Creativity Workshop
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Creativity List |
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Creativity Articles:
a selection
The Creativity Workshop - Babel
Q.- How would you describe your workshop on creativity to those who have never heard about it?
A.- The creativity workshop is, first of all, not about producing an artistic product, it's about the creative process... More Creativity Articles
Tapping Creativity - In class
Berc calls the class a hands-on workshop wherein students use creative writing, drawing, painting, collage, photography, and other art forms to explore the possibility of understanding the world through its images and its symbols. The goal is not to create a product, but to re-express those images in ways that are both collective and universal and also one's own.
From her perspective as a university teacher, Berc recognized that the imaginative process was not being taught. After developing her ideas and teaching the creativity workshop course for several years in Europe, she won support from the university in 1996 to begin teaching her methods at the UI. More Creativity Articles
Business Creativity
Since 1993, the Creativity Workshop (creativity seminars, creativity class) has been taught to people in businesses of all kinds from all over the world, from CEOs to scientific think tanks to small business owners, working in specializations as diverse as finance, IT, marketing, PR, industrial design, accounting, and public relations.
The Creativity Workshop offers a series of tools that help participants develop their creative, collaborative, storytelling and writing skills, as well as their self-confidence. To this end, the workshop concentrates its experiential exercises in the following areas:
1. Getting over fear of creativity
Getting over fear of creativity and gaining belief in one's ideas. We do exercises which help students get over 'blocks' which make them afraid to express themselves, say the wrong things, paint a bad picture, take a stupid photograph, write a foggy paragraph. The workshop works against self-censorship in the early stages of development so that critical analytical skills can come into play later and more forcefully. To this end, we use techniques of free form drawing and writing, the importance of playfulness, as well as visualization and meditation exercises.
2. Collaboration
The Creativity Workshop believes that by sharing work in intimate groups, participants learn self-confidence and respectful listening towards others which is vital to any collaborative process. The Creativity Workshop involves several modules in which collaborations, ranging from 2 person teams to a whole class are explored.
3. Map making
Every project has a process or 'way'. The Creativity Workshop teaches individuals how to track their processes by making journey maps of its steps and the on-going progress of their work. The maps help participants see where they are in their projects and where they can go with them.
4. Free form writing and automatic drawing
These exercises help participants find innate ideas and develop them without fear. The workshop also teaches imaginative editing techniques and idea framing.
5. Storytelling
Storytelling is vital to getting your ideas across. Be it visual or literary, it is one of the most direct and human ways to share our ideas convincingly.
6. Expanding and changing perceptions
How we see is important to what we see. We teach a variety of exercises aimed at altering perceptions physically (through cameras, cut out shapes, kaleidoscopes, telescopes, microscopes) and emotionally (through fairy tales, memoir writing or inter-generational interviews), which assist participants in looking at projects from many different angles.
8. Using your environment
We teach participants how to use their natural surroundings to generate ideas for the workplace. Exercises to be done in local cafes, libraries, cafeterias, woods and mountains show that inspiration can come from the most usual and surprising of places.
9. Time
In our busy, multi-tasking world we seldom feel we have enough time to try something new or have creative fun. We teach participants how to ‘stretch time’ and use 15-minute blocks to do satisfying creative work on an on-going basis.
10. Self-Nurturing
We spend so much of our time encouraging and supporting others that at times, we forget to nurture ourselves! The Creativity Workshop teaches the importance of self-nurturing, play, and curiosity and not always knowing the ‘right’ answer. Failures after all can be the catalyst for the most astounding successes.
11.Tax-Deductible
Your workshop expenses may be tax-deductible if they are for your professional development. Check with your accountant; the Creativity Workshop has been taught to people in business all over the world from small business owners to corporate leaders.
What people in business say about the effect of the Creativity Workshop |
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Creativity Comments:
a selection
Thank you for the great, great inspiration and fun of the Creativity Workshop. It helped me get a whole screenplay done during a trip to Mexico afterwards. It was great for me and my students. I don't think I've ever seen them so happy.
Doris Doerrie, Filmmaker, Professor, Munich Film School, Germany
I was fortunate to participate in the Creativity Workshop in Paris. The course offered everything it promised and both Shelley and Alejandro are masters in their craft . The workshop helped me to determine the elements I needed to have in my life for me to continue to be a successful creative thinker. As principal of an elementary school I have been able to put together enough the workshop’s material to last this next year as I teach my staff the skills of being a more creative thinker and, in turn, they will teach the students.. All the best in your creative thoughts.
Lee Koran
Principal, St. Patrick Fine Arts Elementary School, Alberta, Canada
The new millennium needs bold, creative men and women who can turn their dreams into reality... Shelley Berc and Alejandro Fogel show how you can do this through their challenging and inspiring creativity workshops...even a simple first contact will prove what these two talented teachers can do for your own gifts.
Dr. Kirpal Singh, Writer, Professor and Head of Creativity Studies
Singapore Management University, Singapore
I will cherish my 10 days at The Creativity Workshop for a lifetime. Shelley and Alejandro instantly felt like old friends when I first stepped into the classroom, as if I had met them before in my travels. Through automatic writing and drawing, developing stories in cafes and interviewing classmates, all that inspired me unfolded in ways I never imagined. The exercises in class were a reflection of Shelley and Alejandro's love of the artistic way of living. They taught me to honor who I am as a writer and how to make time for creativity in my daily life at home after the workshop. As I stepped out into the streets of Paris-- a place I have visited many, many times since childhood-- my senses were open to my surroundings in a new way.
--Stephanie Merrill, Writer, New York City
The Creativity Workshop is one of the best ways to discover a new city. Exploring our creative spirits each evening opened my visual and kinesthetic senses for the following day. Barcelona is a wonderfully beautiful city, enhanced by the sensitivities that were stimulated in class. The participants were as rich as city and they so warmly shared their personal lives through the creative writing and drawing exercises.
Nancy Welch, President, Welch Design Group
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