Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Week One

It's been an exciting week and although I didn't get to read as much as I planned, I did make many new contacts and attended two days of stimulating discussion that will probably lead to paths I hadn't considered before.
I spent eight hours in total on trains to and from Dublin and made use of the time reading sections from Nurturing Creativity in the Classroom (Beghetto and Kaufman, 2010); The Educational Psychology of Creativity (John Houtz, 2003) and Creativity: A Handbook for Teachers (Ai-Girl Tan, 2007).
I went to the NCAD library after I registered on Wednesday and took home a selection of books including Gardner's Creating Minds (1993) which examines creativity through the lives of Freud, Picasso, and Gandhi amongst others.
I also have a couple on primary school and childhood art; integrating the arts in the curriculum; why schools need the arts; Sternberg's Handbook of Creativity (2009) and Sue Crowley's Letting the Buggers Be Creative (2005), which I have yet to read. I have noticed that although there is a vast amount of books available on creativity from various perspectives, the same names crop up in most of them. I'm already finding some of it repetitive, so I will have to start being more selective once I clarify the direction I want to follow.
Friday was induction day and I spent Saturday at the Art Teachers' Conference in the Camden Court Hotel, more about both of these later.