Here is a piece I started a couple of years ago when I decided to try to name my facilitation method for teaching and in group workshops. I came up with various ideas and alighted upon Creative Insight Method which has stuck (for now). I am continuing to develop this idea and hope to see it in press sometime in 2014. All comments and feedback welcome.
Creative Insight Method
Jane Edwards, 2011
This is an arts based research method in the interpretivist tradition which takes as its starting point the understanding that the arts occupy a potentially important space in our cultural, intra-and interpersonal life. The arts reveal aspects of experiences to ourselves, and engaging in artistic experiences can facilitate our connections to others.
Individuals, groups and societies can use the arts to consider more deeply their relationship to each other, the past, and their hopes for the future. The arts allow the emotionality of complex experiences to be manifest in ways that allow for reflection and insight. Such encounters can permit us to re-experience, or to further engage with our emotional state to promote insight and self-awareness.
The title of the Creative Insight Method reflects its parameters. Creative processes are used to inspire, guide and reflect on each stage of the research. Writing, poetry, visual arts media and music are used as the basis of the research process.
The naming of the method is inspired from years of teaching through the arts that has allowed the author and founder to discover and refine aspects of this process. Year on year of student group she has taught have reflected how being given the license to write about experience, or draw, or improvise has allowed them to develop greater insight into their experiences of training, of study, or in the case of PhD students, a closer connection to their data and resultant reflective insights.
The Creative Insight Method is intended to reveal in stages, increased clarity and understanding for individual and group member reflections about processes that have occurred in creating works specifically intended to represent or ‘be about the phenomenon under investigation.
[I am working on further details and explanation of the method, due for publication in 2014]
