Preparing for Evalt Work Meeting in Spain

From 6 to 10 of May 2013, the Evalt team will meet in Spain, region of Guadalajara-Castilla La Mancha, for the 5th work meeting. During this period the participants will attend in Guadalajara the Provincial Seminar about women and employment, in Molina de Aragon the workshop on theatre and dancing held by the Portuguese association Contempla Trilhos (coordinator of the project) and in Tartanedo the workshop on creative writing held by Fepamuc-Guadalajara (host of the meeting).

To prepare for the travel, here some shots of the beautiful places.

 Guadalajara - The Municipality Hall

Guadalajara

 Molina de Aragon

 Molina de Aragon - The Castle

 Tartanedo

 

Tartanedo

Obviously we cannot miss Madrid, the capital, where we will land and from we will fly off.

Madrid - Plaza Mayor

The Hunt for the Creative Individual

Creativity can quite simply be defined as the capacity to come up with new ideas to serve a purpose. Creativity is thus one of the most important sources of renewal. Creativity contributes to innovation and improvements in working life, commerce and industry.

No wonder employers want creative employees in areas where it is essential to come up with proposals for new products and services, and new ways of doing things.

The creative personality

Professor Øyvind L. Martinsen at BI Norwegian Business School has conducted a study to develop a personality profile for creative people: Which personality traits characterise creative people?

The study was conducted with 481 people with different backgrounds. The segment consists of various groups of more or less creative people.

The first group of creative people consists of 69 artists working as actors or musicians in a well-known symphony orchestra or are members of an artist's organisation with admission requirements.

The second group of creative people consists of 48 students of marketing.

The remaining participants in the study are managers, lecturers and students in programmes that are less associated with creativity than marketing.

The creativity researcher mapped the participants' personality traits and tested their creative abilities and skills through various types of tasks.

Seven creativity characteristics

In his study Martinsen identifies seven paramount personality traits that characterise creative people:

1. Associative orientation: Imaginative, playful, have a wealth of ideas, ability to be committed, sliding transitions between fact and fiction.
2. Need for originality: Resists rules and conventions. Have a rebellious attitude due to a need to do things no one else does.
3. Motivation: Have a need to perform, goal-oriented, innovative attitude, stamina to tackle difficult issues.
4. Ambition: Have a need to be influential, attract attention and recognition.
5. Flexibility: Have the ability to see different aspects of issues and come up with optional solutions.
6. Low emotional stability: Have a tendency to experience negative emotions, greater fluctuations in moods and emotional state, failing self-confidence.
7. Low sociability: Have a tendency not to be very considerate, are obstinate and find faults and flaws in ideas and people.

Among the seven personality traits, associative orientation and flexibility are the factors that to the greatest extent lead to creative thinking.

"Associative orientation is linked to ingenuity. Flexibility is linked to insight," says the professor. The other five characteristics describe emotional inclinations and motivational factors that influence creativity or spark an interest in creativity.

"The seven personality traits influence creative performance through inter-action," Martinsen points out.

Less sociable

The study shows that the artists who participated scored much higher on associative orientation than the other participants. They have a substantial need for originality and are not particularly stable emotionally.

The personality profile of the marketing students was quite similar to the artist profile and also differs from the other participants in the study. The artists in the study also scored lower values for ambition than the others and are not particularly sociable either.

"An employer would be wise to conduct a position analysis to weigh the requirements for the ability to cooperate against the need for creativity," Martinsen believes. He also emphasises that creative people may need help to complete their projects.

"Creative people are not always equally practical and performance-oriented, which is the reverse side of the "creativity medal.

Journal Reference:

Øyvind L. Martinsen. The Creative Personality: A Synthesis and Development of the Creative Person Profile. Creativity Research Journal, 2011; 23 (3): 185 DOI: 10.1080/10400419.2011.595656

Source: ScienceDaily

Link Between Creativity and Mental Illness

People in creative professions are treated more often for mental illness than the general population, there being a particularly salient connection between writing and schizophrenia. This according to researchers at Karolinska Institutet, whose large-scale Swedish registry study is the most comprehensive ever in its field.

Last year, the team showed that artists and scientists were more common amongst families where bipolar disorder and schizophrenia is present, compared to the population at large. They subsequently expanded their study to many more psychiatric diagnoses -- such as schizoaffective disorder, depression, anxiety syndrome, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, autism, ADHD, anorexia nervosa and suicide -- and to include people in outpatient care rather than exclusively hospital patients.

The present study tracked almost 1.2 million patients and their relatives, identified down to second-cousin level. Since all were matched with healthy controls, the study incorporated much of the Swedish population from the most recent decades. All data was anonymized and cannot be linked to any individuals.

The results confirmed those of their previous study, that certain mental illness -- bipolar disorder -- is more prevalent in the entire group of people with artistic or scientific professions, such as dancers, researchers, photographers and authors. Authors also specifically were more common among most of the other psychiatric diseases (including schizophrenia, depression, anxiety syndrome and substance abuse) and were almost 50 per cent more likely to commit suicide than the general population.

Further, the researchers observed that creative professions were more common in the relatives of patients with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, anorexia nervosa and, to some extent, autism. According to Simon Kyaga, Consultant in psychiatry and Doctoral Student at the Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, the results give cause to reconsider approaches to mental illness.

"If one takes the view that certain phenomena associated with the patient's illness are beneficial, it opens the way for a new approach to treatment," he says. "In that case, the doctor and patient must come to an agreement on what is to be treated, and at what cost. In psychiatry and medicine generally there has been a tradition to see the disease in black-and-white terms and to endeavour to treat the patient by removing everything regarded as morbid."

The study was financed with grants from the Swedish Research Council, the Swedish Psychiatry Foundation, the Bror Gadelius Foundation, the Stockholm Centre for Psychiatric Research and the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research.

Journal Reference:

Simon Kyaga, Mikael Landén, Marcus Boman, Christina M. Hultman, Niklas Långström, Paul Lichtenstein. Mental illness, suicide and creativity: 40-Year prospective total population study. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 2012.

Source: ScienceDaily.com 

"Drama & Sailing" in Rome

The sunny weather of October second week has been the perfect climate for the third workshop of the Evalt project. The location, Lake of Bracciano, has been kissed by a bright and warm sun that facilitated all the outdoor activities of the transnational team of the project.

In Rome from 3 to 7 of October 2012, after 2 days of cultural exchange the group moved to Trevignano for the methodological practice of the workshop delivered by Tecnopras. The topic was Drama & Sailing.

The workshop combined the two activities in a continuuous base on the same educational metaphors, firstly developed by the Drama session (in the morning) and implemented afterwards by the Sailing session (in the afternoon). With the project management of Cristina Miliacca (psychologist, trainer, Tecnopras project coordinator), the training activities were delivered by Sabrina Lilli (educator, theatre director, actress), as regards Drama, and Stefano Bertoldi (trainer, sociologist, skipper), for what concerns Sailing.

Clicking HERE it is possible to download the educational materials of the workshop from Evalt website.

The initial briefing of the workshop

Dramatization of sailing metaphors

Dramatization of sailing metaphors

Sailing session

Preparing for the meeting in Rome, 3-7 October 2012

Giovanni Paolo Pannini "Capriccio panoramico di Roma con il Colosseo,l'Arco di Costantino e il Tempio di Castore e Polluce"

Canaletto "Veduta di Piazza Navona, Roma"

William Turner "Modern Rome - Campo Vaccino"

  Ettore Roesler Franz "Ponte rotto"

Meeting in Siauliai, June 2012

The third meeting of Evalt project has been held in Siauliai from 6 to 10 of June 2012. The agenda foresaw moments of discussion - in order to monitor what has been accomplished until now and to agree the next actions to take - and two workshop on expressive arts (decoupage and painting) and crafts (making soaps, bread, etc.) as tools for education of disadvantaged adults.

 The group at the opening moment of the meeting

The workshop on expressive arts: in blue jersey, the trainer

Liuda Radzeviciene (in red) and Lina Miliuniene (in black) of the Lithuanian team, coordinator of the meeting

Moments of the workshop

 Moments of the workshop

Developing the Innovative Mind

From 20 to 23 September 2012, in Coronado, CA (San Diego), Marriott Coronado Island, the 2012 EdTA Annual Conference will take place. The Educational Theatre Association (EdTA) is a national nonprofit organization (with approximately 90,000 student and professional members) whose mission is shaping lives through theatre education.

The 4Cs of creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication are the cornerstone 21st century skills that every college- and career-ready student needs to possess. A professional theatre educator has the "job" to cultivate and model these lifelong traits. To do so, he/she must be innovative, in the classroom and on the stage. In the 2012 EdTA Conference it will be explored the broad challenges that today’s theatre teacher educator must meet in order to succeed in our ever-changing world.

 

Conference 2012 will feature:

• Opening keynote speaker, Ben Cameron, known for his dynamic and compelling presentations on the value of the arts.

• Presentation of findings from the first national landscape study in more than twenty years of theatre teachers and school administrators on the state of theatre education, conducted by EdTA and Utah State University.

• Overview of the Next Generation Arts Standards Project.

• Practical workshops and educational opportunities to augment educator's skills for the classroom.

• Opportunities to network and exchange ideas with other educators. 

• Inspiration from the newest class of EdTA Hall of Fame inductees.

 

To see what else the conference has to offer or to find out more about the host city, explore the link: http://schooltheatre.org/events/edta-conference/