Creative Potential of Failure: Pedagogy Workshop
All of us have been students and therefore shaped through education. Start a conversation on education and all of us will have a story to remember from our school years. Mostly a bitter one!! A story about failure or one about the pressure of being successful.
But what is failure? And could it have a positive outcome?
We have stigmatized failure! We have stigmatized mistakes!! Nowadays, we run an educational system where mistakes are considered the worst thing one can make. The pressure on children to achieve high levels of academic success overrides the joys of learning and makes kids anxious and depressed.
This workshop is interested in observing failure from a different angle. It questions the One Size Fits All dominant approach of an educational system which wastes/squanders children’s qualities and results in loss of individuality. We need to realize that if children are not prepared and allowed to make mistakes they will never fully discover their creative potential and their extraordinary capacities. It is not suggested that we should encourage students to fail just to make them feel better or that making mistakes is the same as being creative. What is proposed is to simply shift focus on process rather than finished product.
Give a child a challenge and they will have a go even if it is ”unknown”. By nature, children are not afraid of being wrong and will gladly jump into risk. Unfortunately, as we grow older we lose the freedom of being wrong and get terrified of failure.
In this workshop we will try to redefine personal failure and to become aware of its creative potential. We will develop the ability of accepting failure and the completely unknown as vital elements within our creative process. Then we can use this experience as a tool in our teaching environment. Games, improvisation, movement, drawings, story dramatization and creative singing are some of the tools we will be using in this workshop in order to awake our playfulness and free ourselves from fears and judgment. The educators will then be able to further use these practical tools in the classroom. This workshop mainly draws on the Augusto Boal Theater of the Oppressed and Creative Drama methods.
*The workshop is aimed at educators and future teachers who are interested in exploring new paths of teaching and developing a creative teaching process as well as their own creative potential.
