normal classroom, and a plain account of the research the exercise rests on — Csikszentmihalyi on flow, Fredrickson on positive emotion, Porges on safety and the nervous system, Damasio on feeling and reasoning, Dane and Pratt on intuition, Sarasvathy on effectuation, Beaty on the creative brain, Magsamen and Ross on the arts and health. The science sections are written for practitioners and say plainly where the evidence is thin.

Beyond the book

The programme also includes a companion game and a series of short instructional videos, so that a facilitator can run sessions without having read the whole book first. Course materials and updates are at connectedcreativity.nl.