Now I can take a breath from all the business, and I can tell you how marvellous and intense my stay at UPCE conference on creativity and education at Utrecht, has been!
Utrecht Platform for Creativity and Education conference have been one of the most enriching conveign I have attended since now. I listened to many contributions which were so related to the real life, specifically, to education. I think this is one asset I have to improve in my research line, so I have so much to learn about it.
When and how research meets reality?
A good point for any research field, I think.
But, why this conference?
If my research needs to be anchored to a context and the creativity field seems one of the most promising ones!
I attended only the first day of the conference and I wished I could stay more. All contributions were interesting and I was stricken especially by Professor Todd Lubart.
Professor Todd Lubart provided a full, incisive overview and a critical examination on the measurement of creativity. Then, he proposed a new instrument to assess creativity, able to solve the dichotomy between the divergent thinking and convergent thinking measures. A huge challenge in the creativity field! Most important, he anchored all his talked in the educational field: these issues matters because are real issues!
People suffer from biased evaluations. Being classified as a potentially creative person makes the difference in life, as well as not being considered gifted or talented.
Anyway, I had the possibility to meet the authors of the articles on creativity that I have read in this period. I appreciated the talk of Maciej Karwowski on the relationship between creativity and education, pointing out the true and false myths on this topic. It was a pleasure to listen to the real creative work of Simone Ritter about VR, expectation of violation and creativity! I build a part of my Perspective article upon it!
More, I really enjoyed one of our the talk by our compatriot Giovanni Emanuele Corazza about measuring creativity in the education field. I have to confess that i did not know him, but I started to follow him on researchgate.
Finally, last but not least at all, I met Professor Vlad Glaveanu, one of the biggest experts in the field of creativity. My flight was at 6 p.m. from Schipol Amsterdam airport, so I had to follow the Dr. Paolo Gomes’ advice (he his more than a researcher and closer to a believer, to a dreamer and creative thinker). Anyway, he was right. I got out my comfort zone and I went to talk with Vlad. It was a great opportunity!
It was a real pleasure to talk with him about emotions and creativity, his knowledge has been a source of fertile thoughts for me. He gave me many suggestions about my work and I really felt that I have so much to learn!
So many emotions in such a small day! I felt joy while meeting new and interesting persons and research fields. I lived awe in front of something that was so hardly intelligible and new. I experienced sadness when I had to leave…of course, also a little bit of anxiety when I was about to lose the flight 😉
So much to discover about creativity and a short life to do it! We can only be pretty sure that we live and experience it every day with our senses, even if we still fail grasping the essence.
Creativity is almost infinite. It involves every sense – sight, smell, hearing, feeling, taste, and even perhaps the extrasensory. Much of it is unseen, nonverbal and unconscious.
– Torrance, E. P. (1988). The nature of creativity as manifest in its testing. The nature of creativity, 43-75 (p.43).
AWE 